A Fresh Batch of Stellar Personal Essays...
Plus: Classes from Narratively Academy, Alicia Kennedy, Megan Stielstra/Off Assignment, a call for submissions, and a conference...
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…
I Knew My Pregnancy Was Over. Doctors Insisted Otherwise
by
“The thought of carrying a non-viable pregnancy made me feel frantic, contaminated. I asked the clinician about access to mifepristone and misoprostol—the abortion pills—and he said, “I’m shy to discuss that when things are looking so optimistic.” He signed a requisition form for another follow-up scan.”
What My Father’s Emails Taught Me About the Craft of Writing
by
“How can I explain that though, now, at forty-two, on the verge of publishing my debut novel, a book I poured my soul into for years, the idea of being a writer in that dreary Cornell computer lab was the furthest thing from my mind? At that time, I considered fiction a waste of time... It’s amazing how our minds jump to our defense; my curriculum didn’t make space for electives, none of my (exclusively engineering) friends were the least interested in literature, and anyway, there was no money in writing, so it was easy to rationalize the whole enterprise as unchallenging and inferior. I put blinders on, and that allowed me to keep going.”
The List
by Noreen Graf
“In the hot tub, I tell my daughter, ‘I don’t think my mom ever got Alzheimer’s. Nothing to worry about.’ Ultimately, I think parts of her brain slow-rotted a tad. I don’t tell my daughter this. On her deathbed six years ago, Mom got her four daughters confused. Not her four sons though; she recognized them until the very last.”
My Most Dangerous Year
by
“I’ve heard it said that everybody gets religion when they’re on death’s doorstep. Believe me, it’s true. Even though I’m not particularly religious, I started praying, “Please God, not like this. Don’t let me die in front of my children.” Fortunately, my wife's job was close by. She rushed home and drove me to an emergency room. What I thought was an asthma attack was actually the result of a heart condition called atrial fibrillation, or AFib.”
Essays from around the web…
Did You Think We Were Safe?
by Evelyn Fok
“The women around me grew up enduring an inborn hostility against their gender and spent their entire lives accommodating it. They’d become almost blind to the manoeuvring and compliance necessary to keep themselves safe, as they cheered each baby step towards progress, hoping that things would get better. Unlike me, they did not have an escape hatch. It was simply the most bearable way to survive, and to do so with dignity. Why could I not be as strong? Why did I not have a thicker skin?”
Beacon St, February 19
by Afri Arebu
“Family dinner is tonight. The semester just started and we’d only just coaxed the black leaves off abandoned plants. Shahrazad, Elliot, and I relocated three years ago to the cold tip of this continent, at once. Started our self-teaching, at once. Then, we met each other, fell in love, and began living together.”
Everything Got Better When I Got Sober. Then I Was Hit With A Harsh Truth I Did Not See Coming.
by Jorge Estupinan
“Sober is not boring, but it can be lonely. I am two-and-a-half years clean, and in 2024, I only dated one person. Before I got sober, I was in a 12-year relationship. The whole time I was with my ex-partner, I was drinking and using drugs. We would use together, and when things got very volatile between us, I was kicked out of our townhouse and that was the end of that partnership. The very next day, I quit cold turkey and have been in recovery since.”
I'm in Recovery from Anorexia. Here's How I'm Helping My Daughter Navigate Body Image.
by Mallary Tenore Tarpley
“My daughter Madelyn was 18 months old when she stood in front of a full-length mirror for the first time. She wore a Snoopy onesie, and her strawberry blonde hair was tied in a miniature ponytail. She leaned forward and kissed the mirror, leaving lip marks. Then she paused to admire the girl staring back at her. ‘Iiiiii! Iiiii! Iiiii!’ she trilled, with a wave of her small hand. She was too young to pronounce her “H’s” but old enough to greet herself with a smile so big it pushed her pale, round cheeks up to the bottom of her hazel eyes. I was in awe of how much she seemed to admire her reflection. And I could not remember the last time I truly loved mine.”
Something Like Pleasure
by Kathleen Quigley
“He ran his finger along my scar. It reminded me of seeing a flash of lightning, then counting by hundreds until I heard thunder rumble and could gauge the storm's distance. It took thirty seconds for the sensation of his touch to travel from my scar along the synapses to my brain, axons and neurons firing and flashing, until something like pleasure quivered through me.”
Drawing Breath in Chapters
by Rose Gerszberg
“Life as a child of Survivors resembles something akin to an archaeological dig. One that never ends. In the search for my pre-Holocaust mother, I coaxed my aunt Chuma into allowing me to film an interview with her. Over the course of five hours, my Weingarten family’s story unfolded, a story that pivoted on a singular detail—survival. The interview closed with a wistful sigh as Chuma carefully lifted the shawl her mother wore to light Shabbos candles, a shawl she had somehow kept all those years, and murmured, ‘It outlives the woman who wore it.’”
Closer to Fine
by Gina Calderone
“The old map indicated failure, too, but somehow it seemed like a more successful failure. They certainly traversed more roads together, probably spent more time sleeping under the stars, likely shivered through more dawns next to a sputtering camp stove waiting for coffee to percolate. I wondered how they kept going, through all the red flags.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Academy's From Journal to Memoir: How to Turn Your Side Scrawls Into Literary Gold
There are has upcoming sessions, the first starting this Saturday, March 1, with a second session added in April. In this four-part workshop with Rebecca Evans, writers will explore methods and concepts to help shift their journals and notebooks into powerful writing tools.
📢 ’s Reported and Personal Essays in Food Media, March 11th
What does it mean to write short- and long-form essays for food magazines? What are different examples of features, and how would one go about pitching such ideas? What are the structures of these pieces and how do the writers build their arguments within the container of the essay?
Tuesday, March 11 over Zoom
Session No. 1: 11 AM to 1 PM EST
Session No. 2: 7 PM to 9 PM EST
$100
📢 Writing Grief with via Off Assignment
A generative/discussion-based class. With guest authors Samantha Irby, Lulu Miller, Matthew Salesses, and Vauhini Vara. Saturdays: Apr 5 - May 3
12 - 2 p.m. EST. $400
📢 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.📢 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 fabulous roundup!!!
Thank you for including sneaker wave’s “Closer to Fine.”
Thank you for including my essay! :)