Drag queens, little league, and tarot cards
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. It may be the start of a new work week, but at least we have this great new writing to get us through it.
Podcasts and Tarot Reading Showed Me How to Be Real Instead of “Good”
by Sarah Lyn Rogers (Photograph by Alan Chen/Unsplash)
I knew that this person loved me, loves me . . . But could I trust that he did not, in some tiny part of him, also hate me a little? Wasn’t that just how people who loved me sometimes expressed it? I found myself doing a kind of math I’d learned in childhood: to be un-bothersome to the people around me, how much less than a real person did I have to be?
Little League, Revisited
by Adam Kuhlmann
“It gives him a leg up,” my sister had told me the previous night after Chase went to bed. Perhaps sensing my skepticism, she explained the nature of today’s competitive child-rearing: how all of a kid’s activities — from his first birthday party to his college admissions — must be coordinated and enhanced, for a fee, by biologically unrelated adults.
Everyone You Meet is God in Drag
by Robert Julius
Drag night with Patrick begins with cocktails and pop music, and the two of us dressing up to go nowhere. With Gaga blaring, we take out the makeup from our bags. Mine is a mess, but then again, so is Patrick’s. He has flown all the way from San Francisco to visit. We’ve been best friends since high school. Seven years later, we consider ourselves sisters.
Family Man
by Joanna Hershon
It’s not my uncle’s absence that haunts me—after all, I never knew him. It’s that no one—not my grandparents, my parents, or any of my mother’s cousins we visited with over the years—told me stories about him, or about losing him. No one mused aloud about why he removed himself from the rest of us. It’s the absence of inquiry that feels disquieting, even now.
Plague Diary: March
by Gonçalo M. Tavares
I open the online pages of newspapers that explain how to disinfect boots that go outside.
Spain 498, France 365, Iran 157, Italy 712.
‘Man executes rival with two gunshots on bar patio.’
Bullets are not obsolete.
‘New York Stock Exchange climbs.’
During the French revolution many people started to shoot at clocks.
I get up from my chair, I take a bath.
A shot to the back of a clock’s neck.
Writers’ Resources
Check out this list of notable online events, from The Rumpus
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