Böcker av Cris Mazza

"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 the author searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance among a growing list of losses. The decade contains many of life's expected losses: of pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places; plus the loss of identities: child, student, partner, "successful" author. Some of late life's experiences aren't so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get you to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in 30-year-old #MeToo incidents; "hooking up" with a "boy" from your teenaged past; struggling to accept that lifelong sexual dysfunction will never wane; realizing a deeply trusted mentor from 45 years ago might be declining into dementia when he claims 6-year-old girls are being forced to run races to put condoms on erect penises; plus a lifelong attachment to a childhood wound of having a "preferred child" as a sibling. And there's the apparent loss of hope: for ever finding contentment in the mark one makes in the world or for ever forming an identity that brings contentment. Except that these latter two have no expiration date, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking"--

Would her life have been better if she'd had sex with her supervisor when she was 23? Hester Smith is a woman who always played life near the sidelines-until she decides to rescue a teenage Mexican prostitute. She's up against the border sex trade in SouthernCalifornia that works like a drug cartel, where the smuggled contraband is teenage girls forced to work as prostitutes in undeveloped canyons just outside suburbia. Law enforcement agencies know it happens, as do investigative journalists, yet the illegal sex trade continues to exist. Most people, comfortable in their homes only miles away, express some brand of shock in the moment they hear about it-and then they go on with their lives, assured there's nothing they can do. While she prepares for the rescue, Hester discovers that the man with whom she almost had an affair-her mentor when she was a 23 year-old student teacher-had been simultaneously having a sexual relationship with a 16 year-old student. Hester mines her own memories of the would-be affair and ultimately tracks down the former 16 year-old. When these two women with a shared scandal in their pasts confront one another, the meeting coincides with the last step necessary to rescue the teenage prostitute Hester has tried to protect. It is only this mayhem that allows Hester to finally take ownership of her decisions and regrets.

A dazzling array of starshot across the sky from the brilliant Cris Mazza, who reminds us again and again that we must not only hold the line when it comes to our individual and community worth, but endlessly imagine a future. Cris Mazza makes feminism act like a verb, an ever-adapting organism, a space of change.