The Decade of Letting Things Go (A Postmenopause Memoir)

Mazza’s THE DECADE OF LETTING THINGS GO 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.