Fresh Batch of Stellar Personal Essays Right Here...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications.
*Beginning in late January, there’ll occasionally be original work as well, likely behind a paywall—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish. So, if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one! Stay tuned for information next week on how to submit.
You can read all about expansion plans here. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
On Being Tough
by Kathleen Gullion
"And now I hesitate to call them what they were...If I call them what they were, everyone will see how I’m not tough after all. And if I call them what they were, I’d have to admit that men aren’t the only ones who can be cruel. That love between queers isn’t always something holy."
The End of the Empress
by Alizeh Kohari
“Other 19th-century buildings in Karachi’s colonial downtown were surreptitiously hollowed out by high-rise developers, over conservationists’ futile protests; when only their shells were left, the conservationists quieted, and apartment buildings rose from their ruins. But Empress Market was different. With its stately edifice, its elite past, and its future upmarket potential, city officials had realized that heritage and commerce didn’t have to clash. The building just had to be restored, they kept repeating like a mantra, to its former glory.
And then, the bulldozers rolled in.”
Confessions of an 80-Year-Old Barbarian
by Abigail Thomas
"There must be some underlying reason to explain my enthusiasm for spatchcocking a chicken, or chickens, as I have done three already…What is wrong with me? Why do I keep doing this horrible thing? How to explain this frenzy! My friend Paula suggests the chicken might be a “transitional object,” and removing its backbone is the substitute for what I want to cut out of my life but can’t bear to look at. "
What If I Never Publish Another Book?
by Anjali Enjeti
“My convalescence gave me time to reflect on my experiences as a double debut author. Certainly, it was a joyous and exciting period. It also felt as if I’d been run over by a Mack truck. I recalled my conversation with the author I met at the playdate all those years ago. Now, I could better understand her reluctance to devote herself to another book project. When we spoke, she was possibly still processing her own first publication experience and trying to put her life back together, as I was now.”
The Solitude Project
by Christina McCausland
"I'm more of a person alone,” I’d written to my high school ex soon after our relationship ended, and in the years following, I studied solitude like a discipline in order to make myself actually believe that. When I was 21, a junior in college, I wrote (to myself), “I am unmoored and I’m terrified but I also think only of myself and it’s thrilling.” I’d been reading Susan Sontag’s journals, where she attributed the success of Against Interpretation (1966) to the extended solitary state she found herself in: “Even now — I know my mind has gone a step forward by virtue of being alone the last 2½ years.” I thought she was onto something. Choosing to understand “being alone” as romantic singleness, I considered the emotional immensity of my single extended teenage romance: the ease of having a constant and outside point of reference, the feeling of outside definition, another’s gaze. When I read Sontag, I wondered if the fact that I continued to seek those things out made me weak, or less serious. Maybe if I’d been less obsessed with companionship or attention from men, I would have an idea for a senior thesis, for example..
The day motherhood divided into Before and After
By Taylor Harris (excerpted from her memoir, This Boy We Made)
“Paul found him that morning. Our twenty-two-month-old boy, staring and still, awake without a sound. A twenty-pound toddler in blue pajamas, lying across the only thing we allowed in his crib—a taut cotton sheet.
Tophs hadn’t smiled to reveal the dimple planted deep on his left cheek or hopped up on his short, thick feet to call for me. Even though he was almost two, he didn’t always call me “Mommy” or Paul “Daddy.” Sometimes he switched our names around or stole Paul’s pet name for me. “Baaaaaabe! Baaaaaabe!” The adult word in Tophs’s raspy baby voice never grew old.”
The Fish
by Kimberly Diaz
"My mother turned up at my door with a huge hunk of fish wrapped in newspaper. She rarely stopped by the house even though she lived right de said. “It’s fresh.”
Dale was a married man she was seeing although my sister and I could not imagine why. He was overweight, balding and supposedly sold buffalo meat for a living. He’d been incarcerated too. A real winner."
My Body Doesn’t Hate Me. It’s Just A Little Glitchy.
by Jennifer Furner
"When I worked on the assembly line of a transmission plant one summer, if something got stuck in a machine, I would get a broomstick and dislodge it. Why couldn’t I do that with my body? How nice it would have been if, like an industrial printer, my body had an error screen that told me exactly what door to open to clear out the jam.”
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
The artwork and the appropriate credits.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received.
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!
If you received this email from a friend or found it on social media, sign up below to get Memoir Monday in your inbox every week! You can also follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday.