A 4-year-old mayor and the archives of women's history
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and monthly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, Granta, and Guernica. It may be the start of a new work week, but at least we have this great new writing to get us through it.
All Hail Yo-Yo, 4-Year-Old Mayor of the Cancer Ward Clowns
by Victoria Millard
The next time I saw Cameron, she was wearing a bright pink dress, a big red nose, and a gold paper crown on her little bald head. She sat in her wheelchair throne and announced herself as Yo-Yo, Mayor of Clownville. Her older sisters were her clown cohorts, dubbed Sweet Pototo and Spin. On her bedside controls, she created imaginary buttons that, when pressed, commanded the clown doctors to tell a joke, play a song, or do a trick. She ruled with perfect comic timing and a broad range of exaggerated expressions. She was every inch what is known in the clown world as a “number one persona.” We would sometimes clown for her for 10 minutes, only to be faced with a penetrating frown and the command, “Now can you do something funny?”
All Mom’s Friends
by Svetlana Kitto
It was a Los Angeles childhood so a lot of our time was spent in the car — a beat-up gold Corolla with a Die Yuppie Scum bumper sticker on the back. My grandmother had given my mother the car to help her start her new life, separate from my father. If it was hot, the windows would be rolled down and the AC on. My mom would either be smoking or rolling a cigarette, which she could do with one hand. We would drive all over Hollywood running errands and visiting her friends, many of them sober, some of them still using, almost all of them gay men. All the first people I loved outside of my family were gay men.
Turning Purple: The Year of the Defector
by Leigh Hopkins
When my first marriage ended, he picked the East Village and I moved my little pile of things into a Philadelphia loft above a restaurant called Golden Chopsticks, a name that felt hopeful and shiny and new. When I looked around and realized that I was living alone in a city without anyone who really knew me, I bolted the door and didn’t come out.
My Body Is an Archive
by Patricia Fancher
Walking from the kitchen to the dining room, I noticed the changes: The wall was blank where it once held a black-and-white photo of me as a baby. The shelves were less cluttered, relieved of my childhood pinch pots and graduation photos. My awful painting of a bird that my mother had displayed on the shelf since I was thirteen was gone, replaced with a glass vase. In the hallway, my brother’s and sister’s faces still smiled at me, but there were gaps on the walls—tiny nail holes were the only traces left where my school photos had once hung.
Binyavanga
by Pwaangulongii Dauod
I collect a handful of the soil and smell it. ‘Binya,’ I say, ‘it smells of deadness. The place smells of dead leaves, leaves that have stopped being lush and have come to new ashen colors of grey, brown and earthy poetry.’
‘Quit being sentimental,’ he says. The man detests sentimentality and melodrama. He desires to simply arrive at naked meaning. Whatever is stripped bare.
Writers’ Resources
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With love, until next Monday,