Review by Mack Hassler
Mazza recently retired from thirty-one years of teaching in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois in Chicago and has moved to the Upper Peninsula, so we can now consider her as a Yooper writer. She is a native of Southern California and has written a variety of fiction and nonfiction. She began with an award-winning novel. What I find most fascinating about this most recent Memoir of hers is the language itself. As in most biographical and/or Memoir writing the language use, images, metaphors, and semantics agree with and are in the same universe as the key subject matter in the “life” written about. Loggers use language having to do with the knife, the sled, the axe. Mazza tells us early, “These are my initiations into a club no one would ask to join: female sexual dysfunction” p. 5 And she is a novelist who tells us that most of her fictional characters are either versions of the men who invite her into this club or versions of her own character as the prime member. So she is a teacher and a writer who has lived and worked most of her life far from the UP but who now joins us with a very trendy modern topic as well as a new and, for me at least, a strange semantics.
For men, the topic is expressed in a phrase that is semantically easier “erectile dysfunction.” From Mazza we learn new words like vaginanismius or “vaginamismia’ or the most strange “anorgasmia.” The issue, of course, is the inability to have a female orgasm; and she tells us pretty quickly that what the therapy for the condition is is masturbation. The woman should learn about that part of her body and about what the stimulations are to reach an orgasm Mazza says at one point the title for this book was Invisibility since what the therapists would tell her seemed nearly impossible to bring to actuality Instead it was an “illusion” that she could not see. Her experience with men had more to do with them pushing and shoving being “raw” with her—represented by numerous characters in her fictions. But her use of semantics in the book goes way beyond the introduction of these “coined” and more or less technical terms such as “anorgasmius” and is most interesting as she talks about our uses of common words like “girl” and “boy” and “girlfriend.” On those terms she writes in quite a lovely and amusing way. It is ecrutiating for her, and I think those analyses make the presentation of hers so good: She refers to Bob Dylan’s 1966 lyrics “Just Like a Woman” and then writes,
…here my desiring to be the girl in a song might have ended: 1986. When my now “boyfriend” moved one hundred miles away to marry someone else, because I was already married to someone else and he said it was killing him to stand around watching me be someone else’s wife (Wife. There’s a word that needs looking at) It took twenty-five years but now he’s standing around watching me be his—–” p. 10.
Finally, Mazza tells us that she wants understanding from the man she loves and wants to be able to talk over all problems with him and all these strange semantic relationships that she knows so much about—the book contains a lot of Freud and a lot of reference to experts on anorgasmia. But read The Decade of Letting Things Go. I do not want to tell you the ending. The reading of her analyses of the unusual semantics and of our uses now of “boyfriend” and of “girl” and of “woman.” She hates the word “lady.” All of that reading is more than enough to welcome this Southern California girl, who taught 31 years in Chicago as a fine new Yooper.
The Decade of Letting Things Go, A Postmenopause Memoir (The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction), by Cris Mazza (University of Geogia Press, Athens, Georgia 30602, 2024), 272 pages, pbk. $26.95.
