Fourteen. (That's How Many Stellar Personal Essays Are Featured in Today's Newsletter.)
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, and Orion Magazine — plus many additional publications.
You might have noticed we also have a nice new logo, thanks to Ian MacAllen of Design is the Message!
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The lateset original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in November, is “My Big Break” by Jennifer Dines. The next original essay is coming in December. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Our first in what will be a series of seminars was Publicity 101 For Writers with book publicist Lauren Cerand, was held October 8th. Paying subscribers can view the resulting video here.
Essays from partner publications…
The Erl-King
by Emma Cline
“We were taking our nephew on a walk, H and I: buckling the baby into the stroller, finding his giraffe toy and tucking his blanket around his legs. He was a happy baby, startlingly so: I had heard him cry, really cry, only once…‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ H said. ‘How mellow he is.’…He was our younger sister’s baby – her and her husband’s baby, I guess. They were young parents and excessively chill. It seemed better that way – to be young enough that your self-conception hadn’t yet solidified, that there wasn’t some well-grooved lifestyle now under threat from the demands of parenthood.”
Writing For My Life
by Sorayya Khan
“I’m 60 now. I have stretch marks to match my mother’s. Raised veins run like railroad crossings on the backs of my hands, although I wish they didn’t. My hair is grayer. Of course, now I wonder how much time I have left, whether it is the ten years my father knew he had. But I worry less about the years than the novels I need to write, like the one that began to take shape while I revised my memoir, We Take Our Cities with Us, now making its way into the world.”
Silence and Air Raids: 4 Essays from Wartime Ukraine
by Ilya Kaminsky, Ludmila Khersonsky, Zarina Zabrisky, Elena Andreychykova
“We are sitting in a restaurant on Kanatnaya Street in Odesa, Ukraine. Zarina looks straight at me…'He was dragging grandmothers and moms and toddlers from under the rubble.'…Instead of running to the shelter, Zarina will ask if I would like more cognac. Surreal to be clinking glasses and continuing our dinner during the air raid. But that’s what we do.”
City of God
by Rosa Boshier González
“Gil, I should come clean here. By mythologizing you I am also mythologizing myself: the sludge of my own body, the bodies I love, and my city at large. Your words collapse the difference between self and myth, between the radiance and the ravaged inside all of us.”
Menopause Is More Than Just a Punchline
by Sue Carter
“I don’t want to turn to my phone to see a spokesperson like Naomi Watts looking super cute in an oversized magenta sweater, riding a bicycle with her bare legs outstretched in joy—unless she reveals that she peed a little getting off the seat, or that she isn’t wearing pants because they no longer fit. I can’t take any of this marketing seriously until I see a video of a gorgeous star checking for errant chin hairs before they hit the red carpet. I want someone with real star power to affirm that, sure, this is a time for renewal and celebrating one’s wisdom, but it is also ugly, confusing, and sometimes devastating”
My Big Break
by Jennifer Dines
“Back then, I never considered myself raped, but something inside my twenty-one-year old brain, the one who wrote the lyrics to ‘One Wish,’ knew he had done something violent and shameful. But at the time, I couldn’t admit how much it hurt.”
Essays from Around the Web…
How to Help a Grieving Friend
by Emily Raboteau
“‘How are we supposed to orient ourselves to your suffering if we don’t know you’re in mourning?’ She placed her napkin in her lap…Orient themselves to my suffering? I wasn’t sophisticated enough to answer. Obviously, this couple had something to teach me. ‘Tell me,’ I said in a voice that sounded almost like begging, ‘how you mourn.’”
Material History of the Closet [Soft Serve Ice Cream]
by Tyler Raso
“A photo: me, a high school freshman, blue with joy for making the team, standing flagstill in a parking lot, crumpled eating a soft serve ice cream cone out of a baseball mitt.”
I Process America's Fast Fashion
by Rachel Greenley
“I’m a seasonal worker in a warehouse of an online superstore. Five days a week, I make $18.75 an hour standing at a station with yellow bins brimming with returned clothing. My job is to determine — in less than two minutes — whether a garment should be resold.”
Why You Should Record Your Holiday Dinner Conversations
by Jeanne Bonner
“During a weekend visit to New York last winter, I recorded my son’s impressions of the city. I began by asking where we were. I thought he would simply say “Manhattan” or “at the hotel,” but Leo, then 9, said, “We’re in a hotel in New York City, in North America, on a planet known as Earth, in a galaxy known as the Milky Way, in a universe known as the Universe.”
I Will Never Run Again
by Mikala Jamison
“I wanted to embrace all things unbecoming of a girl. So I went to gyms and I was not dainty or quiet or small or graceful or pretty. I was big and loud and sweaty and breathless and ugly and hungry. I staggered into the weight room a raw nerve of fury and mania and bodily loathing and emerged as serene as a feather riding a breeze. I was introduced to myself for the first time in my life.”
Dirty Words
by Wendy Mages
“In my family, there are those of us who have an affinity for dirty words, and those of us who don’t. Personally, I’m a fan. I think the judicious use of a few choice words, in just the right context, can add emphasis and impact. My sister, on the other hand, abhors all forms of profanity. She doesn’t even like me to say, ‘Butt-dialed’. Too crude! She prefers, ‘Purse-dialed’. I’ve tried to explain to her that the only reason she thinks ‘butt-dialed’ is crude is because she assumes butt refers to a body part, where it may, in fact, refer to a verb, as in ‘Your phone butted up against something in your purse and dialed me’. She is not convinced.”
Cutting Edge
by Jacqueline Doyle
“They sent me to doctor after doctor, hospital after hospital, then St. Vincent’s Catholic Sanitarium in St. Louis for the mad, then the state hospital at Farmington. Six fruitless years of Metrazol and insulin shock therapy. Since the operation, I can’t think any more, I can’t seem to feel anything. They’re good to me, my brother, my mother (her fault, her fault). Everyone meant well. I smile and smile. I love Christmas. I like to watch “General Hospital” on TV. I like the grilled cheese sandwiches at the Highland Diner. I like to sing in church.”
After My Mom's Death, I Developed A Seemingly Innocent Habit. Then It Spiraled Out Of Control.
by Natalie Serianni
“There I was, 20 years after my mother’s death, still hurting and hanging onto a mine of old memories. I still missed my mom. Pictures of my family, all heads squished together in the frame, made me feel close to my childhood of Donna Summer songs, happy meals, and cherry cheesecake…My picture saving forced me to keep every still, every nuance, and every angle of my kids as photographic evidence I could return to.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Memoir Monday founder (and reading series host) Lilly Dancyger is offering a workshop:
Essay Revision Intensive, 12/3
📢 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!
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