I knew about this short story when I read the
author's note on Instagram about it. The story takes its background from the American author and her Mexican husband who both live in Mexico City now. The story formed when the author lost her wallet in late May, and ended up at the consulate feeling silly. Then she wondered,
is losing a wallet really so bad? So I popped over to the journal to read it.
This is 'Coconut Flan' by Catherine Lacey, published in The New Yorker on October 5, 2025. We begin with a lost wallet. Andrés and Daria land in a city for a vacation. A beach getaway. Dunno where, an island outside of Mexico City, presumably, but still within Mexico. Daria discovered her wallet missing. She's American and has residency status in Mexico City by way of marriage to Andrés.
The wallet wasn’t quite a wallet, actually, but, rather, a black leather pouch large enough to comfortably hold her passport, residencia card, credit card, debit cards, Metrobús card, and house keys, as well as a small Polaroid of Andrés, two pens, and seven thousand pesos in cash. This was the litany that she, in her faltering Spanish, and he, in his native Spanish, repeated at the airline counter, the airport information desk, in the security department, the luggage department, and then to various voices on the phone. They described the thing that had been lost, and all the things inside the thing that had been lost, recited this list like a prayer, or a spell.
Daria seemed really innocent or silly in wondering why people would take her passport and her residency permit. Yes. Exactly that. She didn't even seem to know that she would have to report the loss of the passport and residency card to the Embassy.
But the passport, the residencia, the passport, the residencia,” Daria kept repeating, increasingly pathetic. “Why would a stranger want my identification?”
....................
What was an embassy, really, and what did it do? Calling the Embassy was something that rich people did. People called the Embassy when they had friends at the Embassy, college buddies named Teddy, ambassadors who owed them a favor. No one owed Daria anything.
What she lost was more than cash. It held everything, her whole life, in that sense, including the all-important house keys. Everything was replaceable via a tedious arrangement with the banks and such. The passport is valuable but it has been lost and it was used in an attempt in a human smuggling operation. So she lost stuff and retrieved her passport. The house keys though, once lost, stayed lost. She was frantic and haunted by it. They seemed to represent some sort of psychological and physical safety that is breached.
I sighed and realized that my own eye-rolling at Daria's reactions is uncalled for. Many people don't know what an Embassy does or how it could help us. I can't be so quick to judge, even if it's a character in a story. I do see these exact reactions in many.
With the loss of her wallet, Daria seemed to have lost her own identity. Or at least she's questioning it. She couldn't do anything without her cards and cash although she still had her phone. She doesn't even speak fluent Spanish. Her husband Andrés would have to pay for everything. She settled into some sort of passivity, and had her husband navigate the city, and even order food for her.
I wondered what's with the coconut flan. It is the title of this story after all. The coconut flan was a gift by way of another tourist at the resort when they were all at dinner. That was Kevin, with an odd little tale about his much-younger girlfriend who drowned on this island last year. But in reality, the waitress told them, the girlfriend left him; she said nobody has ever drowned in this area.
Kevin spends half a year on this island and never bothered to learn the language. I suppose that Daria considers him an average American tourist, or even an expatriate, considering the amount of time he spends here.
Apparently the coconut flan was really good, as was the chat with the waitress who sat down with them.
Daria got a new passport made. Andrés and her left the island and went back to mainland, and retrieved her new passport from a DHL office. She wondered whether they should change locks in their home. I was like, HELL YES. CHANGE THOSE LOCKS. But I have no idea what they think about lost keys versus the cost of changing locks. The story ended with this chunk that I'm not too sure what to make of,
Then their vacation was over, and Daria was back in their apartment, where she began to listen, quite carefully, to the comings and goings of people in the building—other residents, visitors, deliverymen. She tried to imagine the sound of someone putting her lost keys, their found keys, into the lock and turning the knob and entering her home. She thought so much about this possibility, with such focus, that she was quite sure she knew exactly how it would feel, finally, for some other character to enter her life, ready to repossess it as their own.
The author chose to write this story in a third person narrative. As a writer, she hasn't been compelled to write in the third person, but for this story, she did. In an interview with the same journal, she said, "A first-person narrator can really delve into the psychology and interiority of a single character, but the third person might have an advantage when it comes to depicting relationships between characters, or between a character and society. Lately, I feel more drawn to the possibilities of the third, perhaps for that exact reason."
The author used the third person narrative to look in on Daria, who is keen to differentiate herself from other American women even when it comes to something universal and mundane as losing one's wallet in a new city while on vacation. Daria is an immigrant to Mexico City by way of marriage. She's a gringa in Mexico City, and still can't speak Spanish, but she longs to remain apart in her identity from other typical American expatriates.
In the interview, the author was asked about her depiction of Daria and how the character viewed herself through this incident.
Estrangement is a major theme in the story. As an expat, one who is tempted to whisper “Fuck America” on a call to the U.S. Embassy, Daria has estranged herself from the States. And, having lost all of her I.D.s, she becomes estranged from her sense of self. Did one of those narrative threads come to you first?
One of the fastest ways to feel estranged from reality, other people, and even yourself is to interact with a bureaucracy about your literal identity. Another way is to learn a new language and to try to live in that language. And though the word itself—estrangement—has a negative connotation, I don’t see it that way. Travel is a useful form of estrangement, too, and I find that I write a lot more when I’m travelling or otherwise displaced. But my sense is that estrangement, in one form or another, is at the core of all fiction, film, and art in general. Artists and writers tend to be strangers, or to see themselves as strangers in this world, and making a story is an attempt to fill that gap, or to describe it, or to just live with it.
