Avatar: The Last Airbender, nuns, and a mastectomy
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.
Fool Me Once
by Amory Rowe Salem
But the woman in the hotel mirror reflected a different story. No matter how hard I stared at her, pivoting like a ballerina trapped in a music box, there wasn’t an angle that didn’t feature her breasts, or at least the suggestion of them. In two days those breasts would be gone. Who would I be then?
How Legend of Korra Gave a Big Black Girl Permission to Be Broken
by Ravynn Stringfield
The promise of Korra was initially what drew me into the Avatar: The Last Airbender world. Where I saw a show about learning your strengths in Avatar: The Last Airbender, in The Legend of Korra, a sequel of sorts to ATLA, I saw a story about becoming aware of your own weakness and fault lines—and what happens when they are tapped in just the wrong way.
The Hole in the Fence
by Adrian Van Young
Beyond that fence reside the nuns—a whole nun condo—two stories tall and eggshell-blue. The nuns were there before we came. I imagined uncanny habits with shadows inside them, but these are chill, back-to-the-land nuns. Sometimes I see their lights at night, the mellow, anonymous squares of their windows.
My Life in Cars: On Driving and the Dread of My Own Power
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
My father was to the motor born. He drove for pleasure when he was calm and drove for relief when he was enraged, and drove for the sake of driving. He’d take anyone anywhere; all you had to was ask. “Come,” he’d beckon when I was a child, “let’s go for a ride.” I hopped in and we were off. No seat belts to fuss with back then.
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