This Is How You Lose Her

Like most of the literature we've read for AP English this year, I probably missed a whole lot of English rhetoric, symbols, and other nonsense in my independent reading book. I seem to be really good at being completely wrong about whether or not something is significant. But regardless of all of that, I really enjoyed my first book on parental love.

My book, This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, was about all kinds of love. Essentially it's a group of stories told by a young Dominican man named Yunior revolving around relationships, love, family, marriages, affairs, and babies. In two hundred short pages, he talks about his many broken relationships, his brother's struggle with cancer, and his endless battle to get over "the ex" who changed him.

A lot of it was very interesting, but what I was trying to focus on was the parent/child relationships. What the book mostly explored was the way parents felt about their children.
Yunior's best friend Elvis has a love child, a son, in the Dominican Republic and a little girl with his wife in America. Elvis is so excited that he has a son that he refuses to see that the child isn't his until Yunior realizes it. Elvis is heartbroken, because he says that while he was fighting in the war, all he wanted was the chance to live so he could have a son.
In another subplot, a law student at Harvard leaves her boyfriend and comes to live with Yunior, claiming that she's pregnant and it's his child. She lives with him throughout her pregnancy, then in the delivery room abruptly shouts that it isn't his baby and never speaks to him again.
Yunior's relationship with his parents is also extremely complex. He loves his mother and wants the best for her, but his brother Rafa treats her horribly, stealing from her and blatantly being rude and disrespectful to her. He doesn't understand why she lets Rafa do this, but I think it's just a way of showing the great love parents have for their children.
What I have concluded from this book is that a parent's love for their child goes beyond logical thought and causes irrational actions. All the parents in the book did things that make absolutely no sense, either in an attempt to protect their children or to give them a better life.