“The Pura Principle” was first published in the March 22, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected and is currently most readily available in This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead, 2013).

How do we read and teach an amazing story that's been written by an author whose behavior seems reprehensible? Can a work of art be separated from the person who created it, and even more vitally, should it? Is it possible—isn't it possible—for an author who is demonstrably guilty of sexist behavior to produce a story that's interesting and even edifying about sexism? These are the questions that confront me when I think about Junot Díaz now.

Before Zinzi Clemmons stood up and spoke out against Díaz, I'd heard rumblings from colleagues about him. How misogynistic his work is, how toxic. How the students reading him need to be cautioned: don't write like him; stories should do more than celebrate predators and put down women. These were comments I blanched at and, at times, spoke out against, especially those directed at the writing students: I believe that writing should reveal the different prisms, even or especially those that are flawed and skewed, through which people see the world; many young writers already seem to be labouring under a heavy burden of cultural sensitivity. But for the most part I managed to ignore the rumblings, to treat them as so much background noise.

This was possible because I teach at a school where the students are famously edgy, and because my classes are made up of aspiring young writers—writers who are hungry, as I am, for different voices and new ways of telling stories. With these students, I've had the immense pleasure of reliving my own joy at discovering Díaz's work, the shock and thrill I felt when I picked up Drown in the late 1990s, an era in which writers everywhere were emulating Raymond Carver's restraint and repressed style, my amazement at encountering a voice that was profane, intimate, lyrical, moving and oh-so-funny, a voice that effortlessly, irresistibly combined Spanish with English and erudite references with geek pop culture.