A New Batch of Personal Narratives to Read this Week...

Plus workshops via Narratively and Fine Arts Work Center in the announcements at the bottom.

Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by

Sari Botton

, now featuring four verticals:

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation.

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Seeing Someonw,” by

   Amy Shearn
   . A new essay is coming soon.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Problem Isn’t Him,” a craft essay by

   Laurie Stone
   .

4. 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. Recently I published “It’s Not Over Until the Bride’s Father Sings,” my own story of eloping to Manhattan’s old, no-frills marriage bureau.

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*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*

Clockwise from top left: From Narratively, illustration by Kenny Wroten; From Granta, photo by Suzie Howell; From LitHub, "actually"; From The Walrus, illustration by Tomio Nitto; From Oldster Magazine, A flicker by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, 1911. Via Wikimedia Commons; From Orion Magazine, a drawing of olives and olive oil; From Electric Literature, photo is by David Clode via Unsplash; From The Rumpus, photo courtesy of the author. Center: Memoir Land logo by Julie Novak.

Essays from partner publications…

Does My Love for a Straight Man Change My Queer Identity?

by Rachel Parsons 

“I’m here because I’m in love. Despite my preference for women and trans bodies, I am drawn to Nick’s gentle nature. He makes me laugh even when I’m angry and he is learning how to hold me when I cry. There is a deep knowing he’s my person, but a profound confusion as to what kind of person this makes me.”

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We Would Have Told Each Other Everything

by Judith Hermann, translated by Katy Derbyshire

“Some time ago, in a 24-hour minimart on Berlin’s Kastanienallee, in the middle of the night, I happened to run into my psychoanalyst – two years after the end of my analysis and for the very first time outside of the room where I’d lain on his couch for years.”

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How to Comment on Social Media

by Rebecca Solnit

“1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Listening/reading delays your reaction time, and as with other sports, speed is of the essence.”

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Goin’ Down the Road

by Sandra Martin

“Given our disparate childhoods, the fact that my husband and I have bonded over road trips is as mysterious as any of the other encircling links that conjoin two people in a long relationship.”

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Compensation

by

Sydney Lea

“Not that, if I wanted, I couldn’t spend the night on that mossy ground, my only discomfort the few remnants, warm-weather mosquitoes that would soon start to strafe me anyhow, even if I walked briskly. There’d be no additional harm to me beyond a mild chill if I lingered until morning, but I’d alarm my wife and others who’d care. I’d had a stent put into a coronary artery in 2016 when I was 73 and, though I’d felt fine and fit since, who knew what those dear ones down below might imagine?”

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The Taste of Extra (Extra) Virgin Olive Oil

by

Beth Kephart

“I called my interest in extra virgin olive oil a tribute to a former student, who had, upon graduation from our shared urban campus, postponed her commitment to a high-tech New York City job so that she might live for a time in a camper among rows of Tuscan olive trees. In the picking, the pressing, the elevated air, the nearby hot springs, my former student had made her peace. She had become an acolyte for these deeply rooted, ancient trees. And authentic extra virgin oil. In her life bending toward light, she had persuaded me.”

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The Great Blue

by Kim Drew Wright

“Heron calls are coarse, a wild dog barking, frog croaking, the throaty rasps of a jungle cat. They are not songbirds. Some species of birds, like the zebra finch and fairy-wren, are not only excellent singers, but sing to their babies before they even hatch. In fact, the superb fairy-wren slips a specific note into her song while brooding that serves as a security code her chicks sing back to her to ensure they are fed. The unique note varies per fairy-wren family, like a last name. The cuckoo bird will hide her own eggs in the wren’s nest to evade the obligation of feeding her young; the special note tells the mother wren which hatchlings are her own. It’s the secret key for identifying which ones to care for—which ones to love.”

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An Excerpt of Sex With a Brain Injury

by Annie Liontas

“It starts with a big bang. It comes from the sky: a meteor, a falling object, a box. It comes out of nowhere, a car, a baseball, an opponent’s fist, a partner’s fist, an officer’s baton, a player’s helmet, the banned Kane-basami throw during the girls’ judo tournament, a skateboard crash, a roller coaster, the blast of an IED, a low-sitting shelf, a low-hanging branch, a rogue wave, a 2×4. Or you fall off your bike on a quiet road.”

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Essays from around the web…

How Starting an Investment Business Nearly Got me Indicted

by

Marlon Weems

“Growing up in Arkansas, I expected a certain degree of racism. For example, to lease the office space I wanted, I got a white friend in real estate to handle my negotiations instead of doing it in person. Still, there was more overt prejudice than I anticipated. When the building management realized they’d leased prime office space to a Black-owned business, they tried to wriggle out of my lease…But I had other problems. I had no management training, not even a college degree. Unlike today, there were no startup incubators or accelerators to mentor me. Since I was one of the first Black folks in the country to attempt something like this, I didn’t have a blueprint to rely upon.”

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With Teeth

by Sam Paul

“I know that her scathing insistence is also a form of care. It is a screaming care. A hurtful care. A care that makes me catch on my words mid-sentence if I hear the faint sound of a lisp she mentioned as a jab. But it is also a care that is massive and real and wants things for me that she didn’t have, or earlier than she got to have them. I am lucky to have had his care, and I am lucky to have hers…What is unclear is what it means to care for myself.”

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I Hate the Barbie Movie, and It’s Because I’m 44

by Anna Rawhiti-Connell 

“Perimenopause and its banal but inescapable realities gave my age a hard truth, but something else was eating away at me. Something that felt divorced from the explanations of why the bouts of sudden rage were happening. Something that was slowly churning rather than rapidly boiling…One of my angriest obsessions last year was the Barbie movie. I haven’t seen it, but I hate it. Wrapped in a big pink bow was the nagging feeling that my anger and confusion weren’t just pathological but something more existential.”

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Two Sides of the Same Coin

by Rachael Rifkin

“I wondered if this is how my mom had felt in that other hospital room two years before. As she pulled at the tubes and moaned. As she lost her ability to speak, her glazed eyes staring off into the distance, her breathing becoming labored, her movements jerky. I’d never seen someone die before. No one would say it definitively, that my mom was dying, so I had to Google 'signs of death' to confirm.”

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The Golem Plays HORSE

by Alexander Nemser

“When I was a kid, my dad was very competitive at games. This guy obliterated me at games. This guy assassinated me at games. This guy orchestrated a coup against my democratically-elected government at games. When we played games, it was like he was playing against his own father.”

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Little Lost Girlboi

by Ash Trebisacci

“I want what the Peters and the Pinocchios have: the ability to make people love me, to be open and unabashed and genuine while also holding just a little something back, keeping a flicker of mystery behind my eyes. The cleverness and determination and conviction in what I believe in, even if it’s initially misdirected. The agility and fearlessness and sureness of being in my body. The ability to be recognizably girl and boy all at once.”

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🚨Announcements:

📢 Registration Is Open for Summer Workshops at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center

Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House), Melissa Febos (Body Work), Garrard Conley (Boy Erased), and Sarah Schulman (Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up), are among the writers who will lead weeklong workshops this summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the nation's most enduring artist community. Known for its off-season fellowship that nurtured the careers of writers like Louise Glück, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Michael Cunningham, the Work Center opens its doors to the public every summer with 65 courses in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and more. The workshops run from June 16 - August 17. With the intimate classes open to only 10 students, many sell out quickly. Registration is now open. 

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📢 Narratively is now offering  results-driven classes, seminars and writing critiques taught by Narratively’s editors, contributors and storytelling heroes.

Narratively Academy's debut lineup of classes includes Telling Your Story: The 60-Minute Seminar for Kickstarting Your Memoir, with instructor Kern Carter on Tuesday, February 13, and The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel, an 8-week workshop with Audrey Clare Farley starting February 15.

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📢 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:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. The name of the author, and the author’s Twitter handle. Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

4. 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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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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