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. But is there liberation in these losses?

Mazza's story contains many of life's expected losses: 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 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 contentment-except that the latter two have no expiration date, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking.