The Decade of Letting Things Go is a book of linked essays containing still-relevant experiences that take place after the age of becoming socially and/or professionally invisible, as Cris Mazza searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance among a growing list of losses.
Mazza’s story contains many of life’s expected losses: pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places, as well as the loss of identities—child, student, partner, “successful” author. Some of her late-life experiences aren’t so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get her to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in thirty-year-old #Me Too incidents; “hooking up” with a “boy” from her teenaged past; struggling to accept that lifelong sexual dysfunction will never wane; realizing a deeply trusted mentor from forty-five years ago might be declining into dementia; plus a lifelong attachment to a childhood wound of having a “preferred child” as a sibling.
Ultimately there is also the apparent loss of hope in ever finding contentment in the mark one makes in the world or in ever forming an identity that brings this abstract contentment—except that these have no expiration dates, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.
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CRIS MAZZA is the author of three previous memoirs, eleven novels, and six collections of short fiction. Mazza’s first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. Her second published book was the critically acclaimed collection of fictions, Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She is a native of Southern California and has recently retired from a thirty-one-year tenure as a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mazza now resides in the upper Midwest’s Northwoods.
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