Eleven Stellar Personal Essays to Read this Week
Plus one event and some great workshops in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring four 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 “How to Make Friends During the Apocalypse” by
. A new essay is coming on Wednesday.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #3: Leslie Jamison” the third in that interview series, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye. Recently I published “Drama! at The Knitting Factory” an excerpt of
’s anthology, That’s So New York: Short (and Very Short) Stories About the Greatest City on Earth.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Two Young Women Find Themselves Pregnant at the Same Time—By the Same Man
by Suzanne Roberts
“In this story, two young women are pregnant at the same time by the same man. One of the women is a musician and a writer and a feminist, and she sports tattoos and body piercings before they are cool. The other woman is an outdoorsy graduate student and a feminist, and she wears J. Crew sweater sets and Mary Janes. The musician calls the graduate student “Miss Goody Two Shoes.” The graduate student calls the musician “The Slut.” I am one of these women, or was, and now I realize that it doesn’t matter which one. What matters is that the man is let entirely off the hook by two young women who call themselves feminists.”
Taking Hallucinogens with My Mom
by Rachel Matlow
“I was lying on a buffalo-skin rug, high on ayahuasca. My thoughts were going deep: Why can’t she just get the damn surgery? How long will she keep this up for? What exactly did she mean by the “quantum plane”? I waited expectantly for access to a higher realm—and maybe some insight into my mom’s magical thinking.”
The News This Week
by Julia McKenzie Munemo
“A detail I keep back: as the bird flies, this one happened around the corner. I want these things to only happen far from us. I want to pretend the Trump signs we drive by on our way to my mother’s house, the mall, the train station aren’t indications that this could happen to us. White mama, Black boy, side by side in a little orange car. If it breaks down? If we get lost and turn around in the wrong driveway? If I have an aneurysm and George runs for help? Knocks on the wrong door?”
Fifty-five and Still a Nomad
by
“Living with less means stripping away the stuff that insulates you from the livewire of existence, the electrical zing of the universe. When you travel, with none of the usual stuff to distract you, the world seems more vivid, and your interactions with it seem more meaningful. But it’s an illusion. The world is neither more vivid nor more meaningful. You’re just more available, more present, more vulnerable. The change is in you.”
Voices on Addiction: Learning to Steal
by Rebecca Evans
“ I mastered forging in fourth grade, the year I’d won the Spelling Bee for the entire school. I won a Snoopy trophy the size of my hand and a lunch outing with my teacher. I penned my mother’s name in her beautiful, loopy handwriting on the permission slip. I ordered a BLT, extra fries, and a large milkshake, and suffered a belly ache for nearly three days after. I ate so slow my teacher asked if I wanted to take my meal home, which I couldn’t. I just wanted lunch to last. Forever.”
Revisiting the Radical Presence of Diane di Prima
by Liesl Schwabe
“For decades, I thought I failed di Prima, bungling her birthday and everything else. But looking back, I see that summer as the season I learned that poets were real. That poems were real. I had one friend and one notebook and a diamond underneath my tongue. And whether or not anyone ever hunted it down wasn’t, actually, the point. Even if I was the only one who knew it, Diane di Prima’s poems were how I discovered that that diamond had been there all along.”
Essays from around the web…
Grandfather’s Roof
by Thalia Toha
“Growing up in the super-volcanic lands of near-extinct Sumatran tigers and coffee beans, everyone drinks coffee. My grandfather would have all of us sit on the floor along the inside perimeter of his house. Up against the wall. There were dozens of us. But everyone sat on the ground. I don’t even remember if there were chairs. And his house was probably no bigger than a regular Starbucks. In the middle: The Meal.”
Functionally White: What I Didn't Say About Being South Asian in Uganda
by Raksha Vasudevan
“Masala Chaat House was a place of profound hospitality and hostility, which seemed totally at odds with each other. How could they coexist? The only way to arrive at answers, I decided, would be to excavate what I'd witnessed: the vague and festering tensions between mohindis and Black Ugandans, the shifting asymmetries of power between diners and staff, and my own tenuous and confused connections to all of it.”
Two Dads and a Lump of Clay
by
“A bit less than half of the original ball of clay is left on the wheel. As I shape it into the goblet’s stem, I reflect on stories of my adoptive dad, hoping the details of these memories never fade. My musings guide my hands as they work to define the stem. It should be as graceful as the cup and its base should be wide enough to keep the cup steady, especially if I want a tall stem—tall like David was.”
My Husband And I Separated. When We Met Up 14 Years Later, I Was Surprised By What Happened.
by Lisa Mecham
“For the years G and I remained married yet separated, people had questions. 'Why aren’t you divorcing him?' 'Don’t you want to move on?' Their maps, their routes. Their compasses of perfection. What I found was that living life in an unscripted way made people uncomfortable, especially when deviating from the patriarchal norm. And that the stigma of mental illness is very real.”
Making Friends in Adulthood: Why We Never Leave Seventh Grade
by
“In resuming swimming after several decades, I fully expected to re-learn the basic strokes. What I didn’t expect to relearn was how hard it is to make friends, even as an adult. Turns out, joining a swimming pool is a bit like going back to Junior High; There are leaders and followers…nicknames and bullying…crushes and unrequited love. You’re never entirely sure where you stand—which lane you belong in, as it were—and you’re always jockeying for status and acceptance.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Tomorrow, Tuesday, 3/12 at 8pm I’ll be in conversation with Dan Saltzstein about That’s So New York at Book Club Bar in Manhattan’s East Village. Join us…
📢 A New Memoir Workshop at Narratively Academy:
This Week! Acclaimed writer and filmmaker Kerra Bolton (who recently wrote "The Water Spirits Will Carry Us" for Memoir Land's First Person Singular) is teaching Writing With Your Ancestors: Infusing Memoir With Family History at Narratively Academy, a 4-week workshop class starting this Thursday, March 15.
📢 Blaise Allysen Kearsleyis Leading a New Writing Workshop and I’ll be Zooming in to Guest Lecture
Beginning tomorrow, March 12th, 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
, 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.”📢 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!
Great round-up, Sari. I particularly love Delia’s City Lit piece. ❤️
Thank you!! Very inspiring