Yo!

A companion novel to Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, this book tells the story of Yolanda "Yo" García, a Dominican American writer, entirely through the voices of those around her. Yo herself never narrates. A prologue and 15 chapters, each told by a different person in her life, collectively assemble a portrait of a woman whose compulsive need to turn experience into stories has shaped, damaged, and enriched every relationship she has.

The prologue is narrated by one of Yo's three sisters. The family is furious that Yo has mined their private lives for her published novel, discussed on the radio program Fresh Air. Their mother threatens to sue, and one sister, Sandi, vows never to speak to Yo again. The narrator mediates, consoling Yo while fielding the family's outrage. Sandi confides that she is pregnant through artificial insemination and swears the narrator to secrecy, but the narrator tells Yo almost immediately. When Sandi's baby is born months later, the narrator persuades Sandi to call. Sandi leaves a long, affectionate message on Yo's answering machine, breaking the silence.

Part I traces the forces that shaped Yo. Her mother, Laura, narrates the family's immigration from the Dominican Republic to a cramped New York apartment during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. On the island, Laura used to scare the girls by draping a mink coat over her head and pretending to be a bear; Yo was the one who exposed the trick. When Laura discovers that her husband Carlos has hidden a gun connected to underground resistance work, she interrogates Yo, terrified the girl will talk. Yo reveals nothing but declares the bear trick is over. In New York, Yo is accidentally locked in a closet containing the mink and wets herself in terror, believing the bear has followed them. A school social worker tells Laura she should be proud of Yo's storytelling as a way of processing trauma.

Yo's cousin Lucinda recounts how Yo's diary destroyed Lucinda's future. At boarding school, both girls fall for a literary magazine editor named James Roland Monroe. Lucinda wins him, but Yo records the rivalry in her journal. When Yo's mother discovers the diary and shares its contents with Lucinda's parents, they cancel Lucinda's college plans and bring her home. Lucinda builds a successful life but never fully tells Yo whether she forgives her, noting Yo is "the haunted one who ended up living your life mostly on paper."

Sarita, the daughter of the family's maid Primitiva, grows up alongside the García girls. When Yo writes a college internship report studying Sarita's adjustment to America, Sarita feels her spirit has been stolen and hides the report, creating a rift. Decades later, Sarita is a wealthy orthopedist; they reunite after Primitiva's death and exchange cautious affection, knowing they will likely not meet again.

Professor Garfield, Yo's college English mentor, traces decades of writing recommendation letters for her, each beginning with the same refrain: "Once in a career there comes a student." Yo repeatedly abandons opportunities, dropping a Fulbright to marry a hippie dropout, leaving Harvard's graduate program to join a revolution, and drifting through two marriages. Garfield's own life transforms when his wife leaves him and he falls in love with Matthews, a younger male colleague who eventually dies of AIDS in Garfield's care. When Yo seeks yet another recommendation, Garfield tears up the letter and tells her to compile her poems and stories into a book.

In the Dominican countryside, an elderly villager named Consuelo asks Yo to help write a letter to her daughter Ruth, whose husband beats her. Consuelo dictates advice to endure the marriage, but Yo refuses to write it. Together they compose a letter urging Ruth to seek help and leave.

Part II follows Yo through relationships and domestic upheavals. Sergio and María, caretakers of Don Mundín's mountain estate, are grieving their young son, who drowned in the property's swimming pool. María, once a spirit medium, has lost contact with the spirit world since the tragedy. During Yo's stay, she fills the pool and teaches the caretakers' children to swim. María ventures into the house for the first time since the drowning and hears her dead son's voice calling from the pool.

Tammy Rosen, Yo's best friend, a Jewish poet and recently divorced mother, describes their bond forged in a therapy group for blocked women artists. Each pushes the other to confront avoidance: Tammy with shallow relationships, Yo with celibacy after two failed marriages. When Yo invites Tom, a wealthy gardening magazine owner she has been cautiously seeing, for dinner and then flees his bed, the two women read poems together at four in the morning. Tom joins them, and Yo reads her work aloud to a man for the first time.

Marie Beaudry, Yo's landlady in a small New England town, narrates her own transformation. Marie's abusive husband Clair returns, and his violence drives Yo to announce she is leaving. When rain leaks through the roof and destroys Yo's manuscripts, Marie confesses she knew about the damage. Together they stuff Clair's belongings into garbage bags and wait on the porch for his truck.

Lou Castellucci, a former college football star, discovers that Yo has published a story closely mirroring one he wrote in her workshop, with characters changed to Hispanic. He considers exposing her but cannot bring himself to do so. His wife reads the story aloud on the drive home, and it opens a conversation about their own losses.

Dexter Hays, Yo's Southern boyfriend, visits her in the Dominican Republic during her uncle's presidential campaign, posing as a journalist. They quarrel over cultural differences, and on election night they realize their worlds do not fit together.

Part III centers on Yo's third marriage to Doug Manley. Their wedding on a New Hampshire hillside, narrated through multiple viewpoints, gathers the novel's disparate characters: Doug's teenage daughter Corey, Dexter, Sarita, Lucinda finally telling Yo she is happy, and Tammy preparing to relinquish her role as best friend. A ewe stuck in an electric fence draws all the guests into a shared rescue.

After the wedding, Doug fields collect calls from José, an illiterate night watchman Yo befriended in the Dominican mountains. Losing his land to a government dam, José proposes marriage to Corey over the phone to gain immigration sponsorship. Doug shuts down the calls. During her earlier stay, Yo had taught José his letters, and when his daughter is born, he names her Yolanda.

In the penultimate chapter, an unnamed stalker who has followed Yo for 25 years confronts her in a Chicago hotel room with a knife. Carrying a history of childhood abuse and institutionalization, he has cycled through aliases borrowed from famous poets. Yo speaks to him calmly, connecting his need to be heard with her own compulsion to write. He puts the knife away and asks only that she truly listen. She agrees.

The novel closes with Yo's father, Carlos. He reveals the secret behind Yo's lifelong doubt: When she was five on the island, she boasted to a general allied with the dictatorship that her father had hidden guns and planned to kill El Jefe, the dictator Trujillo. Terrified, Carlos beat her with a belt and ordered her never to tell stories again. Now elderly, he reimagines that moment: Instead of bringing the belt down, he places his hands gently on his grown daughter's head and delivers a blessing, telling her to embrace her destino, or destiny, as a storyteller, to tell the family's journey, and to pass the blessing on.