Amateur autopsies, lazy mothers, and love after abuse
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and monthly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, Tin House, Granta, and Guernica. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place. It may be the start of a new work week, but at least we have this great new writing to get us through it.
How I've Changed as a Parent in the Wake of My Multiple Sclerosis Diagnosis
by Anita Felicelli (art by Celia Jacobs)
On the heels of my diagnosis, I feel like there is no way to construct a narrative around what’s happening to me, a deep betrayal for a writer. This is the part that is so challenging to explain to people: My life story now is chaos. There’s no predicting how this disease will affect my children.
The Bread Thread
by Emily Weitzman
When I sign on to my college’s gossip site, the “Anonymous Confession Board,” there’s my name at the top of the homepage. The words glare back at me.I rush into my dorm room and shut the door. I’m terrified the entire freshman class has seen the post by now. “Anonymous” could be in my English class or my dorm room or my bed.I hide in my room and call my friend Lisle, four floors below in Clark Hall. She has seen the thread and already begun retaliating. But every time she replies to defend me, the insult continues to rise to the top of the homepage.Lisle decides we should force the post down the page by starting another thread. Instead of writing slander, we set out to find a topic that’s neutral, undeniably loved.
To Put it Neatly
by Katie Simon
Our arrangement started with a URL. My friend Sarah opened my barely-used Tinder app and swiped while we watched Voldemort commit murder via Netflix. She matched me with Sameer, who, like most Tinder guys, asked me about the writing I mentioned in my profile. “I’d love to read something you’ve written,” he typed. Before I could stop her, Sarah sent Sameer a link to my most recent publication in a women’s magazine, “This Is What It’s Like To Have Sex After Being Raped: One Woman’s Story.”
The Myth of the Lazy Mothers
by Ukamaka Olisakwe
My mother-in-law bought me a sturdy, wooden stool right after I gave birth to Chi. When we came home from the hospital, I found the stool waiting in my room. The seat was small and square, as though it built was to fit a child’s buttocks. To achieve a proper sitting position on it, I was required to press my legs together and tighten my butt to fit into this small space. And Mama, as we fondly call her, was always hovering by, always begging me to sit properly, so I wouldn’t end up like those women with “noisy vaginas.”
Love After Abuse
by Lucia Osborne-Crowley
The man I am dating is asleep upstairs in my flat. He has no idea that I am in trouble. He has no idea that I am lying at the bottom of the stairs, and he never will. It seems enormously important that I keep things this way.
That Time I Conducted an Autopsy Without Any Medical Training
by Emily Franklin
I'd been a chef on historic boats off the coast of Maine, and I knew about cutting meat. When you butterfly and debone a leg of lamb, you need a steady hand and sharp knife. You have to pull the thick layer of fat away, slicing as you go, figure out where the ball joint is so you can sever it. It turns out human flesh is sort of the same, and it’s with this same sense of detachment that I press into the corpse.
Out of the Maze
by Sandy Allen
Shocked and feeling guilty I hadn’t done so sooner, I started telling relatives about this writing project I’d been working on, based on a story Bob had begun about himself. Initially, and to my surprise, these conversations seemed to go all right. But when I found an agent, who then sold the book, the news hit my extended family like an asteroid hits a planet. Various relatives were irate, suspicious of Bob’s motives as well as mine. They called me names and made threats I will not repeat. None of them had actually read my manuscript, or Bob’s. I think they were afraid of what my book might be, given what they knew about Bob and how they felt about the word “schizophrenic.”
Writers’ Resources
Four-week online workshop “Writing Personal Essays with Substance” at Catapult, Nov. 16-Dec. 14
Applications open for Tin House winter workshops
RSVP for the October 21 Memoir Monday reading—a special edition celebrating the Burn It Down anthology
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Until next Monday,