I discussed these and other questions with the author, who spoke to me by phone from Harlem. Two questions underlie the propulsive energy of this book: Why does Yunior scuttle his relationships as soon as they hit full sail? And who are these women really? They're never fully visible in the narrator's machismo, anatomical confessions.

In this light, each story is a shrine to the women who, because of his own limitations, Yunior loves most earnestly, and most loyally, in hindsight. Even after the cheating, the screaming and hair-pulling, the train-wreck breakups, Yunior's exes haunt him in visceral ways: 'The half-life of love is forever,' he confesses in the book's final epic 'The Cheater's Guide to Love.' There's a paradox here-loss can have a permanence love rarely attains. The guiding irony of This Is How You Lose Her is that Yunior never does lose his women-not fully. Like the excuses and alibis he slips his jilted lovers, it's a lie he badly needs us to believe. 'I'm not a bad guy,' he tells us in the first sentence of the book. Yunior's older now, more contrite and desperate and vulnerable, and his cheating's catching up with him. But This Is How You Lose Her is a long way from the cocksure swagger of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2006). Each story depicts the complex negotiations between men and women held in thrall by the thrill or ravages of love, the lure and pathos of betrayal.Įight of the nine stories here are narrated by Yunior de Las Casas, the poet and career philanderer whose acerbic silver tongue spoke Diaz's first two books. But the specific focus on romantic relationships is new for Diaz. Unfolding in Bergen County barrios and on Santo Domingo beaches, they feature fast-talking Dominicans (from there, from here) struggling against the pinions of racial prejudice, poverty, and immigrant status. The stories in Junot Diaz's new collection, This Is How You Lose Her, tread some familiar territory.

This is how you lose her by junot díaz