It's Time For Your Weekly Dose of Stellar Personal Essays...
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 original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The eighth original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in September, is “Cooking With Dana For the Last Time” by Dianne Jacob. The ninth original essay is coming in October. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Essays from partner publications…
My Mother Wanted Me To Be Happy
by Gina Fattore
“Are you married? Do you have children? Have you stayed thin? When I was growing up, these were the ruthless standards by which the women of my mother’s generation constantly seemed to be judging themselves and—when it was safe to gossip—each other.”
How I Learned That Work Is Not Your Family
by Josh Greenblatt
“I marveled at friends’ abilities to simply find a job and keep it for as long as they wanted—and felt a bone-deep sense of shame about my inability to do the same. I could trace my persistent stomachaches to one gnawing question: What was so wrong with me that work felt impossible? A few layoffs, instances of mistreatment, and manipulative managers later, I realized that I’d fallen for a failed promise: The workplace is not my family.”
Gun Person
by Andrew Howard
“This will be what I take away from the presentation: One day students will be bleeding out on my classroom floor, and I will have to stuff so much cloth into them. I will have to wrap more cloth around their extremities, stanching the awful bleeding. Where will I get so much cloth? Will I take off my work shirt, shred it into pieces? I’m not even armed with scissors.”
How to Milk
by Emily Ogden
“One of the nurses taught me to hand-express milk into a spoon and feed it to the babies. My efforts yielded about enough matter to fill the corner of an eye. I was frantic about it, in ways that are not easy to reconstruct now. To increase milk production, I pumped while I ate, while I read, while I wrote. For nine months I pumped every two to four hours, around the clock. I labeled milk, I froze milk, I pumped at work and at home. I picked figs after dark with a flashlight because, after putting the boys to bed, I had to pump before I could do anything else. Every time they woke up in the middle of the night, I nursed them, then went to pump in the other room.”
Honestly, I’d Rather Be Living in an Elin Hilderbrand Novel
by Mary Bergman
“Nantucket Island was once the whale oil capital of the world. In the first half of the 20th century, writers like Nathaniel Benchley, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck, and the Gilbreth family all found inspiration in summer homes 30 miles out to sea. Today, the island’s primary export is middle- and lower-income families who can no longer afford to live here. Our second greatest export is signed copies of Elin Hilderbrand’s beachy novels: more than 5,000 copies of The Hotel Nantucket were shipped to readers from the island’s independent bookstore, Mitchell’s Book Corner, this past June.”
So You Want to Feel Better
by Micaela Bombard
“What I can and can’t do changes on a daily, and even sometimes hourly, basis, which seems to confuse or frustrate people; I count myself among those same people. In case you’re wondering how I’m managing to type this essay now, it’s because of the steroid prednisone, which I refer to as “the worst miracle ever.”
Cooking With Dana for the Last Time
by Dianne Jacob
“In my kitchen that day, we looked through cookbooks, deciding which version of mahashah to make, an Iraqi-Jewish dish of vegetables stuffed with rice and ground beef. He stood at the counter chopping and cooking, but struggled to control his body and mind, and paused to catch his breath or sigh. Even sitting at the dining room table took effort, despite the cocktail of pain drugs he self-administered.”
Essays from around the web…
Being a Mom is the Best Decision I Never Made
by Jesse Sposato
“My cons list was long, but my pros list only consisted of two bullet points: I wanted someone to help take care of me when I was older, a reason I knew was selfish and couldn’t stand on its own, and the better, bigger reason: boundless love. This was a thing my mom had gushed to me about on every one of my birthdays for as long as I could remember: how wonderful it felt to love someone else, someone you had a hand in creating, so incredibly much. The possibility of that feeling carried a lot of weight. ”
The Pictures We Post of Our Teens Don’t Always Tell the Whole Story
by Andrea Askowitz
“All summer my feeds have been filled with friends’ kids in caps and gowns. In my world, high school graduation is a given. But I didn’t post because in Tashi’s case, graduation was not a given. Posting those pictures would have felt fake. There is so much more to the story.”
Vigilant
by Judy Bolton-Fasman
“The soundtrack of my early childhood: my mother’s manic typing filling up Sunday nights. My mother was back in school, and she pounded the keyboard as if she were trying to liberate enough energy to set fire to our three-bedroom colonial that sat on a corner lot. She wrote weekly research papers in the dining room in a desperate bid to complete her weekly homework for her master’s degree in Spanish literature. The anxious clickety clack of her industriousness set us on edge. She brought saw-tooth ferocity to her work. ”
David Foster Wallace said I Spoke to him like he was a Dog
by Michelle Dowd
“I would visit his office while waiting for my son, and he would continue to call during my office hours instead of coming in, asking me questions about my students and my dogs, almost interchangeably. I reviewed his syllabi and reminded him what students want most is our enthusiasm, much the way our dogs do. I worshiped the way he responded to my thoughts, the way vocabulary fluttered from his mouth as if from the sky. He was an older artist, at the height of his craft, while I was a young mother, bound to the banalities of the earth. He was idealistic. I was pragmatic. When he told me I talked to him the way I talked to my dogs, I wasn’t offended…How does the heart reconcile itself to its feast of losses?”
To the Woman Whose Body I Washed
by Robin Reif
“Three days in the morgue and the chemicals released in death had turned your skin the color of rust. Your torso was stiff and torqued to the left, where I happened to be standing. One of your eyes, now filmy yellow, was open, and appeared to be trained on me as though suspicious of my motives…Your misgivings would not have been wrong.”
Please, Let’s Stop Talking About the Freshman 15
By Anna Rollins
“When the pandemic hit, I scrolled through social media to satisfy my desire for human connection. I gazed at images of how others were coping in this newly contracted world. Netflix binges. Homemade sourdough bread. At-home workouts to combat the effects of lockdown and comfort food. It was eerie how fixated so many became on fighting flesh as we were threatened with a virus that could reduce us to nothing.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Publicity 101 for Writers with veteran book publicist Lauren Cerand and Sari Botton on 10/8/22 is sold out! BUT…the resulting video will be a perk for paid subscribers to Memoir Monday!
Are you a writer struggling to effectively publicize your work? Are you looking to grow the reach and visibility of your published writing, and find more publishing opportunities? Do you shy away from putting yourself out there because you’re not sure of the best ways to do so—and because you’ve been persuaded to believe self-promotion is shameful?
You’ll want to watch the resulting video from this seminar/interview! If you’re a paid subscriber to Memoir Monday, you’ll have access to it.
📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:
By Thursday of each week, please send to memoi 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.
Memoir Monday is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors to its First Person Singular series of original essays. To support this work, become a paid subscriber.
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!
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