This Is How You Lose Her

In the book’s first story, Yunior arrives to the reader as charismatic due to his ability to turn a phrase. At the same time, he is extremely unseemly, due to his treatment of women. This Jekyll-and-Hyde quality will remain a part of his character for much of the book.

Magda means “high and noble” in Latin. The contrast between Magda and Lucy, the girl Yunior flirts with at the resort, creates a binary between female characters in the story that extends across Diaz’s collection: females are either extremely virtuous or the antithesis thereof. If they are not one or the other, Yunior needs them to be.

Yunior is quick to feel sorry for himself, failing to return the thoughtfulness Magda gave him when they were more in love. He seeks solace in the form of the hyper-masculine, embodied by the two men who take him to the cave outside of town. But this hypermasculinity overwhelms Yunior, who says, “Then I notice that Bárbaro’s holding a huge fucking machine gun and his hand ain’t shaking no more. He isn’t watching me or the Vice-President—he’s listening. I’m not scared, but this is getting a little too freaky for me” (23).

Finally, the supposed clarity Yunior locates in the cave—that his relationship is over with Magda—is in stark opposition to what Yunior then tells her in the hotel room: that if they try, they will succeed in salvaging the relationship. In this manner, Yunior is able to lie both to himself and to his partner, establishing him as the unreliable narrator he will largely remain over the course of the collection.