The Decade of Letting Things Go

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. Mazzas story contains many of lifes expected losses: pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places, as well as the loss of identitieschild, student, partner, successful author. Some of her late-life experiences arent 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 contentmentexcept that these have no expiration dates, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.