The decade of letting things go : a postmenopause memoir / Cris Mazza.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mazza, Cris, author.

Series:

Crux (Athens, Ga.)

Crux : the Georgia series in literary nonfiction

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mazza, Cris.

Women authors, American--Biography.

Women authors, American.

Older women--United States--Biography.

Older women.

Physical Description:

248 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2024]

Summary:

"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 the author searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance among a growing list of losses. The decade contains many of life's expected losses: of pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places; plus the loss of identities: child, student, partner, "successful" author. Some of late life's experiences aren't so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get you to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in 30-year-old #MeToo incidents; "hooking up" with a "boy" from your teenaged past; struggling to accept that lifelong sexual dysfunction will never wane; realizing a deeply trusted mentor from 45 years ago might be declining into dementia when he claims 6-year-old girls are being forced to run races to put condoms on erect penises; plus a lifelong attachment to a childhood wound of having a "preferred child" as a sibling. And there's the apparent loss of hope: for ever finding contentment in the mark one makes in the world or for ever forming an identity that brings contentment. Except that these latter two have no expiration date, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Fear itself

Like a boyfriend

Brutality of the hunt (for serenity)

House (what things are called)

How substandard closet design inflamed my chronic dread

Feral

Camp (an unruly word)

Oneiric (another word I've never said)

Neighborhood (taking it to the grass)

Northwoods nap (classically conditioned)

A finished brain

Intercourse in absentia

Friend, partner, boyfriend

Condom races

Nothing to offer

I work, therefore I am : a(n incomplete) conversation about identity (with footnoted asides)

Dark money

The summer of letting things go

Day of reckoning.

ISBN:

9780820367545

0820367540

OCLC:

1430498579