Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her asks us to think about so many complicated issues about American life today: how does race affect the relationships we have with our families? How does gender affect the romantic connections we form? What is lost in the process of immigrating to a new country? What role do language barriers play in the ways we communicate with each other? In this essay, you’re going to do some deep thinking about how one of these topics functions in Diaz’s collection.

In a clearly written and edited 3-4-page paper, take on one of the following topics as it applies to one or two of these stories. You don’t need to answer every question I’ve posed for you here, but you should consider the general ideas of your chosen topic, and then craft a specific, non-obvious thesis for your essay. Don’t just repeat ideas we’ve discussed in class: take a chance on a new argument, and then spend three to four pages arguing it using direct evidence from the text mixed with your own analysis. Your essay should have:(unique_solution)

• An introduction (don’t forget to mention the title and author of the book) where you set up your claim
• Several body paragraphs with strong topic sentences and ample evidence from the text (parenthetical citations are fine)
• A conclusion where you wrap things up and give your reader a sense of why your argument matters in a larger sense(unique_solution)

Here are some possible topics:

• What’s the deal with all the Spanish here? Write an essay in which you mount an argument for the role dual languages play in this text: what is Diaz trying to point out about his bilingual narrator? And what are we meant to experience as a largely monolingual, English-speaking readership?

• Rafa is the traditional masculine ideal in this collection: he’s classically attractive, he has women chasing after him, etc. Then he gets cancer and dies, though, suggesting that traditional masculinity isn’t as all-powerful as we might have thought: men are indeed vulnerable here. With that in mind, write an essay not about Rafa’s masculinity but about Yunior’s. Why does this text feature a narrator who’s a little less masculine, a little less attractive, than his brother? What pitfalls does Yunior fall into concerning his gender, and which does he avoid?

• Are women totally agent-less in this collection? Yasmin is “floating,” Mami can’t intervene to change her circumstances with either Rafa or Papi… heck, the very title of the book suggests that men are the primary agents in ending their relationships. So what’s left for women to do here? Or, on the other hand, why can’t women demonstrate more agency in this world?

• Are there any healthy romantic relationships in this collection? Yunior and Magda, Rafa and Nilda, Yunior and Alma, Rafa and Pura, Yunior and Miss Lora… which do you think is the healthiest relationship in the book? Why is there so much adultery here? What should Yunior do to avoid losing ‘her’?

• This is a collection largely about Dominican immigrants to the US and the sometimes poor decisions they make. It’d be easy to write an essay with the following thesis: “This is How You Lose Her is Diaz’s attempt to show us what terrible people Dominicans are.” Assuming that this is not actually the case – that Diaz is not actually trying to throw his own people under the bus – what’s the collection instead trying to say about this immigrant community? How can we get past the poor decisions people make here? Your goal here, in some sense, is to write an essay where you defend some of the things in this collection that seem indefensible.

• Write on some other topic of your choosing. But like the ones above, think about answering a specific question about the text. I don’t want essays simply saying, “‘The Pura Principle’ shows us how much havoc cancer can play in a family.” I want analysis, not plot summary!

Notes:

• If you choose to include two different stories in your essay, be careful: your thesis should not be, “These two stories have some similarities and some differences.” That’s just true! Instead, choose one of the topics listed above, develop your thesis, and then show me why that thesis is true in the two stories you’ve chosen.
• Editing matters here: all character names and Spanish words should be spelled correctly, your citations should be punctuated correctly, your writing should be in the literary present, etc. Little details matter!
• Use the helpful tools on our Haiku page: Heschel’s stands for analytical writing, as well as the “Elements of Academic Argument” handout from Harvard.
• Our expectations for civil discourse in the classroom also apply to your writing for this course, particularly when it comes to making generalizations. This gets tricky, though, as the characters in Diaz’s collection often make generalizations about women, about Dominicans, about white people, etc. If there’s evidence for it, you may explain how Yunior views his community, but you may not make sweeping statements about how you view Yunior’s community. Be careful of phrases like, “The Dominican immigrant community encourages adultery in men.” Instead, find me examples of characters who say or believe things like this about their community. If there’s no evidence, though, don’t say it.