A Baker's Dozen of Great Personal Narratives
Plus: A new Narratively Academy course on researching your subject.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, 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 published “The Modern Prometheus” by Neda Toloui-Semnani.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #14,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #11: Lucas Mann,” the eleventh installment in that interview series.
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 “You Are Where You Eat,” by Vivian Manning-Schaffel.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
My Mother Will Live Forever in the Stories of Alice Munro
by Jonny Diamond
“In what amounted to something more like petulance than twentysomething rebellion, I rejected Alice Munro along with the Margarets, Atwood and Laurence, and Carol Shields, a remarkable quartet of writers born within a decade of one another, all of them beloved of my mother (b. 1934). But it was Munro (b. 1931) who usually rose to the top of her bedside book pile, to whom she returned again and again…Twenty-five years on, and over a decade since my mother died, it’s not hard to see why Munro was her favorite: born a few years apart they both married young, aged 21, and immediately set to the primary task of the 1950s housewife, the growth and care of a family (four children for Munro, five for my mother).”
Our Last Best Act
by Mallory McDuff
“More than ten years after my parents’ deaths, I opened the file cabinet in my bedroom on the small college campus where I teach environmental education in North Carolina: I took out the folder containing my will, cremation directive, and advance care directive. It was like trying on a pair of jeans from high school. My sister was listed as the health care power of attorney, although she’d moved from nearby Atlanta to Seattle. I’d completely forgotten my instructions for a party after my funeral with beer and barbeque from Okie Dokie’s Smokehouse, where I used to take my kids for mac and cheese and ribs.”
Loving Sports at Any Age
by Anne O'Hagen
“As each runner hits home plate, my father cheers and strains to rise. It’s not enough for him to be at the game; he needs to engage. Young men seated beside him break focus, take note, and reflexively, courteously offer him an arm up. Our exit strategy preoccupies me. I’m on my phone looking at Uber pickup locations. He flags down the beer guy.”
Palcoholics
by Jake Maynard
“I was drinking too much and alone when I started rewatching all these bromance films. At first it felt like nostalgia without the sharp pang. There’s a solace in the message: male friendship isn’t meant to last. It has to flame out, like young love, but can be rekindled for a weekend with the right conditions. The trio in The Hangover could just as easily be replaced with Seth, Evan, and Fogell, or with Brian, Cody, and me—men who will never again be as close as they were as kids. So maybe we drink to go back. We drink to go back to the feeling that closeness is possible, even if the same bravado that we try to rekindle is the thing that keeps us apart.”
You Are the Product
by Rosanna McLaughlin
“Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee. Tortured animals. Random women beating the shit out of each other in parking lots around the world. All manner of unsolicited tits, dicks, silicone contraptions and horny local grandmothers looking for no-strings-attached sex. But the most disturbing thing I have ever been shown is a pair of shoes.”
Guests of Honor
by Sumana Roy
“As we enter Namdapha National Park and Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh, where sunlight first touches the Indian subcontinent, we begin to see them: butterflies,mostly solitary, sometimes in a tiny group, indifferent to us but also quick to levitate. The brochures have prepared us for this—this forest has more than two hundred species of butterflies—and they arrive like good employees: saffron, koh-i-noor, yellow vein lancer, zigzag flat. . . . A purple one with black-and-white stripes sits on Paramita’s hand, turning it into a flower. If the forest had been a Bengali household, we might have screamed in delight, “You’re getting married!” It’s one of those folk inheritances, accepted and passed on without testing: like the frog whose insistent croaking invokes the rain, so does a butterfly perched on a human signal an impending wedding.”
Essays from around the web…
I Call My Name Out Into the Dark
by Loz McQ
“When you're on stage, you feel like you matter and that what you're doing means something. You also bypass all of the parts of yourself that are uncomfortable, awkward, and vulnerable. The audience loves you for it! You become untouchable. They love you enough to make up for the fact that other people don't understand you, and one day, I hoped the audience loving me enough could be my salvation…I suppose that's where the trouble began. I was a girl who was desperate to be loved but couldn't imagine being loved in a way where they could see the parts of being human you can't rehearse.”
Stop
by Jiadai Lin
“After I kissed you back; after we stumbled past the security guard and out the doors streaked with freshman handprints releasing us into the warm night air; after you pointed to the street but I steered us inward, where baby pink blooms lightly garnished the cobbled walkways, where the library’s rotunda glowed like a wayward compass; you led me into Lewisohn Hall, through the empty lobby where I could hear someone far away vacuuming, up the staircase toward the chandelier, to this exact spot where I’m sitting topless on your lap.”
What Time Is It?
by Jeff Wood
“Most of the time it was difficult to notice anything was even amiss, but hints something was wrong had already been gathering. Normally a tidy and organized person, my wife began to leave her purse and possessions spread across the kitchen counters when she came home. She watched more TV. She took more naps. Her job required her to travel; she started getting lost. She asked me to proofread a document for her at work, and I found multiple repeated paragraphs, something she’d never do.”
My Brother’s Keeper
by Michael Connistraci
“The slide into relapse and mania had come two years before. It erupted quickly. Steve had been sober and in recovery for nine years, and during those nine years, we had bonded more closely than we ever had before. I spent almost every weekend with him, helping him around his house, going to flea markets or having family dinners with his wife and daughter. Then he had a heart attack, and shortly after that, his wife told him she was leaving him for another man. He stopped going to meetings, stopped taking his bipolar medication, and began doing speedballs, a cocaine and heroin cocktail. The mania took over, and he never came down, his mind running one hundred miles an hour every day.”
Swan Singing
by Sarah Teresa Cook
“My mother kept neat stacks of self-help books in her bedroom, and despite her valid need for help I used to snatch them up, crawl behind the living room couch where a thin space between it and the wall was just wide enough for my body, and hide them. I didn’t like the idea of her becoming something else. My mother is unwell; how could a better woman, so the logic went, still be my mother?”
Pitch not Perfect: My Quixotic Journey in the World of Music
by Wendy Mages
“I’m as prepared as I can be, but I’m trembling. I love to sing and I have a loud strong voice, but I’m not what you’d call “a natural musician.” If I were “musically inclined,” this would be easy. I’m not…At my junior high graduation, we sang “Morning Has Broken.” I was asked to “sit in the back and mouth the words.” I did as I was told. But I really wanted to sing.”
When You Ghost Your Midwife
by Helena Guerin
“And if masturbation doesn’t work, you might at least have a laugh about it. Because in this scenario, laughter is conceivable. Because in this scenario, it is possible to remember that your genitals can be a source of pleasure.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 This Wednesday: Reporter, Sleuth, Storyteller, Spy: The 90-Minute Guide to Investigating Like a Pro
Amelia Possanza became an amateur archivist in the course of writing her acclaimed book Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives, named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR, Harper’s Bazaar and Publishers Weekly. In Narratively Academy's Reporter, Sleuth, Storyteller, Spy: The 90-Minute Guide to Investigating Like a Pro she'll walk writers through how to navigate the ins and outs of any research-intensive writing project.
📢 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.
You can also support Memoir Monday—and indie bookstores!—by browsing this Bookshop.org list of every book that’s been featured at the Memoir Monday reading series. It’s a great place to find some new titles to add to your TBR list!
Jake Maynard’s Palcoholics is so good.
Thanks, Sari, for including my tender piece! Really grateful <3