Cris Mazza

Something Wrong With Her

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.

Mazza is the author of Something Wrong With Her

From the author

โ€œRecently, someone on FB posted how difficult it was (for her) to write good, serious and meaningful sex scenes. Then, almost immediately, she followed-up and posted that she was good at doing it, she just didnโ€™t know why she wasnโ€™t good at writing it. ย Firstly, not a surprise: that someone who was good at โ€œitโ€ wasnโ€™t good at writing it, because a lot of people have difficulty writing โ€œitโ€ (even though I never seemed to have had that trouble). What struck me about this post was two other things: (a) being good at โ€œitโ€ is something she wanted to make sure everyone knew, and that no one assumed not being able to write it meant she didnโ€™t โ€œdo itโ€โ€ฆ and do it well! ย And (b) it was easy for her to confess being bad at writing it but good at sex. Could she have confessed to the converse, being bad at โ€œdoing itโ€ but successfully pretending to do it in writing? Culture has now decided thatโ€™s the more devastating admission. Are we still cowed by the popular/cool girls who were bragging about having sex in junior high? We thought, โ€œWhatโ€™s wrong with meโ€? ย Among the other things this book proposes to address, to accomplish, to solve, it does try to answer that โ€ฆ in some ways without altering the word โ€œwrongโ€โ€ฆbut perhaps shifting the spotlight.โ€

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