Fifteen Personal Essays to Ease You Into the New Year...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, and Orion Magazine — plus many additional publications.
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The latest original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in November, is “Listen, and You Will Hear Pain Speak” by Liz Iversen. The next original essay is coming next week. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Recently, we launched a new video interview series for paying subscribers. Check out the first interview with Some of My Best Friends author and Catapult editor-in-chief Tajja Isen, about the realities of publishing an essay collection. The next video interview, coming later in January, with be with Chloe Caldwell, author most recently of The Red Zone: A Love Story, about finding a publishing deal unagented, among other topics…
Happy New Year, everyone! This week, other than two pieces from partner publications First Person Singular and Oldster Magazine, our essays are all from around the web…
Listen, and You Will Hear Pain Speak
by Liz Iversen
“My doctor was convinced my symptoms were psychosomatic. He would not refer me to a physical therapist or acupuncturist or chiropractor—anyone who might target the physical symptoms—and I refused antidepressants. We compromised. I agreed to see a psychiatrist on-site and took the elevator to her office, which was somewhat cozier than I expected.”
Heart Failure…at 29?
by Evette Dionne
“As much as these chronic conditions have drained me, they have also helped me reframe what’s important—advocating for myself and for my needs with doctors, romantic partners, bosses, coworkers, and every person and system I interact with.”
What Squirrels Taught Me About Life After Divorce
by Kelly McMasters
“…like clockwork on the weekend mornings we spend together, the squirrels will start to tap on the window. And Noah will rise from the bed as if responding to a baby monitor. He will stumble to the kitchen, grab a handful of unsalted almonds from a jar in the cabinet, return to the bedroom, and crack the window an inch, popping the almonds out one by one so they land on the sill in a line.”
It wasn’t luck that allowed me to become a judge after meth addiction. It was white privilege
by Mary Beth O'Connor
“I first shot methamphetamine when I was 17. As an abused child seeking relief from trauma and stress, I’d turned to alcohol at age 12 and had used numerous drugs to excess before sticking that needle in my arm. In 1979, at age 18, I was arrested for possession of meth and syringes.”
Soothing A Broken Heart
by Lisa Braxton
“Mom wanted to be a writer. She had plenty of stories to tell: growing up poor in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley during the 1940s and ‘50s under the Jim Crow era form of segregation, pushing a white playmate into a pond when the child stated firmly that black people were inferior, tugging on her mother’s sleeve and asking her why they had to stand in the back of the bus where every seat was taken when there were plenty of empty seats up front and being told, “Hush up, child!” by her mother.”
To All the Christmas Day Mes and All the Christmas Day Yous
by Nat Cotterill
“Each time this point of the year comes around I’m always blindsided by emotion and it’s as if, as I get older, I feel the culmination of all the feelings I’ve felt at all the Christmases gone by. I think life gets more beautiful, words and actions become more meaningful, and the Winter season grows more special and more magical to me as I age. At the same time I have more feelings, old and new, than I know what to do with...”
Learning to Love Yourself
by Sabina Walser
“I’m embarrassed to admit how many psychics, palm readers, astrologists and other intuitives I’ve seen over the years, asking about my writing. One psychic, after a long pause, as she was connecting with her guides who were connecting with my guides, declared: ‘Do. Not. Give. Up.’ Yes, I paid $130 for that piece of instrumental but arguably obvious advice. But it helped.”
Dear Life
by Jardana Peacock
“I will give it to you, I will give it to you for free.” He held up a small bag of white powder. You exhaled. This is going to work out, you thought. “All you need to do is take off your shirt. I wanna snort it off your titties.” You froze. You shouldn’t follow people you’d just met at one in the morning into parking garages. You shouldn’t. But you had. ”
I'm Not Going to Pop: In Search of Better Pregnancy Metaphors
by Finn Schubert
“The standard narrative is that my pregnancy will grow larger and larger, my belly more and more tumescent, until one day I—metaphorically, one hopes—pop, followed by what the narrative tells me will be a refractory period of sorts, soft-focused and full of sleeplessness and love…But as a writer, I can tell you that plot structures matter. The shape of a story matters. And I am not willing to live or narrate my pregnancy from inside the shape of what appears to be a conventional cis male orgasm.”
After My Mom's Death, I Developed A Seemingly Innocent Habit. Then It Spiraled Out Of Control.
by Natalie Serianni
“Preserving each moment of my daughters’ lives for posterity, my thumb always hovering over the trash can symbol, unable to press down, for many years felt like an armor against the loss of others in my life. As the real memories of my mother faded like an old Polaroid, I became artificially attached to all the images of my oldest’s first steps and my youngest singing happy birthday to herself.”
The Most Important Lesson for My American Jewish Children
by
“I try to explain anti-Semitism to people who don't know how to see it with their own eyes: dog whistles of greed, control, mistrust, and conspiracy. Ever so often, someone like Kanye whistles too loud. They say "Jews." We call it out while others explain it away. This is the cycle. Today, animosity against Jews remains at a simmer until the next terrifying incident of spillover occurs. My young children have seen little of this yet, but sadly, they will. It's a consequence of who we are. ”
The Sound of Grief
by Kimberly Knowle-Zeller
“Sometimes my grief for my dad shows up in subtle moments: reading an inscription he wrote for me in a book, jazz music playing on the radio, or seeing my kids play with their toy trains. There are days that bring a flood of memories in remembrance, and days when I wish he could witness what I am now experiencing—the life I’ve built with my family.”
To Autumn Again
by Sophia Small
“In a grey-walled classroom north of the Bridge I sit on a blue plastic chair and watch a class of seventeen-year-olds watching Jane Campion’s Bright Star, about the poet John Keats. Towards the end of the film, Paul Schneider, in character as Keats’s friend Charles Brown, is arguing with Abbie Cornish’s Fanny Brawne. In one of the film’s most emotional moments he stands in the parlour with Brawne and screams, over and over, ‘I failed John Keats! I failed him!’ The class explodes. One girl laughs so hard she struggles to breathe, laughs so hard she grabs the table for balance. ‘Miss!’ they shout. ‘Why is he doing that?’”
Ghost Stories, Master Race
by Scott Hurd
“A night spent searching the web for ghost stories from his home state of Virginia led Scott Hurd into the state’s dark history of sterilization and eugenics to create a white master race.”
A Zuihitsu: Harvesting Black Walnuts
by Laura Joyce-Hubbard
“There is too much acid in our soil, and my want is to blame. At least, that’s what the arborist said. But I might’ve misunderstood. What I know is that the Japanese maple wasn’t supposed to thrive where it was transplanted. But for eleven fall seasons, bright burgundy has burst against the cedar shingles. What I didn’t know, when I asked my spouse to plant hydrangeas in the front yard, was that adding a flowering plant would alter things. Throw the equilibrium off. Now, the Japanese maple is dying, and I’m wondering if we can reverse the change in the soil content fast enough so that the maple will be happy again. The hard part is not knowing if I can do anything to please it.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Through January 16th, submissions are open for The Rumpus’s ENOUGH series. “We publish people who identify as women who have encountered rape culture or domestic violence,” says editor Katie Kosma.
📢 New Orleans Review is seeking writing (prose, poetry) and art by Iranian women (trans and non-binary inclusive) for a special issue of the journal, inspired by the current women's revolution, guest edited by writer and filmmaker Naz Riahi.Please submit your work by January 15 and help spread the word.
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, 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!
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