Live from New Brunswick via Santo Domingo...

"The thing is, that particular bit of stupidity had been over for months. Me and Magda were on an upswing. We weren't as distant as we'd been the winter I was cheating. The freeze was over. She was coming over to my place and instead of us hanging with my knucklehead boys—me smoking, her bored out of her skull—we were seeing movies. Driving out to different places to eat. Even caught a play at the Crossroads and I took her picture with some bigwig black playwrights, pictures where she's smiling so much you'd think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge. We were a couple again. Visiting each other's family on the weekends. Eating breakfast at diners hours before anybody else was up, rummaging through the New Brunswick library together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money. A nice rhythm we had going. But then the Letter hits like a Star Trek grenade and detonates everything, past, present, future. Suddenly her folks want to kill me. It don't matter that I helped them with their taxes two years running or that I mow their lawn. Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, calls me an asshole on the phone, sounds like he's strangling himself with the cord. You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish, he says. I see one of Magda's girlfriends at the Woodbridge mall—Claribel, the ecuatoriana with the biology degree and the chinita eyes—and she treats me like I ate somebody's favorite kid."

   ...excerpt from This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, New Brunswick

We are among the fortunate few in central New Jersey who have electricity, so we will not be done out of our annual viewing of It's the Great Pumpkin. Charlie Brown.  We have our own great, befanged  punkin in the window, displacing our own beagle and smiling down on the neighborhood.  Kids ar playing board games at "the big table," leftovers are languishing on the counter, and I am lurking here with you in cyberspace.  However, yet you think all is lost to the dark side, I finished a book today.  This was not an easy task, as it was preceded by a dozen glossy magazines about proper mascara application, recipes for chicken "sliders," and directions for managing stress.  Wanna know a bit about it?
This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz!  Hooray!  Central Jersey and Boston and "the island!"  What could be better?   Sad short stories written in Diaz's unique voice about the many ways to, well, lose her, whether you want to or not.  The best is the final tale The Cheater's Guide to Love, which I originally read in The New Yorker, about the one that got away, the one that meant something, the relationship you screwed up totally.
Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ( which I have read three times) and the collection of short stories Drown,  sets his characters in Elizabeth, Sayreville, Union City, and Paterson, as well as the student haunts at Rutgers and Harvard.  They are, nonetheless, deeply rooted in the DR, in the Bani', the land of Trujillo and memory.  The characters move fluidly among the stories, some rising out of Oscar Wao.  However, not all "Mamis"are the same.  The one who survives the story Invierno is my favorite, reminding me of Janey in Bruce Springsteen's Spare Parts.
Get this one and go back to your immigrant mind, the one that is still conscious of race and just where you rate in society, no matter how many friends at Harvard you have.  Go back and examine just how you lost her or him or them or your opportunity.  Start reading and writing again.

Best to all down the shore and in the streets of New Jersey,

Maureen