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

3.45 of 5 stars 3.45 · rating details · 20 ratings · 7 reviews

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 o...more

Paperback, 230 pages

Published June 1st 2007 by Wayne State University Press

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Jan 05, 2009 Zinta rated it 4 of 5 stars

"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 tha...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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Apr 27, 2008 Terry rated it 3 of 5 stars

Nearly all of these stories are about men who are bewildered by the complexity of sexual relationships and the weirdness of gender identity in an unstable world: men whose careers are falling apart, cowboys and astronauts who aren't sure what to do with themselves, boys whose fantasies come true in ways that only reveal how unprepared they are for intimate relationships. Everyone is sexually abnormal in ways that make them vulnerable. Everyone is wounded and sad in ways that make human connectio...more

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Apr 28, 2009 Nina rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary

This collection was really fantastic. They are memorable and creepy--with images that stick. The title story might possibly be my favorite, though I also especially liked the stories about the Catholic priest, and the doomed couple who drive across the country together.

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Dec 23, 2011 Timmy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: united-states

I get enough of trivial, middle-class America. I deal with it.
Sad to see it taking over so many of our literary channels. Tin House,
Florida Review, Massachusetts Review, Alaskan Quarterly, West Branch, Third Coast, and Beloit Fiction Journal all see these stories as worthy of print. Frivolous topics, frivolous writing. If someone likes it, okay. To see it in some of our "highest" literary journals shows how pervasive the emptiness has become.

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May 19, 2009 Kirsten rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, from-library

What a fascinating, weird collection of short stories! My favorite was the title story, "The Women Were Leaving the Men," although I've also always had a fondness for "Cowboy Pile" in terms of just plain weirdness.

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Nov 02, 2008 Bonnie Campbell rated it 5 of 5 stars

Andy Mozina's stories are a wild ride. The psychology of the book is brilliant and strange. This won the Great Lakes College Book Award. It's got some sex scenes that might make the squeamish squirm.

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May 13, 2008 Lhena guevarra added it

Shelves: fiction

ahoy...its all about guys ...why girls choose to leave men...

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Nov 30, 2011 Wayne State University Press added it

Shelves: wsup-books

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Jul 19, 2011 Kim rated it 2 of 5 stars

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Jan 15, 2009 Robyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

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Sep 17, 2008 Danielle rated it 3 of 5 stars

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