When I was a seven or eight, family road trips to the Wisconsin Dells or to South Haven Michigan usually included different sorts of games to pass the time. I would bend one arm at the elbow like the woman in the We Can Do It World War II propaganda poster then pump my fist up and down until passing truck drivers, who were on to the game, would honk their horns. My mother would lead me and my sister in rounds of Twenty Questions and I would go beyond animal, vegetable or mineral start-up strategies to pull out telling clues. And these pastimes were for relatively short trips.
For John and my road trip to New Orleans, occupying ourselves for many, MANY hours was a much bigger issue. We left for Memphis on Christmas morning (basically an eight hour trip without stops), then continued to New Orleans the next day, driving another six hours. Coming back, we drove ten hours from the Crescent City to St. Louis, stopping only for gas, coffee and clean restrooms then drove for five more hours before we could pull into our garage.

Before we left, we thought a good book on tape (CD actually) was in order. In a recent Sunday Times Book section, we found some recommendations under the guise of Christmas gift ideas. The Times reviewer practically gushed about the audio book edition of Junot Diaz’s most recent release: This is How You Lose Her. Read by the author, the tales of a young Dominican man growing up in Jersey seemed to have compelling biographical elements making it hard not to wonder where the lines between fiction and real life may have blurred. I fell in love with one of his earlier books, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so Amazon made an easy sale. I checked out the opening lines, posted on Amazon, before I confirmed credit card info.

“I’M NOT A BAD GUY. I know how that sounds – defensive, unscrupulous – but it’s true. I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.”

I could tell quickly that there was a character here, a real person coming to me as a fictional hero. I suspected that after a few hours bearing witness to his confidences, I would love his candor and question his judgment. This turned out to be more than true. And the language – once we actually started listening to Yunior’s (the main character’s) narrative – so much rang true.

We wanted to really understand his experience. What would it be like to be an immigrant child growing up in New Jersey? To live close to an Atlantic Ocean you never got to see let alone swim in? To witness your father exercise his best networking skills just to find a barber that could cut your pelo malo, your bad (kinky) hair?

The book came in five CDs. We divided our in-car listening time between Diaz’s alter ego, radio stations that weren’t churchy talk shows, and a handful of CDs we brought (Louie Armstrong and Pine Leaf Boys) to psyche us up for our Louisiana holiday. We wanted to savor the stories, the role of confidante, moments of recognition.

We laughed out loud at the way he described his mother and her prayer group friends (The Four Horsefaces of the Apocalypse) and discussed the chronology of the stories to make sure we understood the real life sequence of events of a possibly real (or largely made up) life. We asked ourselves, “Didn’t he mention that his brother, Rafa, died of cancer in disc one but didn’t talk about his last job at The Yarn Barn until much later?”

We wanted the stories to go on, and on – even after the narrator brought us back to the beginning, thematically, with a chapter entitled “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” In all of Yunior’s reflections, perhaps we heard the disparate voices of our own optimism and cynicism, telling us that if we know better we can do better, but somehow not quite believing our ability to change in fundamental ways.

Yes, we loved hearing the street musicians outside the Café du Monde, reveled in the great dinner we had at Herbsaint, and puffed up with pride at the discovery of an actual farmer’s market in the warehouse district, but spending hours in the car with Junot Diaz was another highlight of the trip.

Sinking into universal truths through the telling of another’s personal experience is a special gift.

Having the good company of a great storyteller is no small thing.