A Passel of Personal Narratives to Read This Week...
Plus: Classes from Narratively Academy and Diane Jacob, a call for submissions, and two conferences...
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.
Follow Memoir Land on BlueSky: @memoirland.bsky.social
Essays from partner publications…
A World Run by Mothers
by Saba Sams
“I was twenty-two years old when I became a mother. I got pregnant on the coil, which I’d had inserted in Manchester, when I’d been living there as an undergraduate. In the clinic, Bridget Jones was playing on a small television suspended from the ceiling above the hospital bed, and the nurse advised me to watch it to distract myself. It was the scene where Bridget, in Thailand, eats a magic mushroom omelette and wades fully dressed into the sea. As the speculum was pushed inside me, I tried to imagine that I too was tripping, waist-deep in warm water. Still, the pain of the coil being inserted was extraordinary. I nearly passed out as I stood up to leave. The nurse pressed me into her swivel chair and brought me a plastic cup of water that tasted like coins.”
The Never-Ending Scrutiny of an Aging Body
by Cathrin Bradbury
“I did a quick mental survey of the things that had come out of my mouth in the past forty-eight hours: “When did my elbows start to sag?” "Do these flip-flops make my stomach look thick?” If I was constantly assessing myself, it would follow that I was doing the same with everyone else. Putting down my body slammed my niece back into hers.”
Winter Kimchee
by Elizabeth Lee
“Crying in H Mart makes me cry because although it covers topics close to my diasporic upbringing, it, like so many books that came before, was not written for me. Zauner is explaining to me a world in which I already live; when I read her book, I am the one looking through the window.”
You Don’t Own Me: On Screenwriter & Novelist Eleanor Perry
by
“Encouraged by her new husband Frank Perry, who she married in 1960, to switch disciplines so they could work as a team, Eleanor scripted the groundbreaking films David and Lisa (1962), The Swimmer (1968) and Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970). At 48 years-old she began breaking barriers while contributing to a changing cinematic landscape; Frank served as resident auteur on those projects, as well as three others. Still, I don’t believe any of their films are as celebrated today to the degree that they should be. This is my attempt to rectify that.”
Essays from around the web…
I Don’t Want Anyone to Read My Diaries, Yet I Can’t Burn Them
by
“I grabbed more pages from the 1990 box, but before I had a chance to incinerate them, a few sentences caught my attention. I was writing about what it had been like for me as a young writer in New York just starting out. “My agent thinks this draft is really there. When I asked her about breakout potential, though, she said she thought it would be a tough book to break out with because it’s ‘serious and sad.’ But on the other hand, it’s ‘accessible, moves fast, is titillating and sexy.’ In other words, who knows.””
This story isn’t about the priest who abused me. It’s about my mother.
by JoAnn Stevelos
“Like so many others before and after him, Frank had been able to use the Catholic church as a cover. This is why, on Valentine’s Day in 2019, decades after I’d last seen Frank, my husband, Todd, and I found ourselves crammed in the tiny reception area of the Bull and Moose Club in Albany, New York. The room was lively, bursting with anticipation. We were there to attend a press conference heralding the Child Victims Act, which allows survivors of child sexual abuse to pursue civil damages against their abusers and their enablers, no matter how long ago the abuse occurred.”
In the Deepest of Night
by
“Never wake a sleepwalker. In the deepest of night, when you were healthy and walking with military bearing fully awake, you skimmed your glass of low-fat milk with saltines. Your crunching reverberated throughout our downstairs. Now, you are back in the same spot in the kitchen without the milk or saltines. And you will remember none of it in the morning.”
I Was In The Women's Restroom When A Man Came In And Called Out A Question That Left Me Nauseated
by
“‘Hello? Are you a male or female in there?’ a rumbling voice called into the women’s restroom. A man’s boots stepped across the threshold, clunking on the tile floor, as I sat alone in the stall closest to the door. I stopped breathing and my heart skipped. My pants were down around my ankles, and no one else was within earshot. My hands went to where my freshly shorn curls used to be — fingers twining into my 2 remaining inches of hair — and I wondered if I had made a mistake.”
We've Got War To Cover
by Dante Fuoco
“2007—Anna Nicole’s death: her biggest hit? In the days after, more than half of cable news is devoted to her. In the weeks preceding her funeral, her death is the third biggest national story, outpaced—barely—by the 2008 presidential race and the Iraq War. An Iraq vet decries troop morale is impacted. . . by the fact that America is paying attention to. . . Anna Nicole Smith. The reality star with a fake name. Vickie Lynn Hogan has died. Who cares? We’ve got war to cover, we’ve got war to cover.”
You Don’t Need to Leave a Country to Be in Exile
by
“I visit their home state one summer or the other, and am suddenly surrounded by strangers called aunts and cousins. We gather around a table to talk about memories I can’t claim. And we eat from a boiling pot of crabs.”
There Are Skeletons in These Dirts
by Jessica Hinds
“I fell for Christina because I felt how Christina fell for me, and I like how that feels. I have never been motivated by romance. While my sisters were playing house, I played school. I never dreamed about a wedding, I fantasized about book signings and Broadway standing ovations. I failed to swoon over boybands, opting for the distorted melodies of Billy Corgan and Marylin Manson. I choose my first boyfriend, a barbershop quartet singing, civil war reenacting 16-year-old, because he had a reliable car and was nerdy enough that his devotion and chauffeuring would be guaranteed. I had thought perhaps this was due to my queerness, but even after I switched to dating women, I experienced dating as the intersection of a social buddy, a sex partner, and that person who will help you move. It’s practical in our society to couple up. After rattling off what I was looking for in a partner, a friend informed me that I did not in fact want a girlfriend or wife I wanted a personal assistant, a maid, and a prostitute.”
What Remains: Voice and The Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad
by Farah Ahamed
“I first became interested in “voice” through encounters with silence: the absence of voices, those forgotten, deliberately excluded or erased. A couple of years ago, as I compiled an anthology of menstruation experiences, I noticed which voices were missing from the mainstream discourse, particularly those marginalized by politics, poverty, occupation, religion or social status. I saw more clearly which voices were privileged, ignored or shouted down. This led me to search out those voices which were muted either from fear, shame or lack of confidence, or oppressed by cultural norms.”
The Night I Became Pat Benatar
by
“My hands were shaking while I did this. I had the vertiginous sensation of falling. But if I sounded wonky, Andrew didn’t say. Instead, he kissed me and told me he loved the performance. It was the first time anyone had complimented me for doing this thing I was certain I couldn’t do.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 At Academy Tomorrow! Brad Scriber leads The Expert’s Guide to Fact-Checking Your Nonfiction Book
Tomorrow! Brad Scriber, longtime fact-checker at National Geographic, will lead The Expert’s Guide to Fact-Checking Your Nonfiction Book, at Narratively Academy. Tuesday, March 17 at 7pm ET.
📢 Jumpstart Your Cookbook Proposal workshop with starting Monday, March 17.
A 3-week Zoom class for people ready to write their proposals for a cookbook, food memoir, food travel or history. Proposals are the documents agents and editors read to decide whether they are interested in your non-fiction book. Workshop your ideas and work, and write sections during class.
Monday, March 17, 4-7 p.m. PT; Monday, March 24, 4-7 p.m. PT; Monday, March 31, 4-7 p.m. PT. $425 per person
📢 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.📢 My Panel at The Woodstock Bookfest Sunday, April 6th
On Sunday, April 6th I’ll be moderating a panel at The Woodstock Bookfest called “On Permission: Daring to Tell,” inspired by Elissa Altman’s wonderful forthcoming book, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create. Participating will be Altman; Hyeseung Song, author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl; and Jonathan Lerner, author of Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid. This is the first of THREE events I’ll be doing with Altman around the publication of Permission. This book couldn’t be more in my wheelhouse, and I am a big fan of hers, so I’m thrilled and honored to be taking part in a few of her events.
📢 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.
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!
Thank you so much for sharing my work! I am honored.
The Dani Shapiro piece is to die for.