Don't miss our reading tonight!

Jul 20, 2020

Join us tonight for a Memoir Monday reading featuring Tyrese Coleman, R. Eric Thomas, Shayla Lawson, and Ross Gay! Register via Zoom, here.

And you can buy tonight’s readers’ books (along with all of our past readers’ books!) through our Bookshop.org list, which supports the readers, Memoir Monday, and independent bookstores!

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.

The Doe

by Daisy Lafarge

In between teaching poetry to undergraduates, tearful conversations with friends, talking to lawyers and worrying about rent, I sit down with The Decameron. Writing in the still-smoking aftermath of the Black Death, Boccaccio witnessed first-hand the effects of the disease which culled the population of his native Florence by half.

The Secret Land of Horses

by Lavinia Liang

I played because I knew I would never ride. My parents never told me so explicitly, but it was as good as a deal we’d shaken on. They did not have to tell me that horseback riding was for people who did not have better, more urgent, more pressing, more important things on which to spend their money. People who, for the most part, were not the children of immigrants.

My Wild Escape Into the Parrot Protection Program

by Ali Wunderman

Just as I was about to go into full panic mode, I was introduced to the reason I was there. Set just steps away from where I’d hung my hammock, twin baby macaws stuck their heads out of the knotted cavity of the tallest tropical hardwood tree in the area and eyed me with deep curiosity. Their screeching parents kept watch from afar, unable to distinguish between the help I offered and the danger other humans presented. Even so, a sense of purpose accompanied me back to my hammock that night, comforting me as I settled in for my first night alone in the jungle.

Waiting for a War, Waiting to Live

by Asako Serizawa

September again in Boston: the whole city deserted, TVs flickering like electric tongues behind every window. Within weeks, racial profiling and the Patriot Act would resurrect images of Japanese American internment camps and McCarthy-era witch hunt, while airport security and luggage restrictions would usher in the age of rolling carry-ons and clear toiletry bags, but the stunned days following the September 11 attacks sludged along, the minutes stretching into hours, the trauma of the eternally unfolding present memorialized by the endless replay of the collapsing towers.

Summer Camp 1968

by Samuel G. Freedman

Humbled until now, silent and plodding under his weight, John transformed before our eyes. All the ridicule he had endured at camp poured back out through his fists. I had never been so near a serious fistfight—playground posturing was more the norm at my middle school—and the thud of John’s blows sent tremors through me. So did the sudden way the wiry boy’s face swelled up with purplish lumps as he staggered from the fight, the loser. From that day on, John swaggered among us, and we parted when he approached, fearing what our scorn had created.

Voices on Addiction: Primary Source

by Jennie Burke

I feel guilty for writing about his assumed cause of death before the results; I have no proof it was the drugs. But the part of his brain that was capable of responsive affection perished five years ago when my dad died. He couldn’t handle it. He tripped into withdrawal in the ICU at Dad’s deathbed. Clawing at the skin on his neck, sweating through a Nike Golf ball cap, he nervously checked his phone then announced that he had to leave. My weary mother snapped to panicked attention while holding Dad’s hand.