K-pop, a mausoleum, and the panic years
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. 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.
Affliction: On Finding Relief in Pain
by Shreya Vikram (art by Eva Azenaro Acero)
In the place I come from, once the Thai moon is fully swollen, the Kaumaras prepare themselves for Kavadi. For forty-eight days, they abstain from meat and sex and alcohol, sleep on cold floors, bathe in colder water, and pray. Mostly, they pray. In the final twenty-four hours before the festival, they do not eat at all. On the day of, they shave their hair, dig hooks into their backs’ flesh, and drag a cart for more than four hours, journeying toward the deity.
Dear H.O.T., I’ll Love You Forever
by Giaae Kwon
I’ve often joked that, had I been raised in Korea, my father would have cut my hair multiple times in punishment because my obsession with H.O.T. was all-encompassing. At my most extreme, I wonder if I could have crept into sasaeng territory, crossing the line from fangirl to ultra-obsessive-kind-of-criminal fangirl, the type who chases her idols home from a taping, breaks into her idol’s apartment and steals his underwear, or even sends knives in the mail to the female idol he got too cozy with. I doubt I would have gone that far (even at the peak of my obsession, I found sasaeng behavior abhorrent), but my dad certainly would have shorn my hair for going to too many music shows and participating in fan club activities and not studying enough.
Harvesting My Father's Mementoes
by Victor Ehikhamenor
My father’s bedroom also turned out to be his mausoleum. He was buried under his bed, the grave flattened back into the cracked grey cement floor. Our tradition demands that elders must be buried inside their personal rooms. I can’t remember now who did it, but while the cement was still wet a short epitaph was engraved on his grave: B.A. Ehikhamenor 1924–2004.
Surviving Your Thirties: AKA the Panic Years
by Nell Frizzell
The morning of my 33rd birthday, I woke up in bed beside a man I love, with a two-week-old baby breathing so gently beside me that, for the 578th time in his life, I had to reach out a hand and touch his face to check that he was alive. My stomach was wet mud. My eyes were lychees of restless weeping. I hadn’t slept for more than three straight hours since the last few weeks of my pregnancy, I was wearing a sanitary pad the size of a blow-up mattress, and I smelled like fermenting milk. As a pinkish dawn kissed the treetops along the River Lea, I dressed in an XL gray men’s tracksuit and my boyfriend’s socks, slipped out of my baking one-bedroom flat, crossed the footbridge into Walthamstow Marshes, faced the sun, and howled.
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