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The Decade of Letting Things Go: A Postmenopause Memoir
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. But is there liberation in these losses?
Mazza’s story contains many of life’s expected pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places, plus the loss of identities—child, student, partner, “successful” author. Some of her late-life experiences aren’t so easily having a mentally ill neighbor try to get her to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in thirty-year-old #MeToo 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 contentment—except that the latter two have no expiration date, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.
Mazza’s story contains many of life’s expected pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places, plus the loss of identities—child, student, partner, “successful” author. Some of her late-life experiences aren’t so easily having a mentally ill neighbor try to get her to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in thirty-year-old #MeToo 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 contentment—except that the latter two have no expiration date, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.
300 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 15, 2024
1 person want to read
About the author
Cris Mazza
38 books28 followersCris Mazza is the author of a dozen books of fiction, mostly recently Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press 2007). Her other titles include the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and the PEN Nelson Algren Award winning How to Leave a Country. She also has a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Mazza has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary awards. A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County. Currently she lives 50 miles west of Chicago. She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago "
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