Fluid shaving, surviving a siege, and fractured truths...
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each personal 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.
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Finding Gender in a Razor
by Katie Okamoto (Photograph by Максим Рыжкин/Unsplash)
"When the razor arrived, I felt like I was holding a bit of car fender in my hand. Shaving with it was more seductive than expected. I squeezed a pearl of Proraso into my palm and swirled it swiftly with wet bristles, working up a lather thicker than whipped cream. The brush’s handle had the finish of a pool cue, lacquered smooth. I hoisted a heel to the edge of the counter, propped chin to knee, took the razor in my right hand, and traced the path of the blade with my left. Despite its name, the razor’s danger, always present, felt closer than it ever did with Venus; I sensed that how I’d wield it mattered. I gripped it gently and let its weight do the work. Every few strokes, I turned on the tap, wet the blade, flicked my wrist, and went again, eucalyptus tingling the air.”
Life or Siege?
by Uzma Falak (Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash)
"There are perpetual arrivals and departures — medicines, documents, uncertainties, testimonies, stories, quotidian conversations, lost embraces, sighs, greetings. Days and nights become a collage of phone calls to and from home: dialing, redialing, disconnected, repeat, conference calls, two phones on speakers next to each other, bringing two universes together in a third, impervious to the siege."
ENOUGH: The Color of the Cast
by Alex DiFrancesco (Rumpus original logo art by Luna Adler.)
"It took me decades to undo the tangles of growing up in an abusive family who strove to keep a bright coat of paint on our white picket fence. It took me years to recover from the trauma of being raised by a transphobic family. The combination of the two were disastrous. My family is mostly shipwrecked and separated. I do not speak to any of these people anymore, for my own sanity. There is only so much you can take of your reality being questioned and disregarded."
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