Only rarely do characters in stories grow and mature: Junot Diaz story

I've read just about everything by Junot Diaz and remain a fan - even though he makes it difficult at times. Story in current New Yorker, A Cheater's Guide to Love (sounds like a novel title, doesn't it?) case in point: in some ways a very smart, funny, even sensitive story in which the protagonist is a complex guy with many evident flaws and much charm; in other ways, a disturbing story that treats women as objects that exist largely to satisfy male needs: whether for sex (primarily), nurturing, love, or posterity (i.e., birth machines for male heirs). In that way, as friend A., who like this story a lot, notes, reading Diaz is a guilty pleasure. Can be, anyway. This story is written in 2nd person, a bit of an affectation but he pulls it off, and the protagonist, "you," is/are a person who shares many of the known characteristics and biographical details of the author: a successful Dominican-American writer teaching in Boston and struggling to find a theme for his next novel. With a few changes of surface details, he could have written this in the first person: except, just because the character seems to be like the author doesn't mean that he is the author. For all we know, every one of the plot details of the story - breakup with fiancee in "Year 0" when she learns he has cheated on her multiple times, followed by 4 years of alternately pining for her and getting entangled in a series of unsatisfying, unhealthy relations, while his writing and teaching take dive and he cannot find a suitable subject - until the end when, surprise, or perhaps not, his subject is the cheater's guide to love, the story you're reading. More than many of Diaz's stories, this one evokes a lot of sympathy for the protagonist, aka You, for his sweet vulnerability, his cultural alienation (he feels constantly hounded and harassed in Boston), and his general cluelessness about the relationships he enters into and falls out of. We could like him/you more if he/you were not so unfaithful and dismissive about women. Have to wonder, as I've noted in earlier posts, whether Diaz doesn't get a lot of slack simply because of his Dominican background: if a Jewish-American writer were to write this way about women (Roth, perhaps?), he would be (as Roth has been) skewered, but for a Dominican it's cool because, why? It's street smart, and report on the culture? I hope Diaz's relation to women - in his fiction, I mean - will evolve, and this story makes me think maybe that will be so: the character seems wiser from his suffering, more forgiving and more serene. Only rarely do characters in short stories actually grow and mature - there's usually not space for that in a short story. Here's an exception.