Introducing the Memoir Monday Book List!
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, Granta, and Guernica. Each 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. It may be the start of a new work week, but at least we have this great new writing to get us through it.
This month is the two-year anniversary of the Memoir Monday reading series! To celebrate, we’ve collected all of the memoirs that have been featured at the series (plus some additional books by Memoir Monday alums!) in one great list on our Bookshop.org affiliate page.
All purchases made through this list will help support a network of indie bookstores (which are struggling right now and could really use the love), as well as Memoir Monday—and of course, the wonderful authors who have shared their work with us. Browse the list here.
A Body Full of Ghosts
by Emme Lund (art by Briana Finegan)
Text I’ve known since I was a child that the world is ending. I felt it in my bones. Every Sunday I heard we were living in the end times. I had nightmares. I would lie in bed at night and imagine what it would be like, whether I was good enough to get raptured or if I would be left behind, my parents and sisters taken by God. Even though I knew, on paper, if I loved God I would be raptured, too, I also knew there was something intrinsic to who I was that God did not like. Something that resided deep in my body, so deep I would never be able to excise it. Something I could not name. Upon awakening before my family, I would lie in bed and wonder if the rapture had happened while I slept. Would I wander into my sister’s room and then my parents’ and finally the living room to find everyone gone?
The Bigamist’s Daughter
by Robin Antalek
In 1964, when my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, she found out that her husband, my father, had married another woman and that woman was pregnant as well. My father’s new wife had left her family and three small children, and then she and my father had created a subset family, making us a complicated algebraic formula, resistant to logic. He and his new wife lived together somewhere in Fairfield County, Connecticut, commuting distance to their jobs in Manhattan, where they had met. For a while they lived in his red Volvo wagon that smelled of his ever present Camel cigarettes.
You Can Do Anything in Animal Crossing Except Escape Productivity Dread
by Grayson Morley
The NookPhone glows. I didn’t notice it until my brother-in-law visited my island. A classic Nintendo flourish: entirely unnecessary, but once noticed, immensely charming. It made me happy to see his character’s face lit up, smiling down at the little smartphone facsimile. His villager, designed by my nephew, looks like his son. But as he navigated his own personal menu for several seconds beyond my attention span, the initial burst of cuteness was displaced with a question: How had I missed this detail?
Help! I Think I'm Falling in Love Over Zoom
by Michael Stahl
I had made a promise to myself that during quarantine I’d do a better job of working on myself, of sitting with my feelings, no matter how sad or worrisome they might become. Across nearly six years of talk therapy — to treat an anxiety disorder and depression — I’ve learned that mentally remaining in the present moment, or “practicing mindfulness,” helps reduce my stress levels. But I’ve also learned just how difficult such an exercise is for me. One of the ways I’ve taken myself out of the moment in the past is through dating, and trying to locate self-worth through the eyes of a woman who’s into me, regardless of my true feelings for her.
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