Announcing our next reading line-up!

Nov 16, 2020

Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. 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.

I Lost My Voice Before I Found It

by Jennifer Romolini (art by Sirin Thada)

The first time it happens, I’m standing on a stage. I’m ten minutes into a speech on “authenticity,” “power,” “finding your path”—the series of platitudes-with-a-twist I’ve become known for and am now invited to spout—when my voice cracks and I can no longer make the words in my brain come out as sounds from my mouth. It’s a momentary glitch in the system; a gurgling gasp, air pushing through tissue where language should be. The episode lasts seconds, but even then I know it is a signal, a “check engine” light. Something is wrong in my body and what is wrong feels serious.

Paris Desert, Tokyo Mirage

by Hitomi Kanehara (translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles)

Young children have their clothing picked for them by their parents. Girls on the edge are reined in by their boyfriends. Expat workers get notified they’re being sent home by their company. I was not a young child or a girl or an expat worker and so I had no choice but to decide for myself, and that decision was not one derived from logic or empiricism, only on personal feelings and impulses not based on any existing grounds, and the guilt and fear that with each decision I may be heading further down the wrong path made me pale. I pierced myself as if it were proof that I have responsibility for my own mind, for my own body, and then I kept removing them afterward; even as I was struck by a sense of helplessness, I would not be able to breathe if I didn’t make a new decision.

Wingtips and Shell-Toes

by Janice P. Nimura

He had equally strong ideas about how a little girl should look. There were always penny loafers, slippery on carpet until you scuffed up the soles; there were always trench coats, which no one else my age seemed to have. He liked my hair long and flinched whenever I went for a trim. He inspected my fingernails and gave me my first tube of acne cream. It was a more formal era, sure, but the appropriate level of dress for each level of occasion was not negotiable. I had a vague sense that other fathers didn’t recoil at the idea of a child wearing denim to dinner at grandma’s, but I didn’t test the theory.

Cees Nooteboom Takes a Wintry Ride Through Venice

by Cees Nooteboom (translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson)

I have finally plucked up the courage. Ten times in Venice and in a gondola for the first time. As I drink my coffee early in the morning on the corner of the Procuratie Nuove, they stand beside me: the gondolieri. Big conversations about yesterday’s match in their impenetrable Venetian dialect. It is cold on the water, a hot cappuccio helps. Outside, their slim, black, bird boats are lined up, the birds’ heads (they are birds’ heads—take a good look) pointing at the island where I am staying. Why did I never want to do it? Because it is the ultimate Venetian cliché?

For Crying Out Loud

by Renee Simms

I remember the moment my auntie began wailing at his funeral. She was my uncle’s disgraced first wife. For over an hour she’d sat among the mourners in the Episcopal church on W. Seven Mile Road listening to the somber prayers and songs. Years before, some of these mourners had known that my uncle had a white mistrelss. When he married her, some of them had attended the wedding.