A Fresh Batch of Personal Essays to Start Your Year Off Right...
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.
*Beginning in late January, here’ll occasionally be original work as well, likely behind a paywall—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish, so if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one! Stay tuned for information on how to submit, beginning in mid-January.
You can read all about expansion plans here. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
When Love Is Not a Pie With Limited Slices
by Abbe Aronson
"According to everything I’ve been told about sex and aging, as a Gen-X woman, I’m supposedly now past my sexual prime. So imagine my surprise when I realized that, approaching 54, I’m having the best sex of my life…What’s my secret? Not so much a secret but I guess I’m shouting it out loud here for the first time: I’m polyamorous."
At the Bath House
by Jung Hae Chae
“So we listened, and we sat our small asses down in the much too uncomfortable water for a long, long time until our young skins became medium rare, slough-ready, ready for our initiation: the slow tenderizing of girls into women.”
Joe at the Aquarium
by Ariél M. Martinez
"I am still his daughter even if he is no longer here to tell me when I’m being selfish, angry, irresponsible. I am still angry—both at him and for him—but I am trying to be less selfish, trying to be more responsible. I am still all these things even though he is no longer here to be any of them. I am still his daughter even if he is no longer here to tell me that he loves me, too."
(Not) A Story About New York
by Kelsey Swintek
"It’s August in Manhattan when we both decide to leave. You accept a job in LA and my boyfriend packs my life in a U-Haul and drives it to our new apartment together in Pittsburgh…When I toss this story around in my head, I want it to be a story about New York. A story about how we both loved the city but knew we had to leave. A story about the end of summer when fruit starts to rot on the vine, turns sour."
To My 11-Year Old Father in the Camp
by Tamiko Nimura
"From age 11 to age 14, you lived here: Family #25401, your parents with their six children, Block 45, Barracks A and B. For decades, I have pictured you waiting in line for the mess hall and the latrines, counting the number of guard towers, shivering under scratchy Army blankets at night. A young boy far removed from the you I knew: the father who would joyfully belt out “Food, glorious food!” before Saturday morning breakfasts, the teacher who taught me how to spell “chrysanthemum” with bright magnetic letters before I went to kindergarten, the librarian who paraded me and my toddler sister through several floors of offices, showing us off to your co-workers. Though I have your written memories of camp, this memorial service is my first physical encounter with Tule Lake: a name I’ve lived with for so long. A chance to meet the child I never met, the child you once were. "
Natural Magic
by Ellen Wayland-Smith
"So it was that nothing in the created universe existed in and of and for itself. Leaf and stone, bird and beast, planet and human were not strangers one to the other but secret sharers, speakers of a common cosmic tongue. So it was that the physician, at his patient’s side, could taste the stars in a drop of blood.”
I Need To Tell You About My Mother
by Melissa A. Watkins
"I can see the question forming in all of you reading this. So, did you struggle with your looks? Did you try hard not to look like your mother? Were you ashamed of being seen with her? Were you scarred by the comparisons? No. I never thought my mother was ugly. I never minded looking like her. My mother isn’t ugly. She’s just Black, and a woman.”
How paranoid schizophrenia (briefly) turned me into a Republican
by Patty Mulcahy
"Social dynamics can propagate conspiracy-based thinking that mimics biologically triggered delusions. But there is no medication that will stop mass violence fueled by conspiracies."
Forgiving my Grandpa for Surviving the Holocaust While His Family Died
By Carol Ungar
“I wanted my grandpa to be a hero but he didn’t measure up. At the critical moment, Grandpa let his family down. He saved himself from Hitler by moving to the US alone, without the rest of his family. In 1944, my mother and grandmother were deported to Auschwitz where my grandmother died… while my grandfather sat in the Bronx.”
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
The artwork and the appropriate credits.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received.
Memoir writers: don’t miss this special offer from Memoir Monday founder Lilly Dancyger (who still hosts the quarterly reading series), good until this Friday, 1/7. The author of the acclaimed memoir, Negative Space—one of the best memoirs of 2021 according to Leslie Jamison in BookForum—Lilly is taking on only a few clients for manuscript evaluation.
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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