A Dozen Excellent Personal Essays...
Plus, a new one-on-one mentoring opportunity with Narratively co-founder Brendan Spiegel in the announcements at the bottom.
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 published “Amy I ‘Blue’?,” by
. A new essay by is coming Wednesday.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 #12,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #9: Lucy Sante,” the ninth 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…
Labyrinth
by Jan Edwards Hemming
“You are sixteen and it’s late summer and you’re with Girl #1, who is your friend but maybe more. Her mother hasn’t died yet and so she’s still happy, still yours for a little while. Your mom still lets you have sleepovers and go to the movies without suspecting anything is wrong. You, however, secretly know something is wrong because people in your town use words like “bull dyke” and “fucking faggot” to describe people who do the kinds of things you do with her: touch each other’s faces in the dark, trace lips and brows with fingers, sneak sniffs of perfume from her soft neck, feel the uncontrollable urge to lay your cheek against her smooth brown shoulder, or slip her bikini bottom below her tan line and touch your tongue to where the skin is white.”
Do Not Bring Your Phone to Meditation Class
by
“I might sound like I think I’m perfect. I don’t. I’m just a person whose cell phone is set to silent and who never talks on speakerphone outside of her own home. That’s all. If you think that makes me perfect, well, it’s very likely you’re an extremely insightful person.”
I Still Shave My Legs and I Don’t Know Why
by
“I can buy my daughter a better razor than I had at 13. I can provide her support for whatever choices she makes, from shaving/not shaving to buying fast fashion to choosing her pronouns. I can tell her about the men in cars…What I can’t figure out is how to give her a better world. ”
Crash Again, Crash Better: A Brief History of Failed Attempts at Human Flight
by Joe Fassler
“Was a book about self-powered flight science fiction or magical realism? Was it literally, physically possible to fly like that, or could such a thing happen only in the realm of fantasy? This wasn’t a topic like time-travel or mind-reading, after all. Flight—as birds and bugs, drones and planes show us every day—really is possible, even unexceptional. But are we capable of it, physically? Did anyone really know?”
Essays from around the web…
On Murder Memoirs: I spent years preparing to write about my cousin’s murder. The story I ended up with was not what I had imagined.
by
“Maybe, I thought, only someone who knew the victim could ever write a true-crime story that didn’t get sucked into the black hole of the killer, or fall back on the easy framework of the investigation. Maybe, when I was ready, these books would show me how to pull off the impossible: a murder story that doesn’t further abuse the victim by reducing them to the violence of their death.”
What Does Baby Reindeer Have to Say About Bartending? A Lot.
by
“In all my bartending jobs, my supervisors invariably told me some version of this: In the little world of the pub, I was in charge. I liked to think that was true, but I’m not so sure; a bartender’s authority is limited by the unpredictable variables that might arise during a shift. When I was on the working side of the bar, I was subject to a particular kind of confinement, both circumscribed and on display—like Donny inside that pint glass. And I knew that being a bartender meant that I could easily be found, should anyone wish to find me, in a place of work with virtually unrestricted access.”
They Are All Terrorists
by Lori Yeghiayan Friedman
“She said not a word about how it felt to be without a home, or a country, when they packed up for a two-week trip until things cooled down, only to have their land seized, house and business gone; “home” a place she would never know again. She never talked about her parents’ terror at losing everything, the future they’d worked so hard to build, after the same thing had happened to both of their parents in another land decades earlier. ”
Nest
by Angelique Tung
“The bird’s nest reminds me of my nesting habits when I was pregnant with my first child. At twenty weeks, I threw out old clothes, cleaned the junk drawers, and donated unused kitchen appliances. At twenty-eight weeks, I organized diapers, onesies, and receiving blankets into matching bins. At thirty weeks, I had a sudden urge to redecorate our third bedroom. One weekend, dressed in my favorite Gap overalls – the sides of which I had to leave unbuttoned to accommodate my expansive midsection – I pulled out the previous owner’s built-in shelving to make room for a queen-size bed. I painted over the dingy green walls a soothing cream color Benjamin Moore White Dove. I purchased a comforter, new pillows, and a duvet cover. Within a few weeks of my due date, I had created a tranquil guest room hoping Mom would visit for a few weeks to help me after the baby came. My son was born at 5:30 a.m. on May 9th. The guest room went unused.”
Lantana Began a Life-In Between
by March Abuyuan-Llanes
“At what point did a weird unsettled feeling shift to out-and-out terror? When did their innocent hike during a day off school become a failed sprint for survival? And then, what happened next? By 3:30 p.m. the girls weren’t answering their phones.”
A Life in Pieces
by Jacque Gorelick
“On a handful of summer visits, before they faded into none, I was again The Sister of a boy with eyes I recognized, but whose dark hair and thin face made him feel like a stranger. This tall, stoic boy had learned to live without anyone motherlike. During those weeks we pretended it was still the same, but each goodbye made it less and less true. In this life, there was a hole so deep and dark in me it could not be filled because of the promise I broke to live it.”
Geography of a Body in Heat
by Dian Parker
“The desert and Bowles’s short stories shimmer, caught in a vortex of pressurized silence, burying identity, form, emitting illusion. A mirage perhaps but acutely, cuttingly real. Forces bigger than your personality. Surrender or resist, if you have any will left.”
My father survived starvation as a child. He never forgot what it meant to be hungry.
by Jason Prokowiew
“My father knew hunger intimately. In one of my earliest memories of him, we sat on opposite ends of a big brown leather couch in our Sudbury home, and I watched him ingest a fish. He tore into the fermented herring, cold from the Sudbury Farms grocery deli counter, with bare hands. He stuck his face into the belly, ripping it apart. He chewed to its core, spitting bones to the side of a plate on the coffee table in front of him. He wasted nothing.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 May Memoir Mentorship: Perfecting the Personal Essay
co-founder has 15 slots for one-on-one editing workshops this month, with two rounds of feedback and a personal consultation on essays up to 2,500 words.📢 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!