36 pages • 1 hour read
This Is How You Lose Her
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Story 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 3 Summary: “Alma”
“Alma” details the relationship between Yunior and Alma, Yunior’s Dominican college girlfriend. She is an artist who is very sexually adventurous. Yunior says, “Yes—it’s an opposites-attract sort of thing, it’s a great-sex sort of thing, it’s a no-thinking sort of thing. It’s wonderful! Wonderful!” (47). The relationship ends, however, when Alma reads Yunior’s journal, in which he details the sexual affairs he’s been having, particularly one with an Guyanese woman named Laxmi whom Alma assumes is Indian. Yunior claims the entries were part of a work of fiction he’s writing, but this is a lie. Yunior says, “This is how you lose her” (48).
Story 3 Analysis
Yunior’s college girlfriend Alma is described as “one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity” (46). In many ways, Alma recalls Nilda from the previous story.
Here, Díaz employs the second-person, turning Yunior’s “I” into a “you.” In doing so, Díaz places the reader Yunior’s situation, while at the same time distancing Yunior from these moments in his existence—ones that he is happy to recount but only when they affirm his manhood. For example, the reader, in this very brief story, receives little detail about his affairs and much more about his sexual experiences with Alma.
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By Junot Díaz
