Review of This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, is the ultimate recipe for getting your ass kicked and dumped by your girlfriend. The main character of the short story collection, presumably Díaz’s alter ego, Yunior, who also appeared in Drown, a short story collection written in 1997 and in the author’s only novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, walks the reader through a battlefield of lyrical storytelling about what it’s truly like to be a Dominican man in the United States. The narrative voice so vividly honest, it reads more like a confession than fiction.

The first story in the collection, “The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars,” first published in the New Yorker in 1998, is written from the perspective of Yunior, a young man who cheats on his girlfriend Magda. Of course, Yunior doesn’t tell her about his infidelity, his lover is the one who confesses it to Madga. The relationship continues only because of the main character’s pleading, but the relationship would never be the same. Yunior’s best thinking takes the two on a vacation to Santo Domingo. Instead of basking in the delight of barrio lifestyle with his “abuelo and his campo hands,” Magda, is portrayed as an Americanized Cuban who would rather stay at a resort in the DR than see life as it really is. No matter how much Yunior tries to make this relationship last, the two are too fundamentally different to be together—Yunior is too rooted in his life as a stereotypical machista, a melancholic being who constantly dreams of his real home to be involved with a woman that takes her heritage for granted.

“Otravida, Otravez” is another well-crafted piece in the collection. The author or the protagonist of this piece has flung us into this story en medias res, without any backstory or context—the reader is put an active position of trying to unravel what’s going on. The story has no connection with Yunior and his brother Rafa (aside from the fact that the woman’s lover is Yunior and Rafa’s father, Ramón before the boys moved to the States), yet it is plopped in the middle as if somehow, the woman telling this story is connected to the brothers by simply sharing a country and its many unknown (to the people that have never been to the DR) characteristics. The story also serves to provide the reader with the glimpse of Ramón’s life in a foreign country before he sends for his family.

Like Yunior and Rafa, the protagonist in “Otravida, Otravez” is distant with her lover Ramón, which is remarkable in and of itself because she breaks free from the role Latin America give women—that they crave love and attention from their men. But this woman is not like that—her only desire in life is to survive, to never go back to the Dominican Republic. The protagonist works at St. Peter’s Hospital, doing laundry for patients who stain the sheets with gallons of blood: “I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and dying” (55). There is great detail surrounding the daily task—sheet stains as the epidemic of the sick and dying—of AIDS, of people dying as this woman only observes, doing nothing, commenting nothing about these daily scenes, she just wants to survive:  “You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says” (55). The dialogue between the two is short and straight to the point—Ramón and the protagonist don’t talk in circles like dialogue is suggested it be written in writing workshops. The narrator treats Ramón as she treats the blood-stained dying patients at the hospital—at arm’s length. Díaz uses minimalistic descriptions to describe an extremely mundane job and converts it into an employment worth seeking and finally obtaining.  

“ ‘Each building has its own laundry room,’ Papi explained” (121) and Mami goes along with it, trying to make the comment, the situation run smoothly across her family’s expression. Like Call Centers in Nicaragua or for Nicaraguans, buildings containing their own laundry room represent success to this Dominican family; to some it might even represent the American Dream.  There is no other, subtler way to say it better than Yunior: “This was our first day in the States” (121) in “Invierno.” These eight words convey so many questions and stories behind each letter that as a reader, it’s better to accept its no-context directness, move on, and swallow hard ‘till the end. The stories jump around out of sequence, because in this piece, Yunior is only about seven years old, compared to the first story of the collection, where we read a narrative by a Yunior who has already completed an undergraduate degree. This is the pivotal moment, where the reader gets to see the influence of a deep-rooted machismo first hand. To Yunior, “a father is a hard thing to compass,” therefore, this story is not about his thoughts about his father’s behavior, but simply an observation. It is important to note that “Invierno” is written in the present about the past in the perspective of a child. No matter how street-smart Yunior and Rafa are intellectually, seven year-old children can’t understand what gender oppression is and can’t possibly understand that their Mami is suffering in her own solitary enclosure. This woman must walk through the snow in a straight line in order to escape into the future, where she will be stuck with two adult men that will be exact replicas of their father; one constructing a formula to lose all the women of his life while the other slowly but surely dies alone.