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 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 5 Summary: “Flaca”
In “Flaca,” Yunior “dates” a skinny girl named Veronica, whom he calls Flaca. He addresses her, “You were whitetrash from outside Paterson and it showed in your no-fashion-sense and you’d dated n*****s a lot” (82). Veronica and Yunior are in the same James Joyce class in college. She offers him a ride three times before he accepts. He only calls her when he has no one else, and she offers to come over. This situation goes on for two years. Yunior says of Veronica: “You’re the only person I ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the kind you don’t find every day” (83). The two go to a New Jersey recreation area called Spruce Run twice. He watches her in the water. Later, she whispers “I love you,” and soon after they never speak again. Yunior recalls, “You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other’s arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise” (87).
Story 5 Analysis
Yunior doesn’t want Veronica speaking Spanish to him or trying to connect to him through the appropriation of Yunior’s culture. At the same time, Yunior gives Veronica a Spanish nickname “Flaca,” which means “skinny.” The sense that Veronica is irrevocably flawed emerges throughout the story, symbolized by her lazy eye, her poverty, her skinniness, and the three-legged cat that seeks her comfort in the bookstore, showing that Veronica aligns with the broken. Yunior says, “You sit yourself down in an aisle and start searching through the boxes. The cat goes right for you” (83).
Yunior further points out that if Veronica were Dominican, his family would have worried about her and cooked her plates of food to fatten her up. Since she’s White, however, the implication is that his family does not care. A teacher, Flaca is the nurturing type. She is generous and kind to Yunior, but there is the sense he is ashamed to be with her, although he likes her. After Veronica confesses her love to him and leaves, Yunior, instead of processing the end of the relationship, spends the summer running. He thereby focuses on himself and attempts to better his own physical form, rather than grow emotionally.
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