Contributions by Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Tin House’s Open Bar, The American Reader, Five Chapters, Best Women's Erotica 2012, The Paris Review Daily, VICE, The Hairpin, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. When she was fifteen, an English teacher handed her a copy of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and nothing was the same after that.
Your Lying Cheater’s Heart
Carmen María Machado
Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her as a Confessional Text
The confessional text—either an author baring his own soul, or a fictional character coming clean about his or her particular version of events—has a long history, from The Confessions of St. Augustine to Nabokov’s Lolita. In the spirit of this genre comes Junot Díaz’s second short story collection, This is How You Lose Her, a sequence of bright, tight stories revolving around love’s many complications—infidelity, pregnancy, dissolving marriages, wounded families, the fact that true love is rare and can be lost forever. The sun in this particular universe is Yunior (of Díaz’s previous collection, Drown), a geeky jackass whose two most consistent qualities are cheating on his girlfriends and an unflappable optimism that he can get away with anything. The first story … Read More »
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