Book Review: This Is How You Lose Her

Talking about This is How You Lose Her has to begin with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. While that book depicts the life of Oscar and his family, it is told by Yunior, Oscar's friend and his sister's ex-boyfriend. Yunior has a fantastic story-telling voice, a conversational Spanglish that is both funny and poignant.

This is How You Lose Her is for Yunior. It is a collection of short stories about lost love. Almost all of them are from Yunior's perspective, and most of them are about relationships that he ruined. There is the adult neighbor he slept with as a teenager until he grew up and moved on; the sex-crazed Alma; the girl he broke up with after she told him she loved him. There are also stories about Yunior's father and older brother, who had similar histories of philandering and womanizing.

In the end, there are two big themes to the stories. One is the importance of family. A couple of the stories were brotherly love stories masquerading as relationship stories. His brother died of cancer, but not before sleeping around with a few different women and getting taken for a ride himself. The other, more important theme was understanding how Yunior has to change in order to be truly happy.

The last story in the book is called "The Cheater's Guide to Love" and it depicts the five years of Yunior's life after his fiancee discovers he's cheated on her with 50 women while they were together and leaves him. Yunior, who has a history of losing women because of his ceaseless cheating, nevertheless goes through a real mourning period. His subsequent relationships and experiences and the relationship mistakes he sees his friends committing have him realize that whatever it was that made him think sleeping around was OK - his belief that it's something all Dominican men are born with, the examples set by his father and brother and friends, his sexual development at the hands of his adult neighbor - is wrong and is causing him ultimate sadness.

A lot of people think Junot Diaz and Yunior are sexist and misogynistic. I think the opposite. I think they realize that whether this is a cultural thing or a familial thing or a hereditary thing or just a personal problem, it is a problem nonetheless. Some men and women think that by sleeping around, they are making themselves happy, but in the end, finding that one true love and holding on to him or her is what causes true happiness. I think that's a lesson Yunior learned too late, but he learned it nonetheless.

I liked this book a lot. A few of the stories, taken alone, seemed a little pointless or repetitive, but when read as part of the collection, it really develops Yunior's relationship history. The only story that didn't seem to fit was "Otravida, Otravez," about a young female Dominican immigrant who has a relationship with an older Dominican man (who has a wife and family back in the DR). None of the characters were tied to Yunior in any way that I could tell, although it did continue the trend of "Dominican men cheat." Still, it seemed a bit out of place.

Other than that, I enjoyed it and would read pretty much anything Junot Diaz put in front of me. And if I wasn't sure I liked him before, he was fabulous on the Colbert Report.