This is How You Lose Her

Raw, deeply sad (maybe tragic), beautiful like a hard punch to the jaw, and very tightly stitched up by the final story. Wow.

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.