Coral reefs and queer liberation
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.
How to Learn About Sex When Your Famous Sex-Advice Father Teaches You Nothing
by Paulina Pinsky (art by Jo Zixuan Zhou)
I heard Loveline on the radio for the first time after I got my driver’s license. At 16, I would turn on KROQ-FM after a long night of studying at my best friend Cate’s house and let Dad’s voice guide me home. Prior to that, I’d hardly ever heard my father talk about sex. Contrary to what most people assumed, my father didn’t talk about sex at the dinner table.
Shifting Baselines
by Callum Roberts
I first began to take my master’s students to the Maldives to experience its marvellous coral reefs in 2014. Sixteen years had passed since the El Niño warming had shrivelled its corals and their renewal was nearly complete. Just as a tree which falls in the forest can offer opportunities to others, space freed up on a reef is soon colonised by seaweeds and a riot of invertebrate life, including new corals. Coral growth is slow, typically ranging from about a centimetre a year for colonies with rounded stony shapes to twenty centimetres for the most vigorous arborescent species. Although visible scars remained, the wounds had more or less healed.
How Queer Sex Liberated Me
by Britni de la Cretaz
Even still, there were limits to what I let myself fantasize about. There was a part of me that suspected my lack of desire was related to an understanding of my queerness different from the one I’d held until that point, but I couldn’t go far down that road because if it were true, it would mean the end of my marriage and blowing up my entire life. Yes, I watched queer porn in an attempt to determine if it turned me on, but my denial often got in the way and I would have to turn it off and put on straight porn to reassure myself that I was still attracted to people like my husband.
When Your Memoir Has the Word ‘Rape’ in the Title
by Michelle Bowdler
"A rape victim’s experience of rebuilding their life cannot be told without speaking explicitly about what it feels like to be dehumanized and terrorized and then live in a world where rape is used for a laugh and dismissed with a wave; a world where the accused too often can retain their position of power and privilege so long as they simply declare, "Didn’t happen."
Voices on Addiction: None of This is Bullshit
by Sheree L. Greer
Navigating the afternoon of my father’s court date involved a special brand of mental gymnastics. I would look at and listen to and respond to everything and anything but him. I pulled up to the house my father lived in—a dingy white, wooden four-square house with a large porch that sat back from the street in a neighborhood some called “The Zone,” a shorthand for ‘The Twilight Zone.” I couldn’t help but watch him walk toward the car.
On the Road
by Meg Bernhard
I felt, as I often did on the long drive, the limitations of language. Any attempt at finding adequate words to describe such vastness veered toward cliché. I was reminded of a time I walked through Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses” sculptures, massive iron pieces that distort one’s sense of space. “As soon as you start reducing it to how you see it,” Serra said of his sculptures, “it takes away from the fact that your body and your haptic senses don’t register that way. Nor can such experiences be distilled into words. The words are always made up behind the experience, after the experience.”
Writers’ Resources
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