The Women Were Leaving the Men (Made in Michigan Writers Series)

published	June 15th 2007 by Wayne State University Press
binding	Paperback
isbn	0814333621 (isbn13: 9780814333624)
ebook
pages	230
description	In The Women Were Leaving the Men, Andy Mozina draws readers into the everyday lives of characters who are instantly relatable but intriguingly flawed...more [close] In The Women Were Leaving the Men, Andy Mozina draws readers into the everyday lives of characters who are instantly relatable but intriguingly flawed. Knocked beyond the brink by departed family members, curious obsessions, and unruly physical attributes, Mozina s characters climb and scrape their way toward intimacy, sanity, and redemption against the often-absurd odds of their lives in this unique, humorous, and poetic collection [close]
date added	06-13-07 edit book

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Zinta rated it:

11/04/07

bookshelves: fiction

Read in July, 2007

"Out on the ranges, out West, you get cowboy piles. Mounds of human cowboys. A cowboy lies on the ground (for no reason, it seems), and then somebody lies across him, and then a third guy piles on..." (from "Cowboy Pile," pg. 1)

How is it that nonsense can bring tears to our eyes? Because we are all more nonsense than sense? Could be. And if that is so, Andy Mozina, associate professor of English at Kalamazoo College, has taken a good look into our quirky side and piled t...more "Out on the ranges, out West, you get cowboy piles. Mounds of human cowboys. A cowboy lies on the ground (for no reason, it seems), and then somebody lies across him, and then a third guy piles on..." (from "Cowboy Pile," pg. 1)

How is it that nonsense can bring tears to our eyes? Because we are all more nonsense than sense? Could be. And if that is so, Andy Mozina, associate professor of English at Kalamazoo College, has taken a good look into our quirky side and piled the quirks up so high that we can't miss them, or shouldn't, and will hear the echoes resonate in our crumpled dysfunctional souls as we page through his collection of stories, The Women Were Leaving the Men. Mozina holds up a mirror, and even if we don't want to look, we must, we can't help it, we wince and we stare. Yup. There we are, all in a cowboy pile.

With this grand opening piled up as a guidepost, Mozina leads us from one intriguing dysfunction to another, from obsession to oddity to deformity to vanity to fetish.

In "Privacy, Love, Loneliness," we read of teen angst and spiraling hormones, circling around a "dead sock" that young Brian has rescued from the bag the coveted Gracie has left behind in his room. Similarly, he circles Gracie, closing in on the big moment: rites of passage in adolescence, clumsy and overheated, and lonely even when together.

In "The Enormous Hand," we meet the hand that measures 24 inches from tip of pinky to tip of thumb, attached to a man, but coming to symbolize all the twitchy places in humanity come alive and ugly when we encounter difference in our fellow humans.

"My Way of Crying" brings us to other places we wish we didn't have to go. Travel has a way of exposing in us what the every day often keeps hidden. Husband and wife head out on a road trip, their differences bristling when enclosed in the small space of a Honda, and when the husband can't sleep at night in a strange motel, he wanders up to the front desk to be, well, "serviced" by the pretty young thing as his wife sleeps down the hall. When the wife's depression leaks out the following day on the road, he tells her he loves her, leaving the reader to wonder: how often do we mean loathe when we say love? Even as we speak to and of ourselves.

More gems: "Beach" puts function back into dysfunction, a sand grain of brilliance in this collection; "The Arch" the St. Louis Arch to the arch of a foot as two sex addicts make an odd couple built on mutual fetish, imitating with a craving to be normal in a sadly deranged manner; "Moon Man" is a retired astronaut caring for his stroke-ridden mother, even though he left Mom's and another woman's photos on the moon, the women he wanted to leave behind; "The Love Letter" bonds teen boy to white-haired woman working a convenience store counter in an unlikely tryst that appears to be a crudely casual exchange of needs and wants but boils down to what even the most casual encounters still turn out to be, no matter young or old: written into her rambling letter to the boy, relating her own wretched youth--everyone is looking for an emotional connection, a true intimacy, however disguised.

And more pile up, one atop the other, a leaning tower of weirdness we recognize as human upon human. The title story, "The Women Were Leaving the Men," is the crowning glory. Mozina appears to have the ability to crawl inside the female skull, tamper with the female heart, and cross the gender divide as only the rare writer can--to pin down exactly the inconsistencies, the paradoxes, the manipulations, the discomforting webs of lies we tell ourselves and each other as we pair off and head for the moonlit horizon. This may not be the wisdom that the self-help books for saving relationships advise, but wisdom it is, at least, keenest observation.

Mozina sums it up himself as he concludes this collection: "You don't even know if your own self is capable of cooperating with your deepest desires."
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The Women Were Leaving the Men (Made in Michigan Writers Series)

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