36 pages • 1 hour read
Junot DíazThis Is How You Lose Her
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 2 Summary: “Nilda”
In “Nilda,” when Yunior is around 14 years old, his womanizing brother, Rafa is having sex with 15-year-old Nilda in their shared bedroom. Yunior and Nilda become friends, as she spends much of her time waiting at Yunior’s house for Rafa to return. It becomes clear to Yunior that Nilda’s main reason for coming over is to avoid her chaotic home life. Yunior explains, “She crashed over at our apartment a lot because she hated her moms, who was the neighborhood borracha” (38)—with “borracha” being a slang word for “drunk.” In time, Yunior develops a crush on Nilda. Over the one summer Nilda and Rafa are together, Yunior recalls how good it felt for the three of them to go to the pool.
Nine years later, Yunior runs into Nilda at the laundromat. Although she is missing teeth and pudgier, Yunior still imagines running away with her. As he recalls admiring her folding laundry, Yunior adds, “A couple of years later I went on to college and I don’t know where the fuck she went” (42).
Story 2 Analysis
Nilda comes from a broken, unsupportive home. Yunior explains, “Her mom was a mean-ass drunk and always running around South Amboy with her white boyfriends—which is a way of saying Nilda could hang and man, did she ever” (32). Readers see that one of the origins of Yunior’s impending evolution into a lothario comes through how he sees his older brother Rafa interact with women. Yunior has a crush on Nilda, and the two bond over comic books. Unlike with some of his later love interests, Yunior and Nilda connect intellectually over literature and pop culture. This intellectual bond, however, is not strong enough to keep the two of them close, especially after Rafa jettisons Nilda.
The end shows Nilda’s inevitable swift decline. Yunior describes her at age 24: “She wasn’t at her lowest yet but she was aiming there and when we passed each other she always smiled and said hi. She was starting to put on weight and she’d cut her hair down to nothing and her moonface was heavy and alone” (40).
Yunior’s love for Nilda continues, but it morphs into the form of something akin to love for a matriarchal figure; Nilda, no longer sexually attractive to him, continues to appeal to Yunior in that she can perform domestic tasks like folding laundry. If in the first story in the collection, readers see the highly-sexualized female as a fully separate entity from her “good girl” counterpart, here, readers see Nilda transmutation goes in the other direction, from sex object to “good girl.” However, if Nilda attains “good girl” status in the eyes of Yunior, her perceived loss of physical beauty relegates her to being forgotten about entirely.
Related Titles
By Junot Díaz
