It's Monday. Time To Read Some Excellent Pieces of Memoir Writing...
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.
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now occasional original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers. If you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.
The second original essay, published in First Person Singular in April, is The Burden of Leaving, by emerging Nigerian writer Ahmad Adedimeji Amobi, in which he makes sense of what his leaving home means to his widowed mother. The third original essay is coming soon!
Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
Essays from partner publications…
Naloxone
by Zachary Siegel
“Then there’s the loneliness of heroin addiction, that paradox I could never solve. Naloxone’s key ingredient, its mechanism of action, lies beyond chemistry: for naloxone to save a life, people have to show up for one another.”
What It Takes to Make a Living As a Working-Class Writer
by Lori Fox
"If you have two writers of precisely equal talent and drive, and one is working class and the other middle class, you can see why the wealthier one has a better chance of success: they can afford to invest more time and money in themselves and their work. By contrast, because the stakes for a working-class writer are higher, they have fewer opportunities to publish and do so at a higher cost. If you take your shot and fail, you’re deeper in the hole, both timewise and financially, than someone who’s better off, and so your odds of rebounding are smaller.”
Saying No Fifty Years Later
by Jodi Sh. Doff
"He was a beloved and admired high-school football coach. He was a middle-aged sack of testosterone and machismo that pinned me against the lockers and ground himself into me, his barrel chest mashing my 15-year-old barely breasts into my ribs. He held me there. Probably not for as long as I remember or as long as it felt at the time."
The Purpose of Book Bans Is to Make Queer Kids Scared
by Lev AC Rosen
“I really thought it would be funny when I hit play on the video. A priest walks into a city council meeting and calls you a pedophile. It’s funny, right? And yet, it was a fist in the stomach. It’s a cliché, to describe something like that, but it’s also accurate. My body curled inward, watching him. I felt a heaviness like a forming bruise in my gut. The air left me. He was so calm. Someone behind him nodded. He explained, serious in his white priest collar, that books like mine were how pedophiles lure your children. I turned it off.”
Essays from around the web…
Who Are Instagram's Infertility Influencers Really Helping?
by Kea Krause
“In the minutes and hours after learning about my first miscarriage during a routine ultrasound, my senses sharpened to the physical details around me: the blossoming warmth of May in Maine, a single feathery cirrus cloud overhead in an otherwise perfectly blue sky, the MOJO RZN license plate on the maroon Mustang in front of us at a light as my husband and I drove home disappointed. Early pregnancy can be speculative, those initial days filled with prospect and sparkly suspense. It’s a dreamy, hopeful time. My loss was immediately grounding.”
Opening Literary Windows to Better Understand Our World
by Candy Schulman
“All writers can spread our literary wings across oceans. After 35 years of teaching, I’ve expanded my knowledge about the craft of writing—as well as systemic racism, slavery, immigration, and prejudice.”
My 11-Year-Old Patient Was Pregnant. Here's What I Want You To Know About Being 'Pro-Life.'
by Dipti S. Barot
"Our clinic rooms will always be too small for anybody but providers and our patients…And we will fight for this sacred space, fight for it to be free of cynical politicians and their divisive games. They have never been invited in and we are not about to sit back or stand by while they force their way in."
Words: On the Linguistic Indoctrination of a Woman
by Cindy DiTiberio
“I indoctrinate my daughters with new words, different possibilities. With every show watched, every book read, I am annotating, revising, correcting the portrayals. You do not need to be a good girl. You do not need to be quiet…As we take walks, as I tuck them into bed, I fill their heads with possibilities, pour new foundations for their futures…Astonish me with how much space you can take up. How big you can be. How loud and messy and fast and ambitious and rude and too much…Be all the things…Be everything…Words: On the Linguistic Indoctrination of a WomanYou do not need to ask for permission.”
Suspension of Flight
by Ellen Sharp
“Waiting for lunch one afternoon, I dragged a blue wooden bench and an uneven table out back, to eat my thali under the bright, cloudless sky. It was early February, 1999, and I was living in Bodhgaya, India, where the Buddha found enlightenment 2,500 years earlier and where I was about to find myself pregnant and alone at age twenty-three...”
Loretta Young
by Elizabeth Rose
“E woke from an alcohol haze to the sound of shattering glass on the morning of her thirtieth birthday. The night before, her boyfriend, J, and she had partied. Friends were invited. She had slept like a free-wheeling adult child, her unconscious dialed to chill. It was 1978 and she was a single woman with a white cat, a substantial career, no mortgage, and no school debt. But the morning of shattered glass funneled her forward into a new maturity.”
🚨Announcements:
Through June 27th, you can apply for Narratively’s Spring 2022 Memoir Prize.
“Narratively is accepting entries for our Spring 2022 Memoir Prize. We’re on the hunt for revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view — the best of which we’ll reward with four-figure cash prizes, publication and heavy promotion, and a lot more.”
Judges include:
Ashley C. Ford, New York Times–bestselling memoirist of Somebody’s Daughter
Nicole Rocklin, Oscar-winning film and TV producer behind the movie Spotlight
Glynn Washington, host, creator and executive producer of the podcast/radio show Snap Judgment
📢 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!
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!