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Book details
  • Genre:BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
  • SubGenre:General
  • Language:English
  • Series title:Bowerbird Memoirs
  • Series Number:3
  • Pages:390
  • eBook ISBN:9781937543341

Something Wrong With Her

A Real-time Memoir

by Cris Mazza

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Overview
Something Wrong With Her is a 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.
Description
CRITICAL PRAISE “Something Wrong with Her is frank. Bold. Mazza faces head-on that which would give most writers pause.” —The Rumpus “Stunningly honest and formally audacious… Mazza’s decision to let speak a “character” that other memoirists would have had remain silent indicates what a vital expansion Something Wrong with Her is for the field of memoir.” –The Brooklyn Rail “In an attempt to locate the origins of her anorgasmia, Mazza exhumes memories of her earliest sexual encounters, first with a boy who played “rape games” with her in private, then with a boy who, unaware of this history, pushed things too far too soon. She subjects these and other pivotal moments in her sexual history to repeated analysis: Do these experiences, she asks, constitute the source of her ongoing problems with sex — or does such a narrative accord them too much power? Is her anorgasmia a physiological problem, unrelated to past trauma? Are these experiences classifiable as traumatic, when they are so utterly —wretchedly — normal?” —The New Inquiry “Mazza’s story is anything but frigid. It contains a hot, complex, rich texture in ample, musical supply. Aggressive and responsive…” —The Believer Something Wrong With Her is a groundbreaking “real-time” memoir by author Cris Mazza that begins with Mazza’s anorgasmia – the inability to have an orgasm. Research suggests that at least 75% of women cannot reach orgasms through vaginal intercourse, and upwards of 15% are completely anorgasmic. The surplus of contemporary sexual memoirs would have us believe otherwise. But Something Wrong With Her is not a book about overcoming anorgasmia. Rather, it is a poignant memoir about a girl who didn’t feel the sexual awakenings she knew she was supposed to feel, and about the boy who loved her nonetheless. Thirty years later Cris Mazza went back to find that boy, now a man, only to discover that he’d never stopped yearning for her. Worse, in an attempt to numb his feelings for her, he’d sealed himself into an abusive marriage.
About the author
Cris Mazza is the author of over 17 books, including Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, Waterbaby, Trickle-Down Timeline, and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? Her first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. Mazza has co-edited three anthologies, includingMen Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience. In addition to fiction, Mazza has authored collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Currently living 50 miles west of Chicago, she is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.