Don't miss our reading tonight!
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, 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.
Join us tonight on Zoom for a Memoir Monday reading with Meredith Talusan, Matt Ortile, Marcia Trahan, and Jessica Rotondi! Register here.
And you can buy these authors’ books through our Bookshop.org page or through our partner Powerhouse Arena!
Whiteness Can't Save Us
by Taylor Harris
I worry every night. I pray, too, and then I worry again that one morning, right when the sun breaks from the ground, I will not catch the way his brown body falls in on itself. He will crash, he will fall on the ground, choking, and there will be no cameras, no eyes. His mother—what is a mother to do, if she cannot save her boy?
Dancing Separate, Together
by Russell Janzen
In my company, when one dancer gets sick it is a guarantee that at least five others will catch the same illness. We touch one another constantly, both out of choreographic necessity and out of the physical intimacy built up over years. We share decades of close proximity and the exhaustive experience that is dance. Ballet is demanding in both an energy-depleting way and a fully immersive, all-encompassing way, though maybe these are one and the same. It is communal and compulsive: being in a company means sharing the thing you love to do and can’t not do.
My Father's Fanatical Feud With the Bullies Next Door Became an All-Out War
by Mary Widdicks
When my mom returned a few minutes later, she was holding a letter in her trembling hand. I followed her into the kitchen, where she slapped the paper onto the counter. The envelope was blank. No stamp or address on the front. And all I could read before she covered it up were two words, typed out in capital letters: MARY and DEAD.
That night my dad moved to the sofa, and we started tiptoeing around the living room at all hours. The dishes and the silence piled up around us during the day, and at night, the whispers became shouts.
The Season of Children
by Emilio Carrero
I was again in the position of deciding whether to acknowledge or ignore what was happening. I could continue to egg Julius on, or I could end it all in a flash. I loved it. I smelled the gasoline of generators, felt the wet air on my face, tasted the iron taste of blood. This was power. The fact that I was what I was—an ashamed brown kid—made my choice easy. Re-inflicting fear and violence on the white kid in front of me felt not just right, but American.
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