A Fresh Batch of Mini-Memoirs to Dig Into This Week...
Plus: Conferences, Workshops, A Call for Submissions, and more...
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.
~The recent crowd-sourced editions of Memoir Monday went well. Thanks to those of you who suggested so many excellent essays. I’m going to make it a regular mini-feature, like this: You are welcome, each week, to suggest to readers one essay you loved—***by someone other than you.~
Essays from partner publications…
Fake
by Edgar Gomez
“I’d been obsessed with my teeth since the fifth grade, when being gap-toothed stopped being cute, and the kids with naturally straight teeth started pairing off to preserve their superior evolutionary lines. My teeth weren’t endearingly bad. I’m not talking about a tiny gap I could rebrand as quirky. Some of them were missing, the rest looked like rotting toenails.”
I Was Born Missing an Ear. To the World, It Was a Problem to Fix
by Kate Gies
“The man at my back pushed the stretcher forward. My mom had explained that Uncle Louie and his team were going to be inserting a balloon in the side of my head. She’d tried to make it sound fun, like a birthday balloon. I knew it wasn’t going to be like that.”
The Rebellious Act of Stillness
by Adaeze Elechi (Guest-edited by Blaise Allysen Kearsley)
“Every week, as she freed, washed, and re-bound my hair in thin black threads in the private quiet of her bathroom, she salved my wounds, my confusion, and restless agitation, and tethered us both to Home.”
I know Nothing About Sex. (Or Nothing I Recall.)
by Judith Hannah Weiss
“A few years back, I met my first blue-pilled beau. He was old and improved, or so he thought, and hot to trot. E.D. pills did not cause him to want sex every hour or two. But they enabled him to want sex twenty minutes after whenever he popped two, not one. I didn’t know about the pills at first, only that my partner bragged about his prowess, which didn’t exist, and his perseverance, which did.”
Essays from around the web…
My Life with Left-Handed Women
by Megan Marshall
“When I was young, in the nineteen-fifties, left-handedness meant the omnipotence of motherhood. Surely I would grow up to be a left-handed woman, too. Slowly, I began to realize that would never be. My right hand took over when I scribbled with crayons and when I learned to print letters in pencil at school.”
Ring of Fire
by Kase Johnston
“When Dr. Blasey Ford testified, I wept for her. I wept while she bravely testified against not only Kavanaugh but against power itself. Thirty years ago, during my brief tenure at the Sigma Nu house, I was never witness to assaults like those Dr. Ford described. But I remember Guut week, the way the guys fought over girls like property, the way they joked about masturbating on unconscious women, and these memories stick like kidney stones in my blood stream. Deep down, I think those guys wanted me to laugh with them—to laugh along is to approve. I think the young man who verbally attacked me that last night must have seen that I did not laugh and was threatened by my refusal. Maybe that’s why he targeted me.”
Even if Your Blood is Clean
by The Real Sarah Miller
“The person who told me to go to Al-Anon is one of the sketchiest people I have ever been friends with and an addict himself. He explained that Al-Anon was for people involved with, friends with, or related to, or just bothered by alcoholics and addicts. ‘Will it get him to stop drinking?’ I said. ‘The fact that you want to know that is the reason you have to go,’ he said.”
Tale as Old as Time
by Lindsey Goldstein
“First love might be the truest. Especially as teenagers when we felt everything so intensely. The desperate need to be with each other every waking moment despite the constraints of being kids who lived with our parents. The long hours spent talking on the phone or merely listening to the other breathing on the other line.”
I’m 33, and I’m Deeply, Deeply Tired of Being Single
by Sonya Matejko
“As much as I know the support from my friends and family is heartfelt and genuine, I also know that it’s difficult for them, nearly all married and with kids, to understand what it feels like to spend a decade waking up alone, wishing someone’s hand would gently rest on your back to signal good morning.”
The Guest House
by Carolyn Chamberlin
“Three years ago, he was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, a ravaging and cruel form of what is euphemistically called ‘mild cognitive impairment.’ There’s nothing mild about it. It’s often misdiagnosed, mistaken for its close cousins, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. But Lewy Body is the trifecta of dementias, characterized by a steadily worsening maelstrom of movement, cognition, behavior, sleep, and autonomic function. (I looked that last one up. Basically, it means the total loss of control.) I am his caregiver. Full stop.”
(Ed note: I’m reposting this piece because I used the wrong link last time. - SB)
Awakening the Fire Within: Recovery, Rage, and the Power of Voice
by Kelly Thompson
“Recovery became uncovery, peeling back layers of old beliefs and unconscious patterns. I learned that awakening isn’t a one-time event but an ongoing process of expanded awareness. I hadn’t yet realized that beneath my recovery process lay repressed anger, hiding deep rage.”
I Spent Years Begging Doctors To Help Me. I Wasn't Prepared For What Happened When They Finally Did.
by Kristina Kasparian, PhD
“Unfortunately, asking for a hysterectomy in your 30s usually doesn’t go over well when you are child-free. It doesn’t even go over well when you are naturally menopausal or vulnerable to cancer. But it does, sadly, go over better if a surrogate is carrying your baby. My surgeon was visibly more comfortable agreeing to a hysterectomy once she knew we were pregnant with our surrogate. Even then, I had to bring a urine sample to the hospital on the day of my surgery for the lab to perform a single analysis: a pregnancy test. The physician’s task is to be absolutely sure that you are sure about the procedure.”
When the Tearing Comes, If It Comes
by Abby Manzella
“More than ten years ago a doctor told me in passing, as he gazed into my eyes in the least romantic way, You are a good candidate for a retinal detachment. He said it like it was a job that I was eligible for. He said it as though he were talking to himself, proud of a discovery.”
This under-the-radar Texas spot feels like a scene from The Notebook
by Isobella Jade
“As a birdwatcher with a romantic soul, I can’t help but think of The Notebook’s opening scene whenever I watch egrets glide across the water. Their beautiful white wings and peaceful essence symbolizes love, new beginnings and togetherness. The serene atmosphere made us walk more slowly, so that we could absorb the beauty of this avian oasis. Then, suddenly, we saw them—hundreds of egrets. I gasped, ‘This is like a dream.’”
🚨Announcements:
📢 I Was On Ronit Plank’s Excellent Podcast “Let’s Talk Memoir”
📢 I’ll Be On a Panel at The Institute for Independent Journalists’ Online Conference, to be Held Feb 27th & 28th
My panel is called “The Power of the Pivot”:
“At a certain point in freelancing, the routine gets old, your pitches aren’t landing, and you start to wonder: is it me? This session will explore how to know it’s time to change gears. Journalism recruiters and career coaches will share stories of a hard pivot: from one beat to another, out of journalism, or into a completely different field. Bring your soul-searching questions and wild ideas: we’ll get you started toward answers.”
📢 There are still a few spots open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, where I’ll be leading a workshop and giving a craft talk.
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and Literary Liberation will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.
📢 Call for Submissions: The Queer Love Project
Every week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay that reveals the truth behind heartbreaks, happiness, secrets, reflections on coming out, sexual encounters and the realities of dating, all to answer the question: “What do you know about love?” All of our content is free to subscribers and is supported by readers. You must be a subscriber to submit. Think “Modern Love”—but only queer stories.
Pay: $75 upon publication. Word length: 1,500-2,500 words is ideal. (Longer essays are welcome, too, but nothing too far from 3K.) Other ways to contribute: We also publish the QLP Questionnaire every week. Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to get the full template of questions.
📢 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.
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!
Another wonderful roundup!
Sari, what a treat to have you on Let’s Talk Memoir, thank you so much for being my guest!