This Is How You Lose Her in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Apr 29, 2015 Sarah rated it it was amazing

Shelves: latin-america-fiction, latinx, american-fiction, fiction, caribbean

This is Junot Diaz, so of course it was fantastic. His writing, as always, is fresh, funny, unexpected and gloriously, unapologetically bilingual. Yunior, suspiciously autobiographical, is an asshole, in that you'd never want him to be your real-life boyfriend, and simultaneously sympathetic, so you feel like his assholery is something from which you really, really root for him to recover. And every moment of it is so real you can't help but love everything about Diaz tragicomedy; it's brash and ...more

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Nov 21, 2012 Jessica rated it really liked it

Shelves: book-club, short-stories

I really don't know what to think about Junot Díaz. He's an amazing writer. He writes about interesting situations. But he keeps writing about the same character, Yunior, and I think what it comes down to is that I really don't like Yunior. (Yunior narrates a lot of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I understand is also the narrator of Díaz's first book, Drown, which I have not yet read.)

This Is How You Lose Her is a collection of short stories, most of which are narrated by Yunior at var I really don't know what to think about Junot Díaz. He's an amazing writer. He writes about interesting situations. But he keeps writing about the same character, Yunior, and I think what it comes down to is that I really don't like Yunior. (Yunior narrates a lot of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I understand is also the narrator of Díaz's first book, Drown, which I have not yet read.)

This Is How You Lose Her is a collection of short stories, most of which are narrated by Yunior at various points in his life. They're mostly about his relationships, and Yunior is a self-centered, cheating asshole in his approach to all of them, yet seems truly devastated when they don't work out. When he's talking about himself or his brother or his childhood, I start getting won over, but then he says something about his girlfriend and all the other women he's been sleeping with at the same time, and he's lost me again. (Insert joke about how maybe the "her" in the title is the reader, or this reader anyway.)

My favorite story in the book was "Otravida, Otravez," one of the few stories that - surprise! - wasn't about Yunior at all. Instead, the narrator is a woman at a time of transition in her life - she's a recent immigrant, but has been in the U.S. long enough to have been promoted to a management role in her job in the hospital laundry, and she's living in a crowded apartment with other recent immigrants but is helping her boyfriend buy a suburban house and slowly letting him talk her into moving in with him. (I didn't pick up on this, but I read an interview with Díaz where he said that the boyfriend - who has a wife and kids back home in the Dominican Republic that he never plans to go home to - is Yunior's father, and the wife back home is his mother. So it's still about Yunior, in a way.)

Díaz is a great writer, and I really want to like what he writes, but Yunior as a character/narrator keeps pushing me away. I'll probably keep trying, because I think someday Díaz will write something that's going to bowl me completely over, but it hasn't happened yet. ...more

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