Casting calls, antidepressants, and a Jewish father
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.
Winter Baby
by Marissa Landrigan (art by Clare Nauman)
At our first appointment, the midwife tells me it’s safe for me to stay on the Zoloft if I need to. I don’t really consider the possibility. There are plenty of things I know I could have in small doses—coffee, tuna fish, alcohol—but I don’t. I’m not a hard-liner. It’s just that, this way, if anything goes wrong, I don’t have to wonder whether or not it was my fault.
Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)
by Sheila Watt-Cloutier
Founded on respect, our appeasement of the animals we harvested took many forms: for instance, giving a newly killed seal or walrus a mouthful of water, a practice based on the knowledge from a deep understanding of and connection to the animals we hunt that these mammals, having spent all their lives in the sea, craved a drink of fresh water. Taboos associated with particular animals were strictly observed. In this way, care was taken to avoid mingling creatures of the sea with those of the land, and so there were prohibitions against sewing caribou-skin clothing on the sea ice. Nor could the flesh of seal and caribou be boiled in the same pot. I remember my mother reminding me of this even when I would eat both frozen fish and frozen caribou together. Above all, the absolute bond between my ancestors and the animals they hunted (and, by extension, the land, sea and air) was founded on respect.
A Year Without an Ending
by Jess Zimmerman
But this was not a normal day. This felt like the unseasonably warm day in my first year of college when the Massachusetts winter lifted enough for our blood to flow again, and this brief reprieve was so precious that my friends and I cut class and went down to the lake to sunbathe in our sweaters. The projected slackening of political disaster had my husband and me tipsy before noon—we went to the park to see friends, one of only a tiny handful of social outings since March, and even with the masks and distance it felt like a jubilee, the release of all our burdens. In the excitement, I somehow forgot to finish the puzzle. And that was it. An uneventful ending, something I’d been working on for months snipped suddenly off, clean as any thread.
Next!
by Barclay Bram
To be in fashion week was to be stepping into the future, a reminder that fashion existed on a speculative timescale. On that February day, when I went to cast for Moncler, I walked down a busy Milanese street, following Citymapper on my phone. I arrived at my destination, stepping through a massive doorway that opened into a courtyard. My heart sank. There was a long line snaking its way through the space. My agency had told me that Moncler was only looking to cast a few guys for its show; they already had a few booked who had done their campaign, and they had a roster of regular bookings. I thought they had given me this information as a boost: they’re only looking for a few guys, but here you are, being called for the casting. Instead, I guess they had said it as a warning. They are only looking for a few guys, and it’s a crapshoot. I couldn’t count the number of models in the line in front of me. It snaked back and forth enough times that I couldn’t get a good sense of it even if I’d tried.
Finding My Father Through His Relationship with Judaism
by Deborah Tannen
Everything about my father is Jewish: his love of reading, of ideas, of learning make him much like a Talmudic scholar; his wry, self-deprecating humor; the jokes he tells; that he’s a master joke teller who knows a joke—a Jewish joke—for nearly every circumstance and topic that arises when he’s in a social situation. Even his distaste for pets—he put up with my adored cats, but never approved of them—reflects a discomfort with the very notion of animals in a home, which, I learn as an adult, is common among orthodox Jews. (When my new kitten mistakes my father’s long leg for a tree and tries to run up it, using claws to hang on, I fear she’s proving him right.)
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