Biker dudes, little dogs, and gifted kids
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly 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 to Transition When Your Models of Masculinity Are Macho Biker Dudes
by Cooper Lee Bombardier (art by Vaughn Parish)
I was still working up the nerve to make it to a Tuesday night intake at the Tenderloin trans clinic, where I hoped to walk away with a paper prescription for hormones in my pocket. I was scared and unsure. Faced with the opportunity to become a man, I studied the ones at work with an intensity I hoped I kept hidden. If they noticed my scrutiny, did it seem creepy?
Waiting for Alice
by Leslie Kendall Dye
People often make fun of small dogs like Alice. She is a teacup toy poodle, she is under 10 pounds, and people say, “That dog is the size of a rat.” Yes, I want to say, and you are the size of a Great Dane. So what?
Six Kilometres
by Adam Weymouth
I am sitting on the veranda of a well-to-do cafe that could be in Vienna or Lisbon – high ceilings, petits fours, the waiters in black aprons and white shirts – and just over five and a half kilometres away is the largest refugee camp in Europe. Because my partner is working at the camp full-time I have been looking after our daughter. It is possible to be on Lesbos and have little idea the camp is here. There are signs, if you know to look for them. In the graffiti – no borders, fuck frontiers, blue stamp for all.
Poetics of Lineage
by Sophia Terazawa
I like to think of myself as a poet because of my mother. She was beaten, too, by her father in Saigon, except, she says, she’d wail out pitifully like a half-feathered macaw before he ever laid a hand on her, so that, even after each strike, she knew the sting would be much less painful than that of her siblings; so that, even her older sister, a stubbornly quiet girl, and later, a vocal revolutionary during the war, chose to resist it; so that, every time my own Japanese father hit me, my Vietnamese mother tended to remind me that someone else had it much, much worse—and I believed her.
Why the Label of 'Gifted Kid' Isn't Always a Gift
by s.e. smith
“I just don’t understand why this is so hard,” a friend said, pointing at a page in my notebook with his pencil while eating a sandwich with the other hand. It was thirty minutes before class and he was trying to demonstrate how to solve for X for the tenth time, from yet another angle of approach, but it remained a stubborn mystery to me. His words were meaningless gabble and my increasing desperation made me panic as I painstakingly tried to work through the problem, not understanding where I was going wrong, crumbles of hummus from my own sandwich smearing the paper.
World Without End
by Martha Park
On my first visit to my husband’s childhood home in Western Kentucky—after I got the tour of the house, the yard, and the garden—we paused on the deck overlooking the waves of tall, undulating grasses. Colin nudged his father: “Aren’t you going to show her the bunker?”
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