The following version of this story was used to create this study guide: Diaz, Junot. "Wildwood." The Norton Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, Shorter 12th ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2015, pp. 413-428.

“Wildwood” opens with a flashback to when teenage narrator Lola is 12 and called into the bathroom by her fearsome, towering mother, Belicia Deleon, to help verify the presence of a tumor in Mami's massive breast. Lola is terrified, but Mami goads her into feeling for the lump, gently guiding Lola’s hand until she finds it and is overcome with the sudden sense that everything in her life is about to change. Lola’s lifelong gift for premonition is well known in her family, and, as predicted, within months, Mami has both breasts removed and loses her hair. Lola changes, too, and recalls that moment in the bathroom with her mother as when her life truly begins. For the next year, Lola’s relationship with her mother is as bad as it has ever been. Their confrontations keep her overweight, docile, younger brother Oscar in his room afraid to come out. Lola’s rebellion against her dying mother’s violent tyranny causes gossip among her neighbors and shame for her extended family who consider her coldhearted and ungrateful of Mami's toil and sacrifice. Lola feels guilty too, and suppresses her conscience by acting out with impulsive behavior.

When she is 14, she develops a mad crush on the dull, 19-year-old Aldo whom she meets at a New York nightclub. She stops just short of having sex with him, but decides she is in love with him and takes him seriously when he invites her to stay with him in Wildwood, on the Southern New Jersey shore. Around this same time, Mami breaks the news to Lola and Oscar that her cancer has returned. Lola’s callous reaction causes a messy brawl to erupt at the dinner table, with Oscar pleading for the two to stop fighting. After a couple of days, peace is restored between them, but Lola has recognized the opportunity to fulfill her lifelong daydream of running away from home.

She arrives to discover that Aldo lives with his bigoted , miserly father, an elderly World War II vet who seems to hate Aldo as much as Lola despises her mother. She unceremoniously loses her virginity to Aldo in the cramped, squalid apartment reeking of kitty litter and endures both men’s drunken insults for a couple of months, forcing herself to believe that it was true love. In November, Lola calls home for the first time, and when Oscar answers, she swears him to silence and asks that he steal money from their mother’s hiding place and bring it to her in Wildwood, at least an hour away. She swears Oscar to secrecy, but soon regrets trusting her nerdy, obedient brother. When the two meet at the agreed-upon time and place, Lola realizes that a trap has been set as her mother, aunt, and drug-addicted uncle appear to apprehend her and return her to Paterson. The frail, bewigged Mami lunges for Lola, who breaks free and runs away, exhilarated with the sensation of flight and liberation. She tries her best not to look back at her mother lying on the ground wailing, but her conscience forces her to stop and go back to help. When she reaches her mother and extends a hand to help lift the big woman to her feet, Lola sees that Mami has been faking her injury and that Lola’s fantasy is over.

Six months later, Lola reports that after Wildwood, she was promptly shipped to stay with the grandmother she never met at Mami's old home in the Dominican Republic. She attends an all-girls private school where she is alienated and ostracized from the mean, stuck-up, rich girls. She becomes best friends with Rosio, a down-to-earth scholarship student who teaches Lola to dress and act and style herself like a real Dominican girl. Rosio also encourages Lola to join the track team, and her long legs soon make her into a champion sprinter. Lola has a new boyfriend from Rosio’s neighborhood, and although Max is from the lower-classes, he is gentlemanly, sensitive and industrious. Through Max’s devoted affection, Lola begins to appreciate her own value and lovability, which allows her increased empathy and understanding for her mother, with whom she has started to reconcile. Lola enjoys her new life so much that she decides to stay in the Dominican Republic for another year, but soon that old feeling of premonition overtakes Lola and she starts losing races for the first time.

One night with her grandmother, Lola sees an old picture of her mother that she had never seen before, and realizes how beautiful Mami used to be. Lola understands that she ran away from Mami, just like Mami ran away from her family to come to the United States, which is what Lola had been raised to believe. The truth was that Mami was forced to flee after falling in love with the wrong man as a girl and running afoul of the despotic military regime ruling the country. Lola discovers that in reality, Mami was burned alive and left for dead, trauma that Mami suppressed through working, though which often gave way to outbursts of violent rage. Lola empathizes with Mami's zealous commitment to protecting Lola the best she knows how to do, and with this understanding Lola can recognize her feelings as another moment of transformational change and new beginnings.