A Fresh Batch of Moving Personal Essays...
Plus: THREE upcoming events where I'll talk with Elissa Altman about her new memoir/craft book, "Permission," plus a call for submissions for our collaboration with Literary Liberation.
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
Essays from partner publications…
Far Off Potential
by Will McMillan
“Think of my skull. Think about what it looks like. Try and make yourself see it.” Seeing skulls was one of Vivian’s tricks. From afar, she could rip someone’s skin off in band-aid size chunks. Up close, touching you, she’d peer through the flesh of your face and into your skull, see what it was you were thinking. There wasn’t a thing you could hide from her.”
The Changeling
by Gail Gallant
“Having two Gails in the family was confusing, especially if we were really only one. I have an early memory of my mother asking me about the framed picture of the other Gail. It had disappeared from the top of the TV. I had no idea where it was. I remember my surprise when she found it face down, buried under clothes in my dresser drawer.”
Our Therapist Gave My Wife and Me MDMA—and It Saved Our Marriage
by
“I stared back at her. Her skin was luminous and flushed, her hair tousled — was this the medicine, or did she really look this beautiful? — and I saw how badly I’d needed this lifeline. The truth was that I was desperate not to lose her, but this whole time I’d been so closed off it was hard to see what was right in front of me. Here was this wondrous person telling me she loved and wanted me, and I’d never even thought to say: ‘I love you too, but maybe I don’t know how.’”
Ten Years After
by
“He tracked me down ten years after his Irish exit from the relationship. By the way, Ten Years After is the name of a band I loved that was popular the year I graduated high school, which is the year he was born…When we met, 48 to 31 was one irresistible thing; 68 to 51 is oh-so-humbling-ly another. I was older then. I’m an oldster now.”
Essays from around the web…
Drinking Was the Job: Assisting Mario Batali meant being a wingman, a sidekick, and a voracious lush who rarely said “no.”
by
“Mario’s vocal horniness had set a tone for everyone who worked at Babbo. His grabby hands and constant dirty jokes and innuendo signified that it was okay, even encouraged, to flirt with and grope each other. No one called it harassment, except perhaps when making jokes about it.”
I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped
by Jasmine Mooney
“There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an Ice detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.”
My Grandmother’s Daughter
by
“I was twenty-nine when I came out to my mother. I had, as a pre-teen, opted to delay this confrontation for a future date, for when I was no longer dependent upon my parents, because I did not trust them to understand. My mother, for example, supported politicians and laws alike that would imperil my ability to exist; I remember vividly when she voted in favor of California’s infamous Proposition 8, causing to be enshrined into legality the exclusion of same-sex marriage—it is a recollection that has forever colored my perception of her. So, when I finally left my closet, I did so only because I had nothing left to lose. I was going through the worst breakup of my life, and I no longer cared what anybody could, should, would think about me. I decided to give her a chance, for the first time, to be there for me as a parent should do.”
My Cool Friend Michelle
by
“Michelle was only two years older than me, but in preteen years, that is an eon. At age 9, I was forever impressed by, and intimidated by, Cool Older Girls. Michelle Trachtenberg seemed to me the epitome of the Cool Older Girl: beautiful, stylish, funny, from New York — so much cooler than my hometown of Burbank, California. I couldn’t imagine she would want to talk to me, let alone be my friend.”
Gravity
by
“A thousand sunsets have since passed since you cartwheeled across this beach. You want to reach back and tell your girl-self to hold that moment under the moonlight, when the lightness of life lifted her forward. You want to tell her that one day she won’t recall the last time she tried a cartwheel.”
Endless Khakis
by Luke Thompson
“Toward the conclusion of the Retreat, we were each given a goody bag, the contents of which were uninteresting, except for a one-to-one scale plastic figurine of a sixteen-week-old fetus. Two of my classmates, Sawyer and Andrew, thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, and they hid their fetuses in the disused drainpipe next to the door that led from the echo chamber to the courtyard. I put my goody bag with its plastic fetus in my locker, and when I graduated, I did not retrieve it. Perhaps someone threw it away, never knowing the irony of what they’d done.”
Losing the boy I once knew, and feeling broken as his mom
by Catharine Cooper
“He breaks a house rule. I ground him. He climbs out a window. I ground him for a longer period. He comes home late. I remove another privilege, until there isn’t anything left to take away. I knew peer pressure would overrule Austin’s pledge to sobriety. Laguna parties are legendary, often attracting hundreds of kids from outlying cities. An MTV show portrayed student life as one long surf session, raging party, fast cars, sex, and wealth, and the kids strive to support that image.”
What I’d Say: On Writing “Frankie Five Hundred”
by
“As a native son of Harlem born in 1963, the origin of “Frankie Five Hundred” began in childhood when my mother, Frances recounted her years as a young woman relocating from Pittsburgh to New York City in the 1950s. She attended George Washington High School, took modeling classes at Ophelia DeVore School of Self-Development and Modeling (where Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson also studied), worked at Doubleday Books on 5th Avenue, socialized with friends, went to jazz clubs with Uncle Carl, and moved out of her mother’s apartment. Having heard these stories for decades, I vowed to one day use them as the seeds to grow a different kind of Harlem tale.”
A Dripping Springs Artist Talks Serendipity, Love of the Craft, and the ‘Fire in Her Belly’
by
“When Daryl looks back on her path to becoming an artist, she sees a gleam in her timeline, like the seams of gold dust that she uses her breath to melt into some of her prints. But I wondered: Did karma connect Daryl to the art that she was born to make? Or was the daughter of a stern Germanic mother and a father who worked for ButterKrust for 35 years the perfect person to devote herself to an exacting, ancient art? And which was my meant-to-be life? The life where I recognized my love of writing in my 20s and never looked back? Or the life I had, writing in the nooks and crannies of the family schedule, driving back and forth on the same highways, between errands and school pick-ups, in a cloud of ambivalence?”
How to Be a Caregiver to Aging, Difficult Parents
by
“The worst part of being a child of difficult parents is when you get to the end. When you’re a child or teenager, you can dream of escape. You can make up elaborate fantasies about one day getting the hell out of that house or that town and making something different of yourself.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 THREE Upcoming Events Where I’ll Talk with Permission author …
Readers,
’s new memoir/craft book Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create sits so squarely in my wheelhouse—and, honestly, that of most who write memoir and struggle to feel permitted to do it—that I’m going to be doing three events with her about it. I hope some of you can make it to one of these!
First up is The Woodstock Bookfest, where on Sunday, April 6th at 11:30am I’ll moderate a panel called “On Permission: Daring to Tell,” inspired by Altman’s 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.
The second event is an in-conversation at Bookclub Bar in the East Village on Tuesday, April 8th from 8-9pm. Be sure to RSVP if you’re coming!
Join us for one (or more) of these!!!
📢 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.📢 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.
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Another fabulous round up! Thanks for including Luke’s essay, Endless Khakis.
Thank you Sari for including my essay. I always appreciate your kindness.