This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz (review)

Love is a common theme in literature; it is timeless and universal, and so is deception and betrayal. This Is How You Lose Her presents one side of love: when it goes sour, or when it fails to create a long-lasting and satisfying relationship. All that remains are “memories,” as suggested in the novel’s epigraph by Sandra Cisneros: “But sometimes there were good times. Love was good.” At the center of this short stories collection, which reads like a novel, is Yunior, a young immigrant from the Dominican Republic, a womanizer who asserts from the beginning as if asking for the reader’s understanding: “I’m not a bad guy” (3). Yunior, the family nickname of the author and that of his quasi-autobiographical protagonist, has been a central character in all of Díaz’s works. We met Yunior in Drown (1996), Díaz’s first collection of short stories, and in the novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), for which Díaz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. In his works, Yunior serves, at times, as narrator and also as the author’s literary alter ego.

Eight of the nine stories in this collection revolve around relationships with women. The narration oscillates between the first and second person, thus shedding light into both the perspectives of his female characters and Yunior himself. From an early age, Yunior had been exposed to the promiscuity of his older brother and the philandering of his father. As time goes by, Yunior becomes aware that girls start noticing him, but he cannot escape his destiny. The ghost of his father lures in the background: “You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself. The blood always shows” (161). In the eyes of the women he has loved, all Dominican men are cheaters, they are overtly flirtatious and cannot be trusted in matters of love. At times, the stories reveal the power of romantic love, but they are also tainted with a dosage of machismo.

“The Cheater’s Guide to Love” closes the collection. It reminds the reader of “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” from Drown. But unlike that story, “The Cheater’s Guide” is not a handbook, but rather, a recount, almost in a confessional tone at times, of Yunior’s suffering and efforts to regain a woman he has lost. The reader learns that the “you” of this story has been caught cheating and his fiancée threatens to harm him with a machete. She does not physically harm him; she does, however, hurt him emotionally. He finds that he cannot stop loving her. Over a five-year period, Yunior goes through times of suffering, denial, failed relationships, but ultimately and presumably, becomes a wiser person. This is a coming-of-age story and a sort of spiritual cleansing, and at the end of the story, Díaz reveals a literary trick, which is best left untold here.

Throughout the collection the readers have had glimpses of Yunior growing up. “Invierno,” a story published more than a decade earlier, is the only one that does not deal with the theme of love and loss. But it is an essential inclusion in this collection because it sheds light on Yunior’s formative years and, ultimately, his identity. As a child of the diaspora, he arrives at age six (almost like Díaz himself) to New Jersey on a cold winter day, with his mother and older brother. Their father, who they had not seen in five years, shows the family how to use the toilets, the sinks, and the shower. “You’re Americans now,” he asserts (122). His father asks a barber to shave his head to fix his “pelo malo” to tame his African roots (128). The extreme cold weather prevents the children from going outside, and kids watch television all day...