A Passel of Personal Essays to Read Over the New Year...
Plus: Our partnership with Literary Liberation and new workshops there, and Narratively's 2024 upcoming workshops...
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.
Happy new year! Through tomorrow, 12/31/24: Save 20% forever on a paid subscription to Memoir Land! Memoir Land is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors for original writing. It publishes five days weekly, with only Thursday’s writing prompts pay-walled. To support this work, become a paid subscriber.
~Oh, hey: The crowd-sourced edition of Memoir Monday a few weeks ago was a hit! Thanks to those of you who suggested so many excellent essays. I’m going to make it a regular 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…
Still Working On It
by
“Charlie, one of the cooks at the diner, is lying on the floor in front of the fridge on a short piece of cardboard, wholesale Crisco oil packaging. He’s in a fetal position to fit on it. He’s sick as a dog. I know sick dogs because we had two of them after the Communist Party allowed dogs in apartments. They both died, and we buried them in the park under two pine trees where the main road made a turn. Dad said it wasn’t Christian to mark the graves since they were animals. Otherwise, the stones would have read ‘Charlie and Maxie, our best friends if we ever had any.’”
First Bird
by
“In birding circles, they say the first bird you see in a new year sets the tone for what follows. Anything can be meaningful if you see it as a sign. On the first day of 2020, as I drove to an early morning exercise class, a pigeon barreled out of the sky. Its body thwacked against my windshield with a horrible soft sound. One moment I was zoning out in traffic and the next the bird was coming toward me, colliding with the glass that separated inside the car from outside.”
The Weird Surprise of Growing Old
by
“So why at 70 are we surprised to find ourselves cast upon the shore of old age? Surprise is surely ridiculous yet…I don’t know a single person of 70 or older who is not astonished that they, too, have grown old. At 78, I’m still absorbing this idea myself, and I announce my age a lot, in sheer disbelief. (I’ll confess it’s gratifying when people feign shock at the number.)”
Out of Body
by
“Now, my eyes on the screen, I think of how I might remember this moment when that face finally looks up at mine. I think of our donor, Bettina, who is somewhere going about her life, not knowing her egg has hatched inside Margot’s womb. I think of my grandmother and wonder when I’ll finally find the right words to tell her—in my heritage language that lacks all these controversial scientific terms—without dishonoring her vulnerable values and sacrifices. She raised me to do everything myself and to silently push through pain, and here I am outsourcing the very essence of what makes a woman worthy…”
Essays from around the web…
The New Age Bible
by Sheila Heti
“Last spring, I flew across the continent to California and drove into the beautiful hills of Mill Valley to visit the independent publisher of A Course in Miracles. I wanted to learn more about this book, one of the strangest I had ever read. I had been in its thrall for months, and sensed that if I could understand how it had been written, I would understand everything. I would learn how to live and write anew, words would start flowing from my hands, and I would again be happy.”
How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?
by Dr. Lilly Jay
“No one gets married thinking they’ll get divorced, in the same way we don’t board a plane expecting to crash. But I really never thought I would get divorced. Especially not just after giving birth to my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband’s new relationship with a celebrity. In this season of shock and mourning, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself as a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health.”
Unraveling a Woman: Study of Forced Structural Augmentation
by Sayuri Ayers
“In the field of cosmos-resource harvesting, guilt and shame continue to be valuable energy resources, fueling the machinery needed to degrade human society. In this study, a woman was selected to undergo a novel technique for extracting guilt and shame. If successful, the process will be utilized in large-scale processing of humanity.”
As a School Employee, I Discouraged Dads From Being Involved. Now, It's Happening to Me
by
“During my kids' first year in daycare, my wife and I battled over who would attend the intro session. I was adamant I had to be there because I needed to make sure staff knew I was a dad they should keep in the loop. My fear of being cut out of my kids' lives is real. I know — I did it to other fathers. During my decade-plus working with children and families as a community and school social worker, I had a Microsoft Word file for easy access to parent contacts. Every time, I called the moms first.”
Child Catchers
by Josh McColough
“If you grew up in the late seventies and early eighties, you knew about missing kids. They were everywhere, in that they were nowhere to be seen. Everyone was looking for them, no one could find them. You knew about child abductions as you did about AIDS and crack cocaine and Russia’s nuclear arsenal and Satan in rock music. All of these terrors were at our doorsteps each day, waiting to be let in. But the strangers—they were out there, trolling neighborhoods for unattended kids who were dumb enough to hop into their cars.”
Gisèle Pelicot Is A Hero, But What Does Her Case Do For Imperfect Victims Like Me?
by
“But I didn’t go to the police. Unlike Gisèle, I had no video evidence, and as her case proves, rapists don’t want to admit they’re rapists even when there is. All I had were text messages painting these men as nice, normal guys ― the kind of ‘Mr. Everyman’ types who assaulted Gisèle. Unlike Gisèle, I was 21 and feared a character assassination. Unlike Gisèle, my rapes weren’t extreme enough to make headlines, but they were still life-altering, reality-shattering crimes against my body.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 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.📢 Write with Literary Liberation this January!
Check out Literary Liberation’s 2025 writing class schedule featuring new classes centered around removing creative blocks, telling your truth and embodiment. We now offer sliding scale! Our first workshop begins Jan 5th!
📢 New Workshops at Narratively Academy:
Narratively Academy just released their Winter 2025 writing class schedule featuring 12 new classes this January to March, from a free seminar with Creative Nonfiction founder Lee Gutkind to a Deep Revision workshop with author Katey Schultz.
📢 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!
