Food's many meanings, policewomen in Pakistan, to be touched by water, inequality in incarceration...
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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When Fresh Food Is a Luxury, Beauty Becomes a Necessity
by Katiy Heath (Photograph by John Cameron/Unsplash)
"Back then, real food was for those families that lived north of town, with parents who were home by five and enjoying meals, not on a TV tray, but around a table. Real food wasn’t for families like mine, where both parents worked multiple jobs and had to purvey frozen dinners that the kids could heat on our own. Real food was for the privileged—those who could afford the hours and energy it takes to cook. Back then, real food was not for families like mine.”
Best of Guernica: Nazish Brohi’s Footsteps in a Marked House
by Nazish Brohi (Photo via Shutterstock)
"For decades, there have been women’s quotas for government jobs, gone mostly unfilled. Women’s recruitment into the KP police was not driven by gender staffing allocations or a desire for equality or diversity in the workplace, but by the need to conduct raids and arrest militants without alienating local communities. Their induction was instrumental, not ideological."
ENOUGH: Body of Water
by Karine Hack (Rumpus original logo art by Luna Adler.)
"At nineteen I tell my counselor that desire is the ultimate imposition. Let me explain. I have a hard time feeling. I speak, analyze, write, but I’m not sure I feel. What does sadness feel like in the body? Or happiness? It’s as if I read my feelings after the fact; my body sends a report to my mind which I then interpret, map, decode, and file away. I don’t want to read the report. I want to be the body which feels the thing. I am unsure of desire, of my capacity for it, as if it were something I could chart—typical. I ache to feel desirous of others. I worry I will never feel this. Will never feel so strongly that I must impose on another. And if I never impose, if I never speak my desire, how will I ever love? Be loved?"
A Series of Rooms Occupied by Ghislaine Maxwell
by Chris Dennis (Photograph © Jan Banning / Panos Pictures)
"I was once a teenager lured into a room by an adult. It is a hard thing to say now. Because at the time I thought, I am a young person having sex with adults because I am special. It is something that I do. It says something good about me that adults consider me a worthy object of desire. It means that I am noticeable. It means that I have power and influence over the world around me. But those are the thoughts of a child. Being an adult now, and a father, I know how very easy it is to not hurt children. As a child I did not know it was easy to not hurt someone. As a child I thought, Oh, it must be very hard for an adult to not have sex with a teenager, because adults are always trying to have sex with me. It was a terrible, uncomfortable room for a young person to be in. I was alone a lot. The word consent meant something very different to me then, because I did not know how to give it."
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