This Is How You Lose Her

The whole book felt completely fresh and surprising, and even a day after finishing I'm still feeling hopped up on it. It's an unabashedly hetero-masculine point of view, in a way that specifically excludes women from identifying with it. This sounds negative but that's not at all how I (as a woman) experienced the book; rather, it was eye-opening and exhilarating and, well, fresh and surprising.

There were a lot of slang words, which I had to look up. There were a lot of Spanish words, which I had to look up. There were a lot of $50 Harvard words, which I had to look up. This mix of street/Latino/highbrow made the book vivid and vibrant.

Highly recommend.

I started this book about a decade ago in a Half Price Books and thought it was time to finally finish it. Though it was very nostalgic read for that reason, it was also a strange read because I cannot imagine such a sexist book being as popular of a release today. I know bad characters don't always equate to a bad worldview, but plain awareness isn't enough to justify being a shitty person, especially when you attribute awfulness to heredities and the book itself seems so autofictitious. Beyond, but not excluding or excusing, all that, the book just made me feel bad and I didn't very much enjoy reading it.

I was going to go on about how Yunior is such a unique and distinctive voice until every review I read talked exactly about how unique and distinctive his voice is.

So instead I will say that I love these veiled, semi-autobiographical memoirs. Maybe talking about oneself frees the author to really flex some narrative muscle. I'm thinking of Michael Ondaatje's Running the Family - still one of my favorites.

Diaz can leave you spinning in the wake of his ever changing narrative voice though. Chapters jump from first to third to tangential characters. But through it all it's a compelling read on the manifestations and muddling of love.

Yunior is a misogynist cheater. Incapable of monogamy and hair rending, teeth gnashing full of remorse when it all becomes uncovered. In less deft hands it would be unreadable but it's rendered so clearly it rings true. You probably know people like this.

The experience is 4/5, but I can't really judge the lasting merit. It's unlike most of my other reads, and full of extremes: punchy but distant, matter-of-fact but kind of an extended bildungsroman, full of Diaz's deference to the task of writing ‘women' but somewhat constructing that by plot and character, and only occasionally explicitly talking role.