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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.
Mind the Gap
by Emma Rault
All my life, I’ve been drawn to older people. Precocious and cerebral, I was the kid that loved sitting at the adults’ table. My crushes were no different. Every time another lesbian my age tells me about the best friend she was in love with in middle school—something that seems to be universally acknowledged as a queer rite of passage—I’m secretly bemused.
A Bleed of Blue
by Amy Key
I have never tired of Blue. Perhaps the reason I can listen to it with as much emotional candour as that first time back in my teenage bedroom with the lava lamp doing its mysterious work, is because I’ve no object to attach to the songs. That might be something to be grateful for – in the past I’ve had to give up whole musical genres because they were too closely aligned with a source of romantic pain. I had always thought that in Blue Joni had taught me about love, about being in love and losing it. Now I think it’s more that Joni taught me about longing. About the gap between what you want and what you have, and what you have and what you had wanted.
Nightmares Before Christmas
by Tabitha Blankenbiller
All my life, watching this movie has marked the beginning of the fall. I put on the soundtrack as background noise while I drag a dozen ginormous Rubbermaid totes in from the garage, filled with the spooky decorations I’ve been collecting since my first college apartment, when I could barely afford a Chipotle burrito but still found enough dollars for fake pumpkins at JoAnn Fabrics. These are the traditions I’ve kindled from the brightest memories of my youth, the ones I dreamed of sharing and building even bigger with my own child.
On Struggling with Drug Addiction and the System of Incarceration
by Chris Dennis
There is a lie, thin as paper, folded between every layer of the criminal justice system, that says you deserve whatever happens to you in the system, because you belong there. Every human at the helm of every station needs to believe it—judge, attorney, jailer, prisoner—and part of the process involves each of them continually convincing one another that this lie is true. I certainly believed it, most of the time at least, even when it took months for a medical officer to finally administer an antidepressant I already had a prescription for. Even through the withdrawals from Effexor—anxiety, agitation, vomiting, and sensory disturbances that people often accurately describe as “brain shivers”—and this was on top of the withdrawals from the illegal drugs I was addicted to. It took three weeks of asking a correctional officer every day before I could be seen for a kidney infection. Compared to many inmates though, my grievances were minimal.
The Ghost on the Zoom Call
by Judy Bolton-Fasman
There are weeks when my mother is visibly delighted to be on Zoom. Those are the times she sees her mother, my abuela, inhabiting a Zoom cubicle. “Look, there’s my mother,” she says, waving and smiling. Abuela has been dead for over forty years. Over text, my sister and I debate whether to tell my mother this hard, bedrock fact. “Is it dementia?” my sister asks. I type back that I think Mom spends too much time alone in her room. “It’s a by-product of the Covid-19 lockdown—a hallucination,” I write back.
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