To talk about Yunior is to talk about an individual that fascinates me, because he's aware that his various decisions block his ability to be in a real relationship. Part of what drives Yunior in the novel Oscar Wao—and it's never really stated, but it's at the margins of the book throughout—is that Yunior has a fascination with Oscar because Oscar permits himself, despite the fact that he has no hope in succeeding, to be utterly vulnerable to the possibility of love. Oscar consistently thrusts himself, places himself, openly, in the hands of other people. In the hands of the women that he thinks he loves and who always reject him. Yunior is fascinated by this because he himself is never able to take off any of the armor, or any of the masks, that a person has to completely take off to expose themselves to the vulnerability of love.

Yunior is often betraying the women who he cares most about—choosing women he doesn't love over the ones he does. Why?

There's a point when you're with somebody in a relationship where the decision comes down to their love or your mask. And by "the mask," we mean your terror in exposing yourself, your terror in making yourself vulnerable to this other person. I think Yunior's tragedy in a number of places in this book is that he keeps choosing his mask. Sometimes he does it compulsively, sometimes he's unaware. But it grows on him that he plays at relationships.

Being in love means you actually have to be in the game. And to be in the game means that you have to actually risk losing, right? It's not a game if you can't lose. It's something else. And I think Yunior likes to pretend that he's in the game. But really he's not. Really, he can't lose. He's always got some other girls up the way. He's always got something going on.

I always joked that Yunior was the guy who you think is stranded out in the open sea with you, but he's got a life vest tucked between his legs.

What's ironic about This Is How You Lose Her, though, is that Yunior never really doeslose these women—not fully. They continue to haunt him. It's almost as though he leaves them in such awful, heart-wrenching ways because it somehow ensures they'll be with him forever.

But this is the problem with such a dumbass. He doesn't get it! What you just said is absolutely the tragedy. That in the end, brother, in the end—the closest that he can come to being faithful is in ministering the loss. In that loss they are permanently frozen in a certain kind of relationship. But it's so empty; it's so non-fulfilling.

I think that once you get over the age of 20, you begin to understand that there's a lot of places where you can fall in and they are just locations of stases. Locations of paralysis. Places where there's no growth. And whether it's a job, whether it's a way that you decide to pursue your life, whether it's a philosophy, whether it's a politic, we all know in our hearts when we're choosing paralysis. When we're choosing the dead zone over life. Yunior is one of these characters. I think that in some ways the closest he can come to love is after it's fucking gone past and it's only a shadow blasted in the wall. Then he'll come every day and bring flowers to it.