A Baker's Dozen of Compelling Personal Narratives
PLUS: Events from Susan Shapiro; a workshop from Literary Liberation; a solicitation for advice column letters...all in the announcements.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring four verticals:Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I reprinted “Without Repentance, No Forgiveness” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also week writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #23,” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #24: Liz Alterman”.
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye. Recently I published “Washington Square” by
.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
The Pneuma Illusion
by
“Seventeen years ago, there was too much going on. If I lay out what was going on, it will sound absurd to call it ‘too much’. It seemed absurd to me even at the time. The turntable: at age fifty-two I was happily married, I had a tenure-track teaching position, I had just published the most critically acclaimed book of my career to that point, and I was healthy and strong, really at a peak of mental and physical strength. I also felt like I was beginning to feel connected to two communities, one literary and the other more local and neighborly; this was a first for me. I had never before experienced such stability and connectedness in my entire life. The vortex: I was boiling with a kind of visceral confidence that was completely new to me and which at times felt mildly unhinged.”
On the Pioneer Woman
by
“Growing up, my mother made dinner. She stayed at home with me and my five siblings, and cooking for us was the work of her life. Our hunger came in an endless cycle, and so she spent much of her time in the kitchen. Did I, when she shoved plate after plate of sandwiches and snacks across the counter at us, think this would be my life, too? I don’t think so—I didn’t know I would end up a man, but I did know I didn’t want the life she’d had. But here I am.”
Better Late Than Never
by
“Mindful that my parents, both Holocaust Survivors, would view my romance with an Irish Catholic man as betrayal, during our first weeks together I repeatedly cautioned Paul to protect his heart. Yes, sex was a Holy Experience, and even activities like dodging Gelatin-filled ‘bullets’ during a Paintball competition or accidentally sinking new white sneakers into muddy terrain became fun when we mucked through as a team. But we were for now, not forever.”
Demeter on the Jersey Shore
by Liza Katz Duncan
“We consume the plastic seascape even as it consumes us. Plankton absorb microplastics; oysters and other shellfish ingest them. This disrupts their normal behavior patterns, leaving them unable to find food, or unable to reproduce, or with offspring that have a higher mortality rate. Humans, of course, eat these creatures. We swim in the water; we breathe the air. On average, humans ingest about a credit card’s worth of plastic each week. Microplastics have been found in fetuses, as well as babies who drink milk from plastic bottles. We are constantly, both literally and figuratively, immersed in a sea of plastic.”
Essays from around the web…
Living with My Husband’s Dead Wife
Amy Paturel
“I had transformed Brandon’s first wife into an archetype, the perfect bride, and somehow made it my job to keep her spirit alive. Maybe the haunting words and fleeting run-ins with a ghost were too compelling to ignore. Or maybe I was seeking the approval from a dead woman that I couldn’t get from Brandon’s parents.”
Those Magic Half-Hours at Lozano Car Wash, Where My dad Was All Mine
by Natalie Jabbar
“In the partially enclosed waiting area, parents stand on both sides of me, hoisting their kids onto their shoulders to watch the cars glide through the tracks of swishing cloth towers. I remember the way my father would teach me about different cars as they emerged through that dark tunnel. The makes, the models, the mufflers that could furnish even the junkiest car with an impressive sound — how every detail felt like a secret he was revealing just to me, his only child.”
A Memoir Is not the Truth
by
“I got things wrong in my own writing about my own life. Some factual and some perceptual. There is also the reality of omission. Ask any woman who’s written a divorce book (and I have connected with many of them) and whatever you think you know there is, of course, so much more that you will never know. First of all, no one likes being sued. And consciously or not, everyone is shaping their narrative, revealing as little or as much as they want you to see and how they want you to see it…It’s surprising, then, that as a reader I forget absolutely all of this. I gobble it all up, take every word as gospel. I assume I’m reading the expansive truth.”
After My Nervous Breakdown During a Police Stop, I Learned a Cottage Industry Exposes Bodycam Footage to Online Titillation
by Mike McClelland
“But what is it about my messiness that makes it OK for my bodycam video to be put up on a stranger’s website for entertainment? I’m not alone in this experience. These bodycam sites and channels are everywhere, and the pool of content they pull from is basically limitless, nearly free and constantly refreshed. Most of the videos that are shared are of scantily clad young women or of Black people. The Freedom of Information Act allows for the information to be released, and recent Open Records policy changes and infrastructure improvements in states like Georgia have made acquiring bodycam videos easier than shopping on Amazon.”
Naloxone, Syringes, and Pipes
by Melody Glenn
“As I drove South, the two-lane highway seemed to stretch all the way to the end of the Earth. There were no other cars on the road, and the gnarled mesquite trees were the tallest feature in the surrounding scrub brush. To my left, I passed a Chevron selling lotto tickets, to my right, the corpse of a coyote discarded along the shoulder. The snow-capped, purple Huachuca mountains marked the distant horizon, and military jets looped in formation overhead. Even by Arizona standards, Cochise County was desolate, so much so that NASA had selected its dry lake bed as a landing site for their space capsule. And although I assumed I had never before heard of this obscure stretch of high desert, I would later learn that it was the setting upon which much of my grade school textbooks unfolded: Geronimo and the Apache, conquistadores, and the Seven Cities of Gold.”
Mountain Milk
by Shubha Venugopal
“‘Let’s go,’ he says. ‘Now, while the weather’s holding.’…There’s no point in saying no. Once he’s decided to climb, nothing will deter him. Not my pleas to hike somewhere easier, or my reminders that there’s no extra milk at home for our infant daughter. Not our promises to my mother that we wouldn’t be gone long. As we face the Colorado mountains, he methodically sets out carabiners, ice axes, and crampons, assuring me we’ll get back in time. As he coils rope into his backpack, I stuff a breast pump into mine.”
Dirty Girl
by Samira Gupta
“When I turned forty, something changed. It did not happen overnight, like curd. No, this was a slow brew, fermenting in a grand old oak casket for twenty years. At forty, it had reached its maturity and was ready to be opened and tasted. I had completed a year of therapy and worked through my years of sexual repression and feelings of shame. I felt bolder and ready to ask for pleasure…But how could I ask for something if I did not know what I wanted or how I wanted it? A friend suggested a vibrator. It was all the rage. It came in discreet packaging, an ordinary brown box with my name on it. My heart thumped and hand trembled as I took what I now consider the first steps to sexual freedom.”
Tricycle Dreams
by Ellen Notbohm
“She heard the words, not the inflection. Didn’t hear the sarcasm, the exhaustion, the utter impossibility of her request. Didn’t think of the eight mouths her father had to feed during a decade of depression that had encompassed her whole life, a decade fraught with unemployment, farm foreclosures and labor strikes put down by federal troops. Didn’t consider that two of her sisters also had birthdays, one day before and one day after hers. When the tricycle disappeared from the store window, what would a hopeful child assume but that her father had granted her wish? That she would throw open the door on December 11, and there on the sidewalk it would be?”
After a Loved One Is Gone, what Truly endures in Our Hearts?
by Wendy Reichental
“Funerals serve as poignant reminders of our mortality and encourage us to contemplate life’s priorities, engage fully in the present moment and know that our time is finite. They solemnly unite us in our shared humanity, fostering community. Regrettably, the polite, concerned, considerate and sensitive behaviours displayed during these times of loss and reflection are not more commonly seen in everyday interactions.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Memoir/Publishing Guru Has Two Upcoming Events:
The first is an online “Secrets of Publishing” Zoom panel tomorrow, Tuesday, 7/23 from 7-8 pm EST.
The second is an in-person “NYC Shrinks Are Away” reading (where she’ll be reading from The Forgiveness Tour) next Tuesday, July 30, at P&T Knitwear on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
📢 Do you have a personal problem you could use help with? Ask ’s “The East Village Yenta” (me) about it.
Send your questions about interactions with romantic partners, friends, coworkers, neighbors, or family members to eastvillageyenta@gmail.com (If I choose your letter, I’ll work with you on editing, and to blur identifying details. And we won’t use your real name.)
📢 New Workshop from Literary Liberation!
-
July 27 | 11 AM - 1 PM ET
Throughout history, Black women have resisted oppression. From colonization to the #metoo movement, Black women have done the labor of building community, seeking justice, and creating safe spaces for others. LETTERS FOR REVOLUTION is a historical fiction writing course, where true historical stories of women who resisted oppression are combined with epistolary writing techniques. This story combines the best of history and fiction and gives you the tools to ground yourself in storytelling.
📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:
By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:
The title of the essay and a link to it.
The name of the author, and the author’s Twitter handle.Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.