This Is How You Lose Her

Yunior’s college girlfriend Alma is described as “one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity” (46). In many ways, Alma recalls Nilda from the previous story.

Here, Díaz employs the second-person, turning Yunior’s “I” into a “you.” In doing so, Díaz places the reader Yunior’s situation, while at the same time distancing Yunior from these moments in his existence—ones that he is happy to recount but only when they affirm his manhood. For example, the reader, in this very brief story, receives little detail about his affairs and much more about his sexual experiences with Alma.

Alma, like Yunior, is also Dominican, and she enjoys many staples of American subcultures, including seminal indie band Sonic Youth and comic books. Alma appreciates Yunior for being a “real Dominican,” and Alma is “only the third Latina [Yunior has] ever really dated” (47). Further, readers learn that Alma wants to work at “reclaiming her Dominican heritage” (46). Yunior, however, seems uninterested in these efforts; he focuses instead on boasting to his friends how many records she owns and how she says “terrible white-girl things” when they have sex (46).

Additionally, it’s the nationality of Yunior’s other partner, Laxmi, that Alma focuses on in the story’s climax, at which point Alma labels Yunior’s own Dominican background as illegitimate. In turn, Yunior uses his fiction writing in a poor attempt to lie about the affair he had, saying the journal entries relate to fiction, not to reality.