Quality Short Stories Make Poor How-To's

The story “How to Date A Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” took me right back to "Self-Help". This is most likely caused by the fact that they are both instructional guides and they both aren’t very good at it. The best example of this is the way they both assume the person reading it is in their exact situation. Take for example the first story in Self-Help, the narrator keeps giving her dialogue as commands, as if you are there. However, the lines she commands you to say are only helpful if you are in that exact situation. For example, I find it unlikely that anyone is going to be on their first affair, and when someone asks about the weather the correct response will then be to say: “It is fit for neither beast or vegetable.” Junot Diaz’s writing also shows excessive specificity. This is most obvious when the narrator is discussing the different neighborhoods, he just assumes that: everyone knows about the inter-neighborhood dynamics of the Terrace, that our locales are similar, and that we have the same neighborhood-based struggles. Yet, I doubt any parent would be scared about bringing their daughter to Savoy. There is also that whole thing about government cheese, which is just absurdly specific for an instructional guide.

There is, however, one difference between the two stories that makes Diaz at least semi-practical, the significance of these How-To’s. Lorrie Moore covered dramatic topics like having an affair, devoting your life to becoming a writer, and handling a divorce while still a child. On the other hand, Diaz gives an instruction guide on how to date as a poor high school student, whose greatest life ambition appears to be getting laid. Now his life may be more complex than that but “How to Date a Browngirl...” definitely covered a simpler topic than those in Self-Help. However, if anything, I think that made Diaz’s story a better instructional guide since people might have more chances to use it, even if it was still quite specific.  

Also relating to the quality of Junot Diaz as a self-help writer, was his narration of his story. When we watched it in class we discussed how his voice seemed strangely robotic. It was also interesting how seemingly everyone had imagined the narrator having a voice that was anything but robotic. I think that Diaz was trying to emphasize that this story was really an instruction list by removing all the emotion from it, while we had imagined it as more of a conventional short story. In my opinion, his style did succeed in making this short story a How-To guide, but he did it at the consequence of making it an interesting story. Which, to me, proves that a great short story can’t be a great how-to guide. What do you think, can a quality short story make an effective manual for something?