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.
Symbols & Motifs
Books, Letters, Words
Books, letters, email, and words play an important role in Yunior’s relationships. In youth, he bonds with girls over comic books. Many of his girlfriends are bookish, and many are teachers, including Flaca, Magda and Miss Lora. Notably, all of Yunior’s cheating is revealed by one mode of text or another. Magda receives a letter from Cassandra. Alma reads about his time with Laxmi in his journal. His fiancé read his emails and finds out about his fifty lovers over a six-year span. Additionally, the letters between Ramon and his wife are a key feature that symbolizes the uncertainty of the future and an unyielding connection with the past.
Vacations/Getaways
Yunior tends to take his girlfriends to the Dominican Republic after he cheats on them:
Over a tortured six-month period you will fly to the DR, to Mexico, to New Zealand. You will walk the beach where they filmed The Piano, something she’s always wanted to do, and now, in penitent desperation, you give it to her. She is immensely sad on that beach and she walks up and down the shinning sand alone, bare feet in the freezing water, and when you try to hug her she says, Don’t. She stares at the rocks jutting out of the water, the wind taking her hair straight back (176).
He talks about the beaches, the waters, and the island with awe and admiration, and, as a constant cheater in the connected stories in the collection, these getaways function to physically reinforce the unreality of the romantic situation between Yunior and his many partners. The Dominican Republic affords a place where Yunior can re-embrace his hypermasculine side and perhaps see it reflected more often in the culture around him.
Bodies
Yunior frequently describes specific body parts and features including hair, breasts, butts, arms, and necks. Yunior notices the hair, breasts and butts of all women, including Rafa’s girlfriends, such as Nilda with the “world class” bust (29), or “Tammy Tetas” (115), who tend to be thick-bodied. Size is also routinely noted. In contrast to Rafa’s girlfriends, Yunior’s girlfriends tend to be thin, and he admires their lithe bodies. Miss Lora, Flaca, Alma are all described as very thin women.
Necks are mentioned frequently: “You Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long slender horse neck and a big Dominican ass” (45). They are also fetishized: “Ain’t a day passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite” (45).
Arms, too, are frequently noted: “That second trip I stood on the beach and watched you wade out, watched you rub the lake on your skinny arms and neck” (86). Yunior displays his own gym-pumped bicep to Miss Lora: “I could curl you, you say to her, flexing your arm(155). Alma and Flaca both have skinny arms, Yunior says: “Arms that are so skinny they could be on an after school special” (45). Lucy, Yunior’s love interest when in the Dominican Republic, has mosquito bites all over her “beautiful arms” (22).
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By Junot Díaz
