Don't miss our reading tonight!
Tonight! Join us on Zoom for readings and a q&a with Athena Dixon, Sarah Kasbeer, Angela Chen, and Melissa Faliveno. Register here.
And you can purchase these authors’ books—along with every book ever featured at Memoir Monday—from our Bookshop.org list! All purchases made through this list help support 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.
My Dad, the Globetrotting Businessman, Paleographer...and Spy?
by Julia Métraux
But … was he more interesting than I’d always thought? Was he maybe even hiding something? I’d never known much about his work, but I did know that he had a strange habit of popping up in places going through turmoil: Germany during the Cold War, Bangladesh after its partition, and Colombia while the drug war was raging during the early 1990s. The more I talked to people, the more I started to wonder if my dad really was a spy.
He’s Starting School at Home, But I’m Just Happy He’s Here
by Melody Schreiber
Yesterday was my son’s first day of preschool. He dressed up in his favorite power outfit—a unicorn hoodie—and reluctantly posed for his first-day photo, squirming and excited. Then, finally, the big moment: meeting his classmates. “Fire truck!” he shouted, reaching toward the classmate holding the truck. But his fingers touched only glass. His class, of course, is virtual.
What Becoming a Mermaid Taught Me About Being a Modern Woman
by Lara Ehrlich
I didn’t transform when I put on a tail. Although the spring felt like a different world, it didn’t liberate me from everyday life; my responsibilities were there to meet me when I rose for breath. I didn’t emerge from the spring a new woman who can effortlessly juggle motherhood and work, wifehood and writing. But by putting on that tail and giving into the fantasy, I learned a few things about living everyday life.
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
by Robin Jennings
What I do remember of my earliest viewings of Girl, Interrupted is the familiarity I felt in each frame. It was the first time I saw a story on screen resemble my own. The women of Claymoore were much like the emotionally disturbed adolescents in my program; we were all outsiders as much as we were troubled, thrown together into a patchwork support system. None of us had friends outside of each other. I’d grown especially close to two girls who were a few years older than me. We’d meet up on weekends to go to the mall or to each other’s homes for movie nights. We tried to give one another the normalcy we so desperately craved. I wish I knew what happened to them, if either of them got the happily-ever-after they deserved. As time has wiped those friends from my psyche, I often revisit Girl, Interrupted. It is still a comfort to me against the unknown.
Writers’ Resources
Read this interview with Narratively contributor Vivian Conan about her memoir of multiple personalities that was 25 years in the making!
Thanks for reading! If you enjoy Memoir Monday, please consider making a one-time or recurring contribution (if even a fraction of subscribers signed up to contribute $1 per month, Memoir Monday could be self-sustaining!) by clicking here.
If you received this email from a friend or found it on social media, sign up below to get Memoir Monday in your inbox every week!