A Fresh Batch of Absorbing Personal Narratives...
Plus: Classes from Narratively Academy and Diane Jacob, a call for submissions, and two conferences...
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.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—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) exclusively for paid subscribers.
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.
Follow Memoir Land on BlueSky: @memoirland.bsky.social
Check out my conversation with and on the “Write Minded” podcast.
Essays from partner publications…
The Joy of Protest
by Filipa Pajevic
“When my mother texted that she and my brother had dropped off food for demonstrating students at the University of Arts in Belgrade, I was stunned. My brother—my apolitical, bashful, forty-two-year-old brother—was now delivering boxes of baklava to a protest. Then I learned that his son was part of the blockade at his high school.
How to Break a Sentence
by Randle Browning
“She could intuit the moment when my internal lens turned away from her. If I sat beside her while she watched a cartoon, she’d catch me as soon as I looked down at my book. Mom, why aren’t you watching this part? I took up embroidery during a long string of sick days. I was desperate for something to occupy my mind while I watched over my daughter, who needed my constant presence but not always my input. I found that, when I sewed, it brought the creative act down from my mind and into my hands for her to see.”
Iggy
by Osman Samiuddin
“He looked like an extra from the set of a Cheech and Chong film who’d taken a wrong turn in 1978 and landed up straight at this gig. On the dancefloor, a lean man was giving it some. And I mean really giving it some. He was also in his sixties with a silver mullet tied up in a tiny, apologetic ponytail. He was doing the Mashed Potato, a slick, rapid dance that will not be found with your roast dinner. With some élan too, his lower legs and feet gliding in and out like he was on roller skates.”
My Father, Myself
by Cameron Walker
“In grocery store lines, cashiers referred to him as my grandpa. Sometimes kids at school did, too. When I was 10, the son of a family friend—a few years younger than I was—told me solemnly that my dad was going to die soon. When my parents married, he was 51. I was born two years later, my brother three years after that.”
Essays from around the web…
Anything Worth Doing
by Jeanne Yu
“On January 28, 2025, I, along with 2.3 million other government employees, receive an email from HR marked with a red high importance exclamation point. The subject line: ‘Fork in the Road.’ A 2025 Presidential Executive Order directs a reformed government workforce, the impetus for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) four-pillar plan of which the first pillar is return to office.”
The Warmth of Dogs
by Frances Scott
“My parents didn’t know I ached with loneliness at night, that as young as five, I crept out to sleep with the puppies, their sapphire little eyes asking me to join them. We whimpered together, speaking the same language of longing. Everything about them exuded softness and warmth, even their breath, sweet from mother’s milk. The pups and their mama welcomed me into their family as if I was born into it.”
Need to Know
by Donna Cameron
“After the Pinkertons delivered their findings, my mother abandoned any hope of seeing her father again. She stopped wondering why he left and why he never returned. Her curiosity had brought her no answers, nor any peace. It only confirmed her greatest fear: she wasn’t worth coming back for. Almost a century would pass before I would learn how wrong the famed gumshoes had been.”
Everyone/Eventually
by Nate Waggoner
“Dante exceeds his prognosis by several months. Jai finds him a hospice facility. It’s a nauseatingly bumpy and winding drive up this big hill, so you’re disoriented, light-headed, by the time you arrive. It’s incredibly verdant and bright up there, and you can see deer and wild turkeys wandering around. The place is designed for kids, so there’s a playground and a playroom and kids’ art all over the walls. Each room has a theme, and Dante’s is 'The OK Corral,' with cowboy wallpaper. I offer to bring his Biggie poster and he declines the offer. Crying family members walk around slowly, holding hands, and the wailing of infants reverberates.”
How an Adoption-Focused Instagram Account Helped Me Feel Seen
by
“I started my Instagram account because I believed more adoptee stories needed to be told, and not just the heartwarming, positive ones. Especially given the tragic statistic that adoptees are four times as likely as non-adoptees to attempt suicide. Even when it’s painful, we must seek to learn. Otherwise, history will just repeat itself.”
My daughter can make the moon move
by
“Perhaps that’s just the job of parents — to worry about the mundane so our children can explore the extraordinary. We worry about big things and little things. We worry about unlikely things. We worry about what people think of our parenting. We worry about how every little decision we make will affect what our children will become. We worry about elementary school running club for some reason.”
Wattle
by
“Abner read somewhere that it’s a resonant gesture to clone an old apple tree. You plant the clone near the original tree, and there they are, old and new, same and different, together. There’s an old apple tree in his new backyard in rural-most Connecticut. Gnarly. Variety unknown. Learning the name of the tree is on Abner’s to-do list, but first comes cloning.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Academy's Deeply Personal: Writing First-Person Essays on Raw and Difficult Topics with Caroline Rothstein…
Join Caroline Rothstein for a five-week workshop starting this Thursday, March 13. In this intimate 10-person class, students will learn how to craft compelling personal essays about the experiences that matter most to them, with hands-on feedback from the instructor and peers.
📢 Jumpstart Your Cookbook Proposal workshop with starting Monday, March 17.
A 3-week Zoom class for people ready to write their proposals for a cookbook, food memoir, food travel or history. Proposals are the documents agents and editors read to decide whether they are interested in your non-fiction book. Workshop your ideas and work, and write sections during class.
Monday, March 17, 4-7 p.m. PT; Monday, March 24, 4-7 p.m. PT; Monday, March 31, 4-7 p.m. PT. $425 per person
📢 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.📢 My Panel at The Woodstock Bookfest Sunday, April 6th
On Sunday, April 6th I’ll be moderating a panel at The Woodstock Bookfest called “On Permission: Daring to Tell,” inspired by Elissa Altman’s wonderful forthcoming book, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create. Participating will be Altman; Hyeseung Song, author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl; and Jonathan Lerner, author of Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid. This is the first of THREE events I’ll be doing with Altman around the publication of Permission. This book couldn’t be more in my wheelhouse, and I am a big fan of hers, so I’m thrilled and honored to be taking part in a few of her events.
📢 Open Secrets Live! May 3rd in NYC…
May 3rd I’ll be moderating a panel at Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Open Secrets Live! symposium in Manhattan. It’s a great lineup.
📢 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.
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!
Sari, thank you for including my essay in Memoir Monday. https://brightflash1000.com/2025/03/03/the-warmth-of-dogs/
Thank you so much for including my essay in great company! I love reading memoir, and separately I loved Goodbye to All That (the book, and I'll be sure to check out this column now that I know it exists.) This made my week, thank you! And thanks to Open Secrets Magazine for publishing it.