Don't miss our reading tonight!
Tonight! Join us on Zoom at 8 EST for readings from Billy-Ray Belcourt, Rose Andersen, Damon Young, and Alisson Wood—Q&A to follow. Register here!
And you can support these authors, Memoir Monday, and independent bookstores, by purchasing tonight’s featured books from the Memoir Monday Book List at Bookshop.org.
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.
It Doesn’t Hurt, It Hurts All the Time
by Jess Zimmerman
Ideally, the pain is a proportional response to the damage: as bad as it needs to be to make you stop what you were doing, sticking around no longer than it takes to heal. But it’s possible to unhook the sensation from the cause. Any number of factors can influence your pain tolerance: cussing loudly can decrease your experience of pain (this has been tested in the lab), and being depressed can increase it. Some injuries hurt less when you see them coming; some don’t hurt until you look at them.
Voices on Addiction: Letting it Suck
by Liesl Schwabe
I wanted to believe that details mattered. That I gave off an impression of competence. So when, in the Sunday Times Magazine, I came across an interview with some random, successful person extolling the virtues of a blazer made from sweatshirt material—cozy but professional—I bought such a blazer, which then proved useful not only on airplanes, but also in emergency rooms, hospitals, treatment centers, support groups, and other places bleak with air conditioning and worry.
Letter From St. Paul: On the Complex Flavors of Black Joy
by Michael Kleber-Diggs
What I wanted to say and didn’t say was this: “I’m fine today; the hard part will begin soon. The hard part for me starts when things get comfortable for you again. The hard part begins the day you return to your normal routines.”
My Lifelong Journey to Find Pee-wee Herman
by Angelina Drake
As an adult, I’ve gone years without watching any Pee-wee content, and then, at a summer screening of Big Adventure in Central Park, am reminded I know every line of dialogue by heart. I find Pee-wee in my coping mechanisms, when I slip into a character voice to diffuse difficult emotions, letting zany energy overtake the self-destructive. I still drift into call-and-response cues when I feel I have nothing good to say to my family. And I make a point of surrounding myself with bright colors so I can find them when everything else feels dark. My parents have wound in and out of reliability. But Pee-wee, his stories, and his sensibilities have always been there. Like a piece of talking furniture, his work my constant companion.
La Ville Morte
by Benjamín Labatut
The Empty City archetype is a mental construct distilled from the agony of countless real communities. It is the afterglow left by the fires that razed their buildings to the ground, the still-felt shivers of the earthquakes that tore their foundations apart, the pangs of hunger brought on by drought, the scars of the plagues which emptied them overnight. But Manin warns that these phantom images, though faint and fading, are neither passive nor neutral: on the contrary, they nourish our darkest and most violent desires.
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You can also support Memoir Monday—and indie bookstores!—by browsing this Bookshop.org list of every book that’s been featured at the Memoir Monday reading series. It’s a great place to find some new titles to add to your TBR list!
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