Last weekend I got an email from Christa who was twenty-five pages from the end of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story and she didn’t want to finish it because she knew what was coming.

I tried to empathize with her plight but I couldn’t. “Right now I’m immersed in the new Junot Diaz collection & want to call people Spanish words that I don’t even know the meanings of, but I know they’re bad. Like morena.”

That’s what reading Junot Diaz does to you. It turns you into someone who wants to swagger about and throw around Spanish slang as if you know what the words mean and you aren’t a forty-something white woman from Minnesota. (Aside: I looked up morena when I was done reading according to the Urband Dictionary it just means dark-skinned Latina. I thought its meaning would be closer to sucia. Now I want to call everyone sucio or sucia.)

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