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The Women Were Leaving the Men
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
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published May 7, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 28, 2008
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 connection nearly impossible. Yet some of the best stories are poignantly funny. "Cowboy Pile" pretends to a kind of documentary investigation of the phenomenon of cowboys' piling on top of one another, motivated by a kind of machismo that doubles as an existentialist engagement with absurdity. The title story catalogs the effects of whatever mysterious forces are breaking up the marriages of even the most modern, gender-reconstructed couples. Maybe the paradox about relationships that Molina is exploring is best summed up by the teenage narrator of "Privacy, Love, Loneliness," a boy whose girlfriend likes him because he's different, but who is afraid that if she saw how different he is--how fucked up, he says--she wouldn't find it so charming: "We got silly and started playing that game--rock, scissors, paper... I told her that I liked what this game said about things, namely, that all power was relative... After a while, I suggested that we play a variation: privacy, love, loneliness. Privacy excludes love, love beats loneliness, loneliness pries open privacy, since if you got too lonely you'd be willing to give up some of your privacy." The stories play out just about every variation of these forces. Even when they end comically, they aren't very comforting. As if love were a game you might win sometimes but that you could never get good at.
July 10, 2023
Stories that find the ordinary just about ready to crack, to break apart. Maybe it doesn't happen, but the tension and the joy are right below the surface. Here's a thing I wrote a while back, in 2007:
The short story, like any other art form, responds to fashion. The dominant fashion at the moment — a certain genuine wittiness that exposes a gently bizarre character often at swim in a sea of commodities — has temporarily marginalized both traditional stories heavy on character development and the riskier stories of the truly bizarre. Luckily, interesting and smart new writers like Andy Mozina, who clearly understands his moment in literary history, aren't overwhelmed by fashion and keep trying to find ways of telling their own stories.
In his first collection, The Women Were Leaving the Men, he ranges from deeply bizarre characters to those who were almost recognizable on my street this morning. "The Enormous Hand" is a Kafkaesque tale of a man born with one very large hand, so large in fact that it becomes an all-purpose device for perfect housecleaning. Bill's defect becomes almost heroic. But Bill's neighbors turn against him because of his deformity, and the jokes and punning turn toward the horrible before turning back toward a gentle eroticism. The story is an imaginative tour de force.
There are other moments and characters in The Women Were Leaving the Men that amaze with their powers of invention — obsessive-compulsive cowboys, a foot fetishist, a former astronaut who comes back home to take care of his mom — but the final story, "Admit," is another small gem in which Mozina seems to have found an exquisite balance between the way of telling and the story told. David in "Admit" is a troubled first-year law student at Harvard who really wants to be a stand-up comic.
The trouble is that his jokes really aren't very funny. He has a girlfriend who is about ready to dump him because he's too self absorbed, in addition to being a lousy lover. After dropping out of law school, he tries one last gig:
. . . I talked about how I was a law school dropout, pretty much an unmitigated failure at life. The laughs dwindled as I went on beating myself up, turning comedy into something else. At one point I ad-libbed, "I've got shit for brains, have you noticed that?" and the audience just dead-eyed me.
Then a waitress dumped half a hutch of glassware on the floor.
I said, "Ah, what a relief." But nobody got it. Heads turned to view the mess.
A heckler yelled, "Hey, at least you're not the only one getting fired tonight."
This is, of course, terribly sad. But it is also funny, and the reader feels slightly complicit in David's pathologies by enjoying the abyss of his self-deprecation. By the end of the story, Mozina turns all the platitudes on their heads.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
The short story, like any other art form, responds to fashion. The dominant fashion at the moment — a certain genuine wittiness that exposes a gently bizarre character often at swim in a sea of commodities — has temporarily marginalized both traditional stories heavy on character development and the riskier stories of the truly bizarre. Luckily, interesting and smart new writers like Andy Mozina, who clearly understands his moment in literary history, aren't overwhelmed by fashion and keep trying to find ways of telling their own stories.
In his first collection, The Women Were Leaving the Men, he ranges from deeply bizarre characters to those who were almost recognizable on my street this morning. "The Enormous Hand" is a Kafkaesque tale of a man born with one very large hand, so large in fact that it becomes an all-purpose device for perfect housecleaning. Bill's defect becomes almost heroic. But Bill's neighbors turn against him because of his deformity, and the jokes and punning turn toward the horrible before turning back toward a gentle eroticism. The story is an imaginative tour de force.
There are other moments and characters in The Women Were Leaving the Men that amaze with their powers of invention — obsessive-compulsive cowboys, a foot fetishist, a former astronaut who comes back home to take care of his mom — but the final story, "Admit," is another small gem in which Mozina seems to have found an exquisite balance between the way of telling and the story told. David in "Admit" is a troubled first-year law student at Harvard who really wants to be a stand-up comic.
The trouble is that his jokes really aren't very funny. He has a girlfriend who is about ready to dump him because he's too self absorbed, in addition to being a lousy lover. After dropping out of law school, he tries one last gig:
. . . I talked about how I was a law school dropout, pretty much an unmitigated failure at life. The laughs dwindled as I went on beating myself up, turning comedy into something else. At one point I ad-libbed, "I've got shit for brains, have you noticed that?" and the audience just dead-eyed me.
Then a waitress dumped half a hutch of glassware on the floor.
I said, "Ah, what a relief." But nobody got it. Heads turned to view the mess.
A heckler yelled, "Hey, at least you're not the only one getting fired tonight."
This is, of course, terribly sad. But it is also funny, and the reader feels slightly complicit in David's pathologies by enjoying the abyss of his self-deprecation. By the end of the story, Mozina turns all the platitudes on their heads.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
December 23, 2011
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.
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.
September 20, 2024
Great writing telling the stories of interesting people who don't often have their stories told. Realistic but pushing realism a bit. Covers a wide emotional range well.
January 5, 2009
"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."
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."
May 19, 2009
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.
November 2, 2008
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.
April 28, 2009
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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May 13, 2008ahoy...its all about guys ...why girls choose to leave men...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews