This month, The Varsity Bookclub discusses This How You Lose Her a collection of short stories by Junot Diaz. Diaz is a Dominican-American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2007. In This Is How You Lose Her, the “sucio” Yunior, a peripheral character in Oscar Wao, dominates the majority of the book’s stories with his vibrant tales of loss, love, and infidelity. The Varsity Book Club contemplates the nuanced and complex issues raised in Diaz’s latest offering. The full conversation is available in our Book Club podcast.
Brigit Katz
Yunior is a minor character in Oscar Wao, but he is featured very prominently in This Is How You Lose Her. How did you feel about the development of Yunior’s voice throughout the course of these short stories?
Jakob Tanner
For Junot Diaz, Yunior is like Nathan Zuckerberg for Philip Roth, in the sense that Yunior becomes this vehicle for Diaz to say whatever he wants to say.
Brigit Katz
The characters’ voices certainly get a lot bolder with each of Diaz’s books. Oscar was a very non-stereotypical Dominican male, whereas I think Yunior fits that bill a little more. And I really enjoyed his voice — the blending of Spanish, street talk, and an almost poetic style.
Simon Bromberg
How does “Otravida Otravez” fit in with the other stories? You have eight stories that are almost all about Yunior, and then one in the middle that is told from a woman’s perspective.
Jakob Tanner
When Diaz is not writing from Yunior’s perspective, his voice becomes much more reticent. And I was happy to see Diaz doing something different. “Otravida, Otravez” is about a woman who has recently emigrated from the Dominican Republic to America. She begins having an affair with a man who has also come from the Dominican, and who has a wife back home.
But there is a possible connection with the other stories in This Is How You Lose Her. In the very first story of the collection – “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” – Yunior is trying to go back to Santa Domingo, where he thinks he’s going to mend a broken relationship. So Santa Domingo takes on this mythic quality, becomes this paradise that Yunior romanticizes. The character in “Otravida, Otravez,” on the other hand, is sort of caught between America and the Dominican Republic, and either place is dangerous for her.
Simon Bromberg
On that note, the character’s job is also relevant. She cleans sheets at a hospital and manages a team of newly immigrated Dominican workers. And just like the sheets that she cleans, some of these young workers are salvageable and some are beyond help.
Brigit Katz
I liked “Otravida, Otravez ” for another reason. In the other stories of This Is How You Lose Her, we get a picture of the relationships that Yunior has, but we don’t really hear the voices of the women that he cheats on his girlfriends with. In most of the stories that we get from Yunior’s perspective, these women are essentially just the “big butt” and the “smart mouth,” as he describes one of his flings in “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars.” And then with “Otravida, Otravez,” we see that there is more to these women than that.
Interestingly, in an interview with The Guardian, Diaz said that with This Is How You Lose Her, he wanted to “capture this sort of cheater’s progress, where this guy eventually discovers for the first time the beginning of an ethical imagination. Which of course involves the ability to imagine women as human.” Do you see that progression with Yunior?
Jakob Tanner
At the end of the very final story — “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” — Yunior receives a compilation of all the e-mails that his girlfriend found, all his cheater’s love notes. And when he’s contemplating this girl who he’s been mourning over for years because she left him, he says, “You did the right thing, negra. You did the right thing.”
Simon Bromberg
Yeah, Yunior doesn’t really come off as remorseful about his cheating in the other stories. His ex in “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” is the one exception.
Brigit Katz
At the same time, though, I never got the sense that Yunior was unable to see his girlfriends as humans. I think that from page one of this book, we’re dealing with a character who has a problem with his attitude towards cheating, but who loves his girlfriends, even while he cheats on them.
Simon Bromberg
Shifting gears slightly, what did you make of Diaz’s use of second person in some of his short stories?
Jakob Tanner
Even with its gimmicky function, the second person does merge the reader and character into one. In a way, the reader becomes complicit in everything that’s happening in the story.
Simon Bromberg
It is invasive. The second person makes you feel connected to Yunior, and that’s why it’s hard to dislike him.
Jakob Tanner
What the “you” also does so greatly is subvert the notion of the implied reader. The implied reader is no longer the white male of the nineteenth century. Clearly the “you” is Dominican, and so in effect, the reader becomes Dominican.
Brigit Katz
There’s also a lot of Spanish in this book, and whereas Drown – Diaz’s first book – includes a glossary, there is no glossary in This Is How You Lose Her. You can get the gist of the Spanish, but Diaz is not pandering to a white audience. His characters’ voices are so unique, and I think that’s why people love his books.
