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Oct 21, 2019

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.

The Secret Revenge of an Assault Survivor

by Estela Salazar as told to Amy Roost

Things got worse after I graduated from elementary school. Like all of the graduates, I signed the backs of my school photos and handed them out to my friends. Eduardo got ahold of one of them and typed on it: I am Estela Salazar, and I am going to serve Eduardo like a wife, on my mother’s order. My signature was at the bottom. He showed me what he wrote on the photo. “With this photo that you’ve signed, I can put your mom in jail,” he said. “So now you must do whatever I say.”

Why We Cry When We’re Angry

by Marissa Korbel

I curated my emotions to look the way they were supposed to: pretty. My anger pacifiable, easily calmed, all pink cheeks and dainty trembling. A whisper-rage that tremored through me. I wanted to behave. I wanted to fit into the mold of girl. And inside my body, alchemy began: when I got angry, truly, rumbling, seismic angry, I began to cry.

When I Froze My Eggs, I Wasn’t Prepared for the Depression That Followed

by Karissa Chen

I imagined I could feel everything I wanted floating away from me: a partner, a baby, now my best friends. I thought: I can do everything I can think of to move toward the life I want and still I will fuck it up. I thought: I will spend my life powerless, watching everyone around me find happiness while I stay here, static, stuck. I thought: I am selfish and ungrateful and self-centered for even feeling this way when other people in the world have real problems. I thought: There is no one in this world I can talk to about any of this. I am utterly, completely alone.

Chimeras

by Elanor Broker

I’m with friends at a favorite bar, half a drink down, and I feel that twinge. It’s like an electric whine, almost audible, a sharp vibration, starting down in my toes and creeping up my leg. And then it’s clear, tumbling like an avalanche: my jaw too square; eyebrows too thick; bristles popping through my foundation; shoulders hulking. I look, the inner voice says, like neither a man nor a woman, but a monstrous agglomeration. Look there, that ripple on my drink—it’s from my voice, that deep roll, probably. As I sit, I’m ever more lost, more confused. How are my friends so unfazed by this? How are they acting as if everything is normal, as if it’s all okay? How are they not seeing this?

I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive

by Elisabet Velasquez

Most days I avoid my mother at all costs. I’ve spent the past 18 years dedicated to my own motherhood. At 16, I gave birth to my daughter, and four months later I was homeless. When she kicked me out of the house with a newborn, I decided it would be the last time my mother hurt me.

Domestic Coffee

by Rachel Purdy

I know exactly how my grandfather liked his coffee because I was the one making it for him two days before he died. I was the one piling the grounds high, as he sat in the Windsor chair, telling me, “Almost. A little more.”