Something Wrong With Her a realtime memoir Cris Mazza 9781937543334 Books
Download As PDF : Something Wrong With Her a realtime memoir Cris Mazza 9781937543334 Books
Book #5 in our Blue Bustard Memoir Series
"Something Wrong with Her is frank. Bold. Mazza faces head-on that which would give most writers pause." —The Rumpus
SOMETHING WRONG WITH HER is an astonishing real-time testimony of a couple’s reconnection while — and within — the writing of this memoir, and their candid wrestling with 30-year-old memories, questions and regrets.
PRAISE FOR SOMETHING WRONG WITH HER
“On math exams we were always told to show our work, privileging process over result. An increasingly and pleasingly unhinged experiment in autoforensics and self-consciousness, Something Wrong With Her is stuffed with both show and work. In sorting out the question implicit in the title, Cris Mazza assembles a long paper trail of primary documents yearbook inscriptions, journal entries, published fiction, emails, personal letters on band stationery, and more, more, more. It’s part sexual history and part detective story. She writes ‘I thought I had control of the material when I wrote the story…. I’m going back again now to regain control.’ Control’s great, but I’ll take the mess any day here’s to ‘going back again.’ Here’s to showing your work.”
—Ander Monson, editor of DIAGRAM and New Michigan Press, and author of Vanishing Point
“Something Wrong With Her is certainly the most unusual true love story you will ever read, layering recollected scenes and psychological analysis with journals, emails, letters, yearbook inscriptions, excerpts from the author’s past literary works, jazz metaphors, footnotes and more. Cris Mazza’s indefatigable self-scrutiny creates an experience that verges on the psychedelic. Reading this book is less like reading a typical memoir than like spending time in someone’s else’s head, or someone else’s life. The generous decision of literary love-object Mark to allow his writings to be included here adds a fourth — or is it a fifth? — dimension to this unprecedented document.”
—Marion Winik, author of Highs in the Low Fifties, First Comes Love, and Rules for the Unruly Living an Unconventional Life
“Something Wrong With Her turns away from the bogus story of what’s sexually ‘hot’ to finally tell the story of what’s real and human the other bodies who don’t fit into this culture of idiotic faux sexual excess. By articulating the chronicle of her own body, Cris Mazza successfully seduces us into questioning the libidinal fictions we’ve been telling ourselves about our own bodies. Beyond brave writing.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Chronology of Water and Dora A Headcase
Something Wrong With Her a realtime memoir Cris Mazza 9781937543334 Books
Fascinating letters written over the years between the writer and Mark. People may not realize until reading the book how interesting the structure is. There are also excerpts from some of Mazza's works of fiction in which she was dealing with some of the issues she admits were autobiographical in this memoir. There are musical words and theories that Mazza applies to her writing and to this book. Read!Product details
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Tags : Something Wrong With Her: a real-time memoir [Cris Mazza] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <b><font color=red>Book #5 in our Blue Bustard Memoir Series</font></b> <b> Something Wrong with Her</i> is frank. Bold. Mazza faces head-on that which would give most writers pause. </b> — The Rumpus</i> SOMETHING WRONG WITH HER is an astonishing real-time testimony of a couple’s reconnection while — and within — the writing of this memoir,Cris Mazza,Something Wrong With Her: a real-time memoir,Jaded Ibis Press,1937543331,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Literary
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Something Wrong With Her a realtime memoir Cris Mazza 9781937543334 Books Reviews
In this brilliantly constructed and beautifully written work, Cris Mazza pushes past everything anyone has done in memoir and even surpasses the originality, beauty and depth of her own previous books. Brave, unflinching, heartbreaking and joyous, Something Wrong With Her is one of the most compelling books I've ever read.
Though I haven't yet finished reading Cris Mazza's latest, I want to put out there how her work doesn't disappoint. I have most closely experienced *Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls* because I interviewed the author about the work. As a reader, I felt an anxiety/tension, as I would reading a thriller or murder mystery, at several times throughout the book. It's exciting when a writer can make a reader feel that--about a story that is not a thriller but about the everyday. Indeed, reading Mazza's work is almost a tactile experience the pages of that book "felt sweaty," I'd say, a description I borrow from one of the characters and which the author explained to me in this way "When I first moved from California to the Midwest (it was in August), I remember how any paper felt wet to me, just because of the humidity. So I imagined someone’s emotions creating a feeling of “humidity,” which might make flipping through the pages of an old notebook feel damp." Mazza truly opens a vein and writes what comes out--and readers are the better for it. This isn't escapist literature--Mazza's is connecting literature, helping us consider ourselves and others with new insight and empathy.
"The writing of this book is the story."
Reading Cris Mazza's new memoir is a truly jolting experience. There is so much going on all at once that the emotion there is nearly overwhelming. She makes it obvious to you what she's thinking in present time, but Something Wrong With Her is also like stepping into the past with the help of journal entries, letters, doodles, textbook quotes, jazz terms, excerpts from Mazza's past publications, and the memories and emails of her dear friend Mark. The book doesn't really have an ending point because it's alive; what she wrote about is still happening. Let me back up....
Read the rest (and a brief INTERVIEW with the author) at Grab the Lapels!
[...]
A vulnerable, honest and brave narrative from a surgically elegant writer. Cris Mazza opens herself to her readers in a way that few authors dare.
Cris Mazza's, Something Wrong With Her, is richer the second time through. The first time, I spent my intellectual energy figuring out how to read; I took in a lot of information, but missed the wisdom. The second time, I was determined to give myself over to it in the way the author had, letting the pieces form a whole. I did not look back and re-read or re-arrange; I read in sequence everything as written, printed, and copied. I left nothing out, nor - I hope - did I read anything in. I can only guess that mine is only the third review here because other readers, in response to this remarkable work, were rendered breathless, wordless.
The memoir reads in linear fashion - it needs to do so in order for the reader to follow - but the shape and progression of the narrative derives from Mazza's exposed, closer-than-most inquiry into what she begins with as a specific issue. Her story is complicated, though perhaps not as atypical at it first seems. The text is visually compelling, cobbled from photocopied journals, letters, drawings, and pink slips, and told via remembered conversations, investigations, analyses from-and-of 30 years-worth - up to the present, where the book ends - of self-examination on the subject of love. The emotional work Mazza has undertaken during the most recent of those 30 years and exposed in these pages, would be expected to result in revealing her path ahead. Instead they steam-roll Mazza even deeper under the introspective glass. She divulges human flaws which she sees in herself as extreme and the cause of failed relationships, and ultimately lays these failures at the feet of what she diagnoses for herself anorgasmia. This is where Mazza initially locates the foundation of her problems with love.
The female orgasm isn't talked about like it used to be, at least in the circles I frequent. Maybe it should be. Statistically, more than one in ten adult women has never had an orgasm. The demons underlying this are many psychological, physical, intellectual, familial, religious, social and other. They are addressed directly or obliquely by Mazza, and recognized by her as significant but not determinants in her own troubled sexuality. There is more to it. She can't pinpoint blame, but clearly wants an explanation. No sex seminars for her, no couples therapy, no self-help books, no mirrors between her legs to look at her own vagina - which she confesses must be inadequate and dirty and why would any man want to go there? Mazza is searching for an answer, a way to be good enough, but she questions what she seeks, reflecting - often to obsession - on what could be Wrong With Her because, clearly, she doesn't feel good enough. Even without the profoundly complicating issue of sex, `good enough' is a notion we all understand. What makes us and what we do, good enough?
The book was written as she searched her past, urging the suffering of a loner teen into the present, some of the trauma still alive and active in the people she writes about. She presents like an archaeologist, taking a whack at the unbroken ground of her psyche, then picking up the soft brush to reveal greater and great detail the minutia of logic and its exceptions, the shoulds, the what ifs, the maybe somedays. And, of course, the reflexive process of the writing itself, questioning every thought as her thoughts shift.
Mazza has taken a risk in writing this book. Its pathos is real and her willingness to expose herself to public scrutiny is astonishing. Yet, I suspect Mazza is not a gambler. The risks she takes in her writing, are not housed in her body, but in her mind over which she maintains control. That she both wants to control her body and release control of her body is the conundrum.
For safety, for protection against physical and emotional pain, she holds on to her familiar habits and processes for they produce what, for her, at this point, has to be good enough. She won't easily trust. She's not a diver. She's a wader, noting every reed, every swell in the water before venturing a toe. Counting trees. She gets close to resolution of the forest this way, and it may be the only way she can. In the physical world, however - the one whose air we breathe, not the one we create on the page however true - in the world of other people and countless uncontrollable variables, resolution must always be ephemeral. Do you know Zeno's Paradox? Wherein you traverse half the distance between you and your objective, then another half, and another, and another... The lesson you can't get there from here.
So Mazza ends the narrative with another paradox. Someone she ran from 30 years ago, now runs from her. She gets as close as she can.
Fascinating letters written over the years between the writer and Mark. People may not realize until reading the book how interesting the structure is. There are also excerpts from some of Mazza's works of fiction in which she was dealing with some of the issues she admits were autobiographical in this memoir. There are musical words and theories that Mazza applies to her writing and to this book. Read!
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