A Fresh Batch of Absorbing Personal Narratives
Plus: Electric Literature's fund drive, Narratively's 2024 Memoir Prize, and news about next week's crowd-sourced edition of Memoir Monday while I travel...
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, 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
“Please Wait,” by
, posthumously.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly 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 Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #58: Allegra Huston” “The Prompt-O-Matic #43,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #59: Nicole Louie”.
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 “Elegy in Times Square,” by
. A new Goodbye to All that essay is coming soon…
***NEXT WEEK I’LL BE TRAVELING, AND WE WILL HAVE A CROWD-SOURCED EDITION OF MEMOIR MONDAY. START THINKING ABOUT WHICH PERSONAL ESSAYS YOU WANT TO RECOMMEND…***
Essays from partner publications…
A Situation at Booth Memorial
by Kate Schnur
“I recognize them: a middle-aged woman and a man who has the same nose and looks a few years younger. They belong to the patient on the ventilator in the corner of the ICU room that is diagonally across from my mother. The woman, I presume the patient’s daughter, is at the hospital all day, every day. She usually wears the same yellow fleece hooded sweatshirt and unfitted jeans. Her hair is dyed light brown with untouched gray roots and is always tied into a frizzy ponytail with a dark green scrunchy.”
Black Christmas
by Derek McCormack
“I was playing the perverse elf I had been as a boy. I was perverting the holiday. I was Halloweening it. What I was doing was nothing new: making Christmas macabre is a Christmas tradition as old as Santa Claus.”
Backwoods Cinema
by Robin Marie MacArthur
“What we didn’t have? The prized accoutrements of the early 1980s: a TV, microwave, centralized heat, flush toilets. But when I was twelve, my parents strung a six-hundred-foot extension cord through the woods, bought a TV and VCR, and changed my life.”
Lessons in Poetry, and Life: What I Learned From My Teacher, Audre Lorde
by
“Little did I know that Lorde wasn’t simply teaching me about poetry; she was teaching me about life. By her bold example, she demonstrated how to live unapologetically. To say what I thought. To stand behind my words.”
Paper People
by Yun Sheng
“‘Otaku’ used to be a subculture in Japan. Coined by columnist Akio Nakamori in 1983, the term describes an individual – typically young and male – who is feverishly devoted to anime, manga and computers. Socially withdrawn and obsessive in their consumption, these gaming enthusiasts guard against the often-disappointing contours of reality by retreating to the realm of fiction. Now, with the combined market value of these pursuits estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, they’re firmly mainstream.”
Leaving Cormac: Life Lessons From My Correspondence with Lee McCarthy
by Kim Young
“When I first met Lee in the late 1990s at a magazine launch in Ojai, California, she stood at the podium, her blonde hair falling across her face like an ancient beauty. I could feel a charge of loss and desire coiled inside her, disguised by a cashmere wrap dress. I had just taken my seat after reading a poem that opened with an image of me climbing scaffolding with my boyfriend to sleep on top of a building.”
Essays from around the web…
The Tree of Togetherness
by Michael Nagle
“When I found out I was going to die, he called me every day. I didn’t pick up. I was too pissed off at the whole entire world to bother, and anyways, wasn’t he my past? It took me a week and a lifetime and an infinity to pick up the phone. The message was clear. ‘I’ll love you til you die.’”
Nomenclature
by Kianna Eberle
“I played with angles and tempo. The right arch of one’s back created an hourglass figure; molasses slow movement and the spinning pole created an illusion of unreality. I held tightly to the belief that gender was largely artifice, more prosthetic than innate. I reminded myself of this as I got my quarterly Botox injections, as I slipped on a pair of eight inch platform heels. I admired the effect a pair of dramatic lashes and the right stroke of contour had on my face. All of it felt like a magic trick; a chimera of angles and light and sleight of hand. My body was malleable, plastic.”
Mother-Daughter Relationships: How Close Is Too Close?
by Megan Cahn
“My daughter, of course, knows that my brother, her uncle, died when she was almost four. When the sadness that now lives inside me begins to show in my eyes or the corners of my mouth, often when I’m putting her to bed, she’ll sometimes say, “Are you thinking about Michael?” Always. But she doesn’t know the details of his passing, and I’m scared of the day I will have to tell her.”
Cymbals, Anyone?
by Patricia Wentzel
“There was this all-night drugstore two blocks from our house, and I could get what I needed to kill myself there. I remember inside the store there was a big bin of Halloween candy next to the register. I remember there were Laffy Taffy bars and little bags of candy corn and small boxes of jellybeans, and on the next rack were Pop Rocks, the newest candy sensation, and Hershey’s Bars. I remember buying a family-size box of Dramamine and a ten-ounce bottle of Orange Crush to wash it down.”
Reaching Back
by Marcia Yudkin
“At age seven, I’m home from school with chickenpox. My parents are both at work, and Esther, our housekeeper, is tidying the bedrooms upstairs. Wrapped in a sheet and blanket on our living room couch, I concentrate on a spiral-bound lined notebook propped against my knees. Pen in hand, I ponder rhymes for a whimsical ditty, testing sounds for quirky elegance. Words have texture, personality and charm for me. I love the way they feel in my head and in my mouth.”
Balancing a Busy, Full-Time Writing Career with Fatherhood Is More Challenging Than I Ever Expected
by
“The desire to do ALL THE THINGS made for a few hard lessons that resulted in some rushed acceptances and eventual nos. As a hungry new author, you want to accept every invitation for fear of missing the opportunity and, along with it, potential new readers who may follow you throughout your career. But over time, you also learn you just cannot say yes to everything and still be a functional person, partner, and parent. And if I did say yes to it all, not only would I feel completely burnt out, I’d feel like I was shirking that most important job—and the joy that it brings.”
Hugs: My Japanese Husband's Love Language
by
“As is tradition, the Sensōji Buddhist temple’s precincts are closed until midnight, at which point the great bell there is rung for the final, 108th, time—once for each of the human frailties that block our path to nirvana. The crowd was orderly and hushed, straining to hear the bell’s toll. Hiro stood so closely to me I could feel the buttons on his pea coat grate against the zipper of my down jacket. Our gloved hands touched and broke apart, touched and broke apart, and I bent my neck to bring my lips closer to his ear. ‘It is customary, you know, for couples to kiss at the stroke of midnight.’”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and
will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.📢 Contribute to Literary Liberation’s End-Of-Year Fundraiser
At Literary Liberation we are building something vital—a space where activists, artists, and writers from the global majority come together to create, to learn, and to imagine futures rooted in freedom and justice. This work is powered by community, and it’s only possible with you.
When you join Literary Liberation as a paid member before December 31, you’re securing our 2024 rates before they’re gone for good. More importantly, you’re making a powerful commitment—to your creative growth, to the shared journey of liberation, and to ensuring this space continues to thrive.
Share this campaign, donate subscriptions, or join us so we can continue to forge a laboratory path towards the future.
📢 Contribute to Electric Literature’s Annual Fund Drive
Electric Literature is a nonprofit organization with 8 staff members and 3 paid interns. We publish 15 articles per week—essays, reading lists, short stories, flash fiction, poetry, graphic narratives, interviews, and criticism—by over 500 writers per year.
Our work costs $500,000 annually, and last year, 33% of that was donated by 2,000 of our readers—people like you! The average donation of $65 made a difference. We depend on you to keep the lights on.
Electric Literature may be free to read, but the costs are real and going up. We need to raise $25,000 by December 31, 2024 to keep Electric Literature going into next year. In these uncertain times, the only thing I know for sure is that we cannot afford to take the organizations and institutions we care about for granted. If the continued existence of Electric Literature means something to you, please make a contribution today.
📢 Narratively’s 2024 Memoir Prize…
Narratively is accepting submissions for their 2024 Memoir Prize. They are looking for “revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view." The guest judge is New York Times bestselling memoirist Jami Attenberg. One Grand Prize Winner will receive $3,000, and the two finalists will receive $1,000 each. There is a $20 entry fee and the deadline to submit is December 19, 2024.
📢 Help Alex Alberto make a short film based on an essay in their collection, Entwined: Essays on Polyamory and Finding Home…
, one of the partners behind indie collective publisher Quilted Press, is making a short film based on an essay in their collection, Entwined: Essays on Polyamory and Finding Home. You can help by contributing to their Indiegogo campaign…📢 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, NEW, the author’s Bluesky Handle.
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.
Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!
Thank you for including Hugs!
Thanks so much for including Michael Nagle’s “Tree of Togetherness.”