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.
Mazza's story contains many of life's expected losses: pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places, as well as the loss of identities-child, student, partner, "successful" author. Some of her late-life experiences aren't so easily categorized: 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 this abstract contentment-except that these have no expiration dates, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.
"The essays in Cris Mazza's new collection are wide-ranging, raw, and full of unexpected insights and deep truths. Mazza is an important voice and an accomplished writer, and The Decade of Letting Things Go is an essential book."
Margot Singer
"Cris Mazza is a masterful writer and stylist. This memoir is as much about reckoning with the past as it is about the present or future. I love the courage, the take-no-prisoners voice, and the inventive structure. This is a brave book."
Sue Silverman
"Mazza's collection of essays deals with the aftermath of menopause and the meanderings and reflected musings of a contemplative writer at this post-fecund stage in her life."
