In the latest “Art + Life” discussion, Hilary Leichter (MFA ‘12) interviewed Hernan Díaz, who was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer prize in fiction for his novel Trust.

On Monday, November 13, undergraduate creative writing professor Hilary Leichter, author of the excellent Terrace Story (2023) and Temporary (2020), sat down with the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer prize for fiction Hernan Díaz in the beautiful Lantern space on the eighth floor of the Lenfest Center for the Arts at the Manhattanville campus to discuss writing and living as a part of the MFA Creative Writing department’s “Art + Life” series. Leichter and Díaz had an amazing rapport, and it was clear from the start that they are very big fans of each other’s work. Leichter is an excellent interviewer, asking very provocative questions, to which Díaz responded with equal passion and great articulation. 

Díaz and Leichter began their discussion of Díaz’s Pulitzer-winning sophomore novel Trust by inverting the idea that real life informs storytelling. According to Díaz, “stories create reality.” He illustrated this point with a charming anecdote from a talk he gave to his daughter’s middle school, in which he compared a $10 Pokémon Monopoly bill to a real $10 bill to show the students that the only difference between the two is the size of the board. The only difference between real life and fiction, then, is the same.

Leichter then asked Díaz about his writing style, process, and influences. With a sardonic grin, Díaz responded that writing is “pure agony,” and that he sets “very strict rules” for himself. These “strict rules” pervade every element of Díaz’s prose style. He has a certain precision that is a result of his highly impressive command of syntax and grammar, or as he more eloquently describes it, “the realm of the sentence.” His writing is neither spontaneous nor stream-of-consciousness; he is deliberate about not only the words of every sentence, but the way they look on the page. He obsesses over every line break, paragraph indentation, and duration of dialogue, making Trust a physical design experience reminiscent of a calligram. If he was trying to sell more physical copies of his book, this strategy definitely worked— guests were clamoring to get their hands on a copy, or to get their personal copy signed, at the end of the talk. However, I wondered whether the mise en page of Trust prohibits readers from getting the full picture of the novel if they read it digitally or via audiobook. And with a looming limited series adaptation for HBO, this question will advance to an entirely different medium. 

In terms of literary influences, Díaz cites everyone from Cervantes to Jorge Luis Borges and Gertrude Stein. This vast array compliments his assertion that literature is “historical sedimentation,” and that to write a novel is to join a lineage of other writers. Leichter even suggested that Díaz’s approach to beauty in his work goes all the way back to Aristotle, which Díaz wholeheartedly agreed with. He insisted that “truth is triangulated with beauty,” and that aestheticism and ethics are inextricably linked. 

In response to Leichter asking him about the pressure to be “original,” Díaz is completely unbothered, because for him, language itself is inherently unoriginal. In a hushed, excited tone he told the room that what excited him most about the English language, which is his “favorite thing is the world,” is that “almost any noun can be a verb. You can write a novel with that.” He recommended that the students in the room write as if they were in a “slow-moving conversation,” trying to catch and understand every word. This was interestingly juxtaposed by an earlier comment Díaz made about his first novel In the Distance, a novel that he wrote as if describing a “beautiful corpse.” For Díaz, then, prose is simultaneously and paradoxically dead and alive, and writers should approach their work with this in mind. 

Trust is a historical novel, and Díaz’s approach to research is a little unconventional. When Leichter asked him about how he made his world feel so lived-in, he said that often “the absence of something can be the seal of legitimacy.” As a non-expert in high finance, which is the main catalyst of Trust, Díaz was able to “spot the bullshit easier” and notice the tendency that economists have to use their “mathiness” as a power play and ignore the social concepts that pervade finance. For Díaz, research is simply reading, questioning, and transposing the experience of real people onto his characters and situations. 

Leichter ended the discussion by asking Díaz if he had any advice to the writers in the room. He was adamant that the most necessary part of being a writer is having a good support system of creative friends and not being precious with your own work. It was very refreshing to hear such an awarded writer insist on the importance of collaboration and creative stimulation with others, and he sees it as essential to his own craft and to the industry as a whole. Overall, this was a lovely discussion between two writers whose passion for their craft was on full display. I really got the sense that even if there had been no one watching, the two would have had the exact same conversation, and they were as disappointed as the audience when it ended.

Lenfest Center via Columbia University