A Dozen Solid Personal Essays Right Here...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications.
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Essays from partner publications…
To All The Brownstones I’ve Loved Before
by Beth Boyle Machlan
"Thirty years ago, I fell in love with a boy and a brownstone. Seth lived in a parlor apartment off Seventh Avenue, back when recent college grads could afford proximity to Prospect Park. His bed backed up against the pocket doors that led into the living room; when we had sex, they didn’t bang so much as bend, gently shifting in their Victorian tracks like Victorian trains. It was 1992, my first Christmas out of college, and I had never dated anyone with their own apartment before. His took up a full floor, with a big bay window that glowed silver in the streetlight when it snowed. There was a whole city on the other side of the river, but we stayed within walking distance of his bedroom, visiting bars and restaurants and parks until, after three or four weekends together, his neighborhood started to feel like mine, his apartment like ours."
Meghan O’Rourke on the Self-Dissolving Difficulty of Chronic Illness
by Meghan O’Rourke
"Attempting to reduce pain that was context dependent to a number just made it clear that there was no way to make this invisible symptom legible to others. And the poet in me found all the metaphors for pain to be limited. “Burning,” “tingling,” “stabbing”—these words did little to describe pain’s reality, which ebbed and flowed according to its own logic. Pain was an empire of its own, well defended against language’s forays against it."
The Unobliged Woman
by Naz Riahi
“It's so much easier for me to admire a tree, a bird or a vista, than to admire a human with our capacity to hurt. But, if I were to admire someone, it would be a woman who lives, truly and wholly for herself and the work of her mind…Does this woman exist? Does she exist unjudged? Venerated, even? I've searched for her, my whole life. I've aspired to be her, to live entirely for myself and the work of my mind—writing and making films. Not to be a woman isolated, but one who lives and thrives amidst the world, its social pleasures and pains.”
Beirut Fragments, 2021
by Charif Majdalani
“Today I tasted peppermint chocolate, I tasted a fresh ripe peach. I smelled the jasmine in the garden and the gardenia on the terrace. And also the violent industrial diesel from the tanker that was pumping water to the roof of the building next door, and the ghastly sour stench of refuse that sometimes floats over the city, depending on the direction of the wind…I can’t help thinking that this stench is the smell of the corpse we are living with, the corpse of the state, of this dead country, or at least of the one we used to know.”
Boys Will Be Boys
By Lena Crown
“Over time, I let my grip on docility and likability loosen. My bite sharpened; my tongue quickened. I let myself believe that we felt the same defiance, the same degree of angry and powerless and omnipotent and free.”
Burning
by Dionne Irving
“She had been dating the cop about a month when they had that weird postmodern conversation about Googling each other. She admitted she hadn’t…‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘Because I wanted to tell you myself.’”
Essays from around the web…
What Spending Five Months on Bed Rest in an Old Farmhouse Taught Me
By Aileen Weintraub
“We had recently moved into a rickety old farmhouse in desperate need of repairs, had just dumped every cent we owned into purchasing a tractor shop and I was suddenly in jeopardy of losing my baby. With the doctor’s pronouncement, I lost my autonomy, my career and my financial stability. My mind swirled with worrying thoughts. How would I keep my child alive? How would we keep the farm going? And most important, would our marriage survive the strain?”
Stuck
by Amy Reardon
"‘Making new shapes with my mouth could not cure me, because stuttering does not live in my mouth. It lives in the long, ragged seam between my body and my soul.’ Documented since antiquity and never fully understood, many continue to look for a cure to stuttering—but what has been lost in that endless search?"
A Part of Me
by S.J. Buckley
"I knew the fire couldn’t undo what he had done, that he would remain unchanged. But I felt the power of that imperfect ritual, momentary but thrilling, red-hot energy throbbing in our skin."”
Teaching in Context
by Amy Estes
“Every year, I am trained on how to handle a school shooter. One of the most important instructions is to remain calm while you draw the blinds and lock the doors. If I have to turn off the light and ask my students to get under their desks, I am supposed to give as little information as possible…If our nation has decided that our collective obsession with guns is worth endangering children and training them on what to do in that danger, then why is there an obsession with keeping the danger a secret?”
Gun Safety
by Anna Chotlos
“When I was eight, I liked the way holding a gun made me feel. The weight. The faint smell of grease. The glow of self-reliance. On my turns, I hit the can often enough to imagine myself a markswoman. I felt like Annie Oakley. Or Princess Leia, grabbing a laser blaster and declaring, ‘Somebody has to save our skins! Into the garbage chute, flyboy!’”
Authority Figures
by Elizabeth Cooper
“In 2015, a woman at work asked if I was pregnant. To my face. In front of other colleagues. In front of svelte colleagues standing next to me.
A year later, another woman at work got into the elevator with me as I balanced two huge trays of leftover lunch to distribute among the unpaid interns seated downstairs.
’I hate to ask, but are you pregnant?’ she asked…I felt all the blood simultaneously rush to my face and out of my brain. Mortified, I could only eek out, ‘No, I’m not.’”
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received.
Announcements:
🚨On International Women’s Day this Tuesday, 3/8 at 7pm EST, HelloRevel will host Oldster Magazine for a virtual reading of four essays HelloRevel sponsored for Women’s History Month, with a theme of “The Women Who Came Before Us”. Hear Abigail Thomas, Naz Riahi, Emily Rubin, and Blaise Allysen Kearsley read from their pieces.
🚨Memoir Monday founder Lilly Dancyger is launching a new series of virtual nonfiction writing courses! Subscribe to her newsletter to learn about her courses on Writing and Publishing Addiction Narratives, Memoir as Detective Novel, Women's Anger in Memoir, and an Essay Revision Intensive.
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!
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