Baboons, fat camp, and writing as weaving
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.
What My Grandmother’s Eyes Have Seen
by Julie Moon (art by Kim Salt)
On our drive, I was stunned to see for myself the very roads my Halmu had walked. I pulled out my iPhone, but no matter how far I zoomed in, how many filters I tried, I could see nothing more than a well-paved highway, threading so many rice paddies to neon-green exit signs. I started to wonder if I could ever give language to my grandmother’s memories across the generations between us. I began to doubt whether I could make my words bring to life all that she has seen, when I have never seen these things with my own eyes.
What Would a Woman of Color Do?
by Julie Sunyoung Chung
This past February, I went to a conference for first-generation, low-income college students at Princeton University, where I attended a panel about guilt, “the hidden inhibitor of success.” Fifty years ago, the lecture hall’s amphitheater-style rows of antique wooden desks would have been mostly filled by the white sons of America’s educated elite. But this time it was packed with college students like me, the daughter of Korean immigrants, wearing a winter coat bought with funds provided by my school’s financial aid program.
How Living with Baboons Prepared Me for Living Through High School
by Keena Roberts
Mom and Dad said we’d only have to spend six months in the U.S. this time, since they only had to teach one semester at the University of Pennsylvania, so that meant just six months I had to survive before they would pull me out of school so we could go back to Botswana and I could hang out with my monkeys again. Our teachers were never thrilled about this, but as long as we promised to keep up with the curriculum in a home-schooling capacity, they had agreed to let us go when our parents needed to. I could do six months, right?
The Spiritual Path at Fat Camp
by Mona Kirschner
A purple and yellow butterfly flew next to my window as we drove up. I hated butterflies, always thought of them as the mean girls of insects. All colorful, flashy wings on the same old insect body.
Making
by Esther Rutter
It is no coincidence that our terms for fibre and fable intertwine. When we want to recount a story, we spin a yarn. If we deceive, we pull the wool over people’s eyes. For centuries, female spinsters (the masculine form is spinner) spun wool to earn their livelihood, and the word gradually became synonymous with ‘unmarried woman’, one not dependent on a husband for her keep. We weave narratives as we weave cloth, and our words for them are bound together: text and textile share the same Latin root, textus, ‘that which is woven’.
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