A Fresh Batch of Stellar Personal Essays to Read this Week...
Plus: Workshops from Lilly Dancyger, Narratively Academy, Rosie Schapp, and Reedsy; and a call for submissions for our collaboration with Literary Liberation.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, 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.
*While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing this and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*
***Next week I’ll be traveling so the “Memoir Monday” newsletter will be crowd-sourced, like this one and this one. Get ready to share your favorite personal essays that have been published recently, or ever.***
Memoir Land is on Substack Notes and BlueSky: @memoirland.bsky.social
Essays from partner publications…
Come See Me Before You Go
by Karen Wilfrid
“It all felt like a story to me—Tyler’s story, with my role in it that began the moment we met each other’s eyes outside my classroom door. Wasn’t that the essence of a teacher’s job: to play a part, however large or small, in the myriad of stories unfolding before us? ‘I’m sure there will be more to the Tyler story,’ I wrote in my journal that first year. ‘I just hope, and wish, it will have a happy ending. I think it will.’ I was wrong. In March of 2021, I found out that Tyler had died.”
How Do You Ask a Dying Man to Accept a Pig’s Heart?
by Bartley Griffith, M.D.
“I have been a heart transplant surgeon for 40 years and have performed more than 1,000 heart transplants. Through it all, I’ve learned the frustrating reality that I cannot, as much as I try, save all the patients that come to us for help. But there was one way to possibly save Dave Bennett and begin to find an answer to the growing dearth of donor organs. I thought of the procedure my partner, Muhammad Mohiuddin, M.D., and I had been working on here for the past five years, a procedure that had never been done before on a human, one that many would have said just a few years ago was impossible. Could Dave Bennett, I wondered, be the first person to receive a genetically humanized pig heart? I was determined to find out.”
The Ballad of Neko and Niko
by
“I promised myself I would learn all I could about the woman attached to this voice. A radio host mentioned a name:
. I didn’t hear the song title but remembered enough of the words to write them on my arm in permanent marker. Below where a piece of paper towel was taped to my arm and the dried blood staining it, I scrawled, ‘Niko (?) Case, last night I dreamt I’d forgotten my name.’”What My Mum’s Approach to Aging Taught Me About True Beauty
by
“My face feels like a living document of my life so far—some of it tough (hasn’t it been for us all?), but most of it good. And yet, every glance in the mirror feels like a reckoning—with time, with vanity, with the culture we’re all steeped in that equates youth with value. That tells women their faces are problems to solve, their bodies things to be tamed, sculpted and smoothed.”
Essays from around the web…
My Parents Expected to Be Retired. Instead, They Are Raising My Sister’s Kids.
by
“My parents put off suing for custody of my sister’s children for a long time. Shy and artistic, my sister was a straight-A student who played soccer in college. It wasn’t clear what came first — the drugs or the depression or the terrible men — but when she dropped out in 2011 as a freshman and spiraled into addiction, having four babies in less than two years, her dissolution was shocking. We’d known, vaguely, that the disease ran in the family — my grandmother warned that most of her 11 siblings dealt with substance abuse. But we had never seen the fallout up close.” (A year ago, Memoir Land published this related piece by Frances Dodds.)
Deracination, Or How to Disappear
by Dayna Bateman
“His error provided the foundation for scientific racism (which is by no means scientific) and persists, in some circles, to this day. (See: Trump, Donald, Shithole Countries (2018).) Also in the tenth edition, to describe the First People of Scandinavia, the Sámi, and those many others around the world who were, well, different from their Continental cousins, Linnaeus created a new category: Homo Monstrosus. That is: He called them monsters.” (Winner of the 2025 American Literary Review Award in Essays, Judged by Jacquira Díaz.)
Remembering Jan Dawson, My Mother-in-Law (Twice)
by
“Ours is an extended family with a lot of tragedy in it, but Jan Dawson’s was unique. Jan was the mother of two daughters, Jen, the mother of my two biological children, and Nancy, who had three children by a previous marriage. I was married to both of the sisters at different points in my life. They both died young—Jennifer at 35 of a previously undiagnosed heart problem, Nancy at 53 of metastatic breast cancer. They died on the same day, fourteen years and a few minutes apart.” (h/t
)Object Permanence
by Gabe Montesanti
“If Nova failed to appear fast enough after I arrived, Evelyn would scream up the stairs a second time. “I said your friend’s here, you stupid bitch! Get down here and get your ass outside!” I wondered if Evelyn knew her dark nipples could be seen through her silk robe, which had become, by this point, its own kind of Jackson Pollock: a painter I wouldn’t become aware of until I was in college earning a degree in art.”
Chipmunk
by Cindy House
“He was just a few days old then and I was tired, so tired, swaying to try to put him to sleep, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something small and fast dart across the floor.”
Ed
by Ben Jackson
“I wish I could say that Ed and Rhett's visit permanently corrected the ICU psychosis. It did not, but it gave us what nothing else had been able to do: respite. I was able to have a conversation with an adult who was not medical—I was able to be a person of my own for half an hour instead of being solely Emma's caretaker. Seeing the power of the pup's interaction with my daughter allowed me to set down the weight of her suffering for a moment and breathe freely. That brief visit gave me the strength to continue carrying that weight a little bit longer than I might otherwise have been able to—and it brought Emma such happiness in the middle of a time where there was simply no happiness to be had.”
I Was Addicted To Meth For 7 Years And No One Had Any Idea
by
“People who wear glasses and pantyhose don’t do meth, right? I always made sure to look the part of a smart, together, confident young woman. I wore Tahari suits from a used-clothing store, stockings and glasses that I didn’t need. I’ll never forget the first time I tried it. I crushed it up and cut it into lines with my library card on my yellow Formica kitchen table. I remember the burn up my nose. My heart racing. My blood pulsing through my veins. The rush of adrenaline. I felt alive, smarter, prettier and — within just a few weeks — thinner. I not only lost the 10 pounds, but I felt so good that I decided to go back to college.”
My Father’s Will Ruined Our Family
by
“My mother died in 2006. Her kidney failure aside, I had a feeling she never quite recovered from her son’s death in 2004. Her sorrow was the catalyst for her downfall. How does a mother bury a son and carry on when the natural order of things has defied logic? Children aren’t supposed to die first, even if they are adults. At forty-two, Tony took his life in an unthinkable way, and she was left to carry the shame… And then there was my father to endure…”
Final Instructions for Princesses
by Melanie Bishop
“After dinner there was a Sunday tradition. My mother’s father chose a daughter to go upstairs with him, to ‘take a nap.’ My mother recalled being chosen often. She remembered the fondling. Some Sundays, an uncle would come to visit, and select a niece to join him on a ‘Sunday drive.’ The idea was to be happy you’d been chosen, to be the niece underneath whose skirt the uncle would like to diddle.”
First Love in the Holy Land
by
“I realized how necessary it had been for me to see him in person again. I wanted to prove to him that I’m still the mostly independent, sometimes rational American he met back in Costa Rica. But mostly, I needed to release the emotions I had kept to myself since high school, the ones that left me frozen in time. Now that I was free of that weight, I could finally move on, knowing my mom was right about one thing—these Holy Land trips were educational. If nothing else, I was becoming fluent in the language of my own heart.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Apply by June 4 for the next session of 's Essay Collection Incubator! (July 19-Dec 6)
Generate, revise, and prepare your essay-collection (or memoir-in-essays) manuscript for submission—with guest authors and industry professionals, craft lectures and exercises, and multiple rounds of workshop feedback.
📢 At Academy: Queer Writers Memoir Workshop and Reading Like a Writer
Two new workshops at Narratively Academy:
Queer Writers Workshop: Memoir Is an Act of Resistance with
—This five-week workshop takes place on Sundays from 12 to 1:30pm ET. Class starts on June 1 and ends on June 29. Cost: $395Reading Like a Writer: A Book Study of Skinfolk with Audrey Clare Farley, with a visit by Skinfolk author Matthew Pratt Guterl—This five-week book study takes place on Wednesdays from 7 to 8:30pm ET. Class starts on June 4 and ends on June 25. Cost: $175
📢 Life Writing: On Food & Drink, a 6-Week Remote/Online Workshop with , beginning May 20th
“When is a dinner more than a dinner? When it’s also a lens through which to see a world, a framework within which to consider ideas and relationships, even a platform from which to advocate for justice. When we write personal essays about food and drink, we are also telling the stories of our lives, and the lives of others. This is a creative nonfiction course, appropriate for essayists, memoirists, journalists— any writer who has ever considered the meaning of a meal.
In this six-week course, we will read and discuss works by Ciaran Carson, Jessica B. Harris, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead and others, which, taken together, convey some sense of the breadth, depth, and creative range possible in writing about food and drink. Workshop discussions of students’ writing will be at the core of our two-hour sessions.” Via Irish Writers Centre.
📢 Reedsy’s “Writing a Bestselling Memoir” in 2025
Whether you’re writing a memoir for those near and dear to you or seeking commercial success, join us for a masterclass with memoir experts Amanda Nell Edgar and Rebecca van Laer. You’ll walk away with an understanding of the memoir market and what it takes to write a bestselling memoir in 2025.
In this packed double-session, you’ll learn about the internal and external elements you need to create a memoir with wide appeal – from finding your voice and narrative arc, to identifying your purpose and target audience, and selecting the publishing path that is right for you.
There will be a 15 minute break between sessions, plus a Q&A with the instructors at the end of the event.
Date: May 22nd, 2025 Time: 15:00 - 17:00 EST Cost: $49 Location: Online (gain access to Reedsy’s event space when you register)
📢 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.
Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.
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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Fantastic, Sari. Thank you so much for the mention. Much appreciated! Some great story links here. I'm looking forward to diving in! :)
Grateful for the shout out and to be in such fine company 🙏💛✨