This Is How You Lose Her
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| Author | Junot Díaz |
|---|---|
| Country | United States of America |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction, Short story collection |
| Publisher | Riverhead Books |
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Publication date
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September 11, 2012 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | |
This Is How You Lose Her is the second collection of short stories by Junot Díaz. It is the third of Díaz's books to feature his recurring protagonist Yunior, following his 1996 short story collection, Drown and his 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
This Is How You Lose Her is composed of 9 interlinked short stories.
The majority of the stories in the collection deal with men's infidelity in romantic relationships. Díaz describes the book as being "a tale about a young man’s struggle to overcome his cultural training and inner habits in order to create lasting relationships... [By the end of the book,] he finally begins to see the women in his life as fully human. He finally gains, after much suffering, a true human imaginary. Something that for the average guy is very difficult to obtain, considering that most of us are socialized to never imagine women as fully human."
The collection received positive reviews from publications including The New York Times, which describes the collection: "In the new book, as previously, Díaz is almost too good for his own good. His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Díaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status."
The Telegraph notes of the collection: "Junot Díaz's short story collection is so sharp, so bawdy, so raw with emotion, and so steeped in the lingo and rhythms of working-class Latino life that it makes most writing that crosses the Atlantic seem hopelessly desiccated by comparison" and "Language is key. Díaz is both a minimalist—scraping, chiselling, honing his prose into its flinty essence—and a maximalist who's capable of code switching, flipping between the colloquial and the highbrow, creating a taut lexical calabash made up of Caribbean phrases, black American vernacular and the playful pugilism of urban street banter."
Virginia Vitzthum, writing in Elle, praised Díaz's prose, but criticized his representations of female characters, writing that "we pretty much only see the women as exes, crying and screaming after they've been cheated on, or as new possibilities, cataloged in terms of their fuckworthiness."
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