Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring three verticals:
Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation.
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “Skiing and Crying,” an excerpt of my memoir, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. A new essay is coming Wednesday.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing, plus writing prompts and exercises. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “Writing is About Making Choices,” an essay by novelist and Writing Co-Lab co-founderAmy Shearn.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
This Year, Ask Yourself What Kind of Writer You Want to Be
by Jami Attenberg
“I know what the words do for me: for an hour or two, when I write, it’s a place I can go to feel safe. It has always worked that way, ever since I was a child. The safety of a sentence. The sensation when I push and play with the words is the purest I will ever feel. The calm space of my mind. I curl up in it. I love when sentences nudge up against each other, when I notice a word out of place and then put it in its correct spot. I can nearly hear a click when I slot it into place. I love making a sentence more powerful, more dramatic or moving or sad, and I love when I make a sentence quiet enough that I can almost hear the sound of my own breath. More than anything, I love when a sentence makes me laugh.”
In Real Life
by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol
“I sigh. How to explain the world of selfies and hashtags to my mom? Looking at it from her perspective, as a newbie to social media, I can see how ridiculous and inane it all seems. And yet, social media is an indispensable part of many people’s lives, including my own.”
Internal Affairs
by Andrea Brady
“I, too, had an abortion. Not in tragic circumstances, not when I was young and vulnerable – a few years ago. I was married, had a house and a mortgage, a well-paid job, three great kids. I just didn’t want any more.”
An Ode to Acknowledgements
by Sarah Wheeler
“The acknowledgements are where you find juicy, personal tidbits. In The Sentence, Louise Erdrich spends the greater part of a page thanking a dictionary she received as the prize for a high-school essay contest. In the acknowledgments to Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger, we learn that the author is a member of a women’s group, which is not surprising, but nonetheless fun to visualize. Marlon James won’t let his mother read two of the pages in his book Black Leopard, Red Wolf. A pair of my favorite authors, Colson Whitehead and Sam Anderson, though quite different in style, both have children named Beckett.”
It Took Six Years for Me to Say Two Words
by Judith Hannah Weiss
“I lost a piece of my mind and sometimes it shows on my face. I pray that it won’t, but I know that it does. It happens when I have to be somewhere I can’t find or do something I can’t do or say something I can’t say. In cartoons, people like me are hilarious, especially in the scenes where skulls get smashed. Think baseball bats, frying pans, and coconuts on craniums.”
The Hole in My Soul
by Sara Eckel
“I wanted to believe. I wanted to think that through the loneliness and uncertainty of life, there was a benevolent father figure teaching me difficult but meaningful lessons as he watched over me in the sky.”
Essays from around the web…
John Singer Sargent and Writing About Real People
by Lilly Dancyger
“I’d already begun to think of character work as portraiture (“Portraiture,” in fact, is the title of the essay on this topic in First Love), and once I was in the gallery at the Morgan, I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to turn to my favorite portraitist for guidance.”
At 40 He Told Me I Was Too Old, and I Agreed
by Kelly Eden
“My doubts were too huge to argue with his logic. What if I failed? All that wasted time and money—to do something only important to me? It didn’t seem worth it. I decided to push the thought of retraining aside. But it wouldn’t leave me alone.”
Some Notes on Hope in the New Year
by Jessica Gigot, PhD
“Throughout the holiday season, hope continues to haunt me. Not just because it’s plastered on seasonal cards, pillows, and mugs, but because I am grappling with what it is and how much I have of it right now.”
Affection
by Jiadai Lin
“The warm sun poured in through the classroom window behind your back, and she said gently, you’re so pretty, for an Asian girl. And even though you were scorched thinking about the way she walks down the hallway in her skintight jeans, the curve of her ass and the sway of her hips, those black platform shoes and streaks of honey blonde in her hair, all of her mocking you and your flat chest and no butt and too-small eyes, even despite it all, you wanted it to be true, what she said.”
Macho Baby
by Nicole Graev Lipson
“I could never look Mike in the eye again — not when I bumped into him in our kitchen, not when he tried his kid-sister ribbing routine on me. He’d betrayed me in a way that couldn’t be reversed, had aroused in me an anger whose source I could not yet pinpoint.”
Aftermath of a Suicide
by Sallie Reynolds
“Remember how George would stop at the door, gather himself, stride in and take over the room? It really impressed me when I was 18. He’d throw his head back, haloed with that dandelion fuzz, square his jimber-jaw. Bingo! We were his.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Blaise Allysen Kearsley Is Leading a New Writing Workshop and I’ll be Zooming in to Guest Lecture
Beginning February 13th, for four weeks, Blaise Allysen Kearsley will be leading Writing New York: Personal Narratives That Could Only Happen Here over Zoom. “Whether you love New York or hate it, whether you live here now or lived here in another life, what are your most resonant and vital New York stories—the ones that could only happen here?…We'll have a discussion with Sari Botton, writer and editor of Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, and read short pieces by Colson Whitehead, Joan Didion, and Michael Barrish.”
📢 Check Out “A Year of Writing Dangerously” with author Summer Brennan
Author Summer Brennan will be teaching a year-long writing class in intentional journaling and generative freewriting called A Year of Writing Dangerously. It will be administered it through a specially designated Substack newsletter and via Zoom.
📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:
By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:
The title of the essay and a link to it.
The name of the author, and the author’s Twitter handle.Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.
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!
Thanks for including me Sari, what great company ❤️
The one that got to me the most this week is "In Real Life" by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol. She answers so many questions about what it's like for those who grow up living in and with social media. I hope that when her self-imposed year is up, she can maintain abstinence.