Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals:
Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, Electric Literature, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. Below is this week’s curation. At the bottom are instructions for submitting. ⬇️
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.
Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye, both inspired by Joan Didion’s iconic essay.
“I appreciate you shining light on writers and their work” - Shea Aleman, paid subscriber.
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A Clockwork Ozempic
by John DeVore
“I tried willpower. I tried walking ten thousand steps all around New York City every day. I tried joining a gym and hiring a personal trainer. I tried diets and downloaded all the apps. Meanwhile, I continued to gain weight. I was prescribed an SSRI for the first time to help quiet my anxiety, and I ballooned on it. These mood-boosting drugs made me ravenous. When I came off them, the weight stayed. There were nights I’d swipe through selfies that I didn’t dare post to Instagram because I saw a man who looked like he’d eaten his own identical twin and doubled in size.”
Emerging From the Fog of Grief (Excerpted from Rise Above: A Memoir)
by Matthew Schnipper
“Grief is a difficult thing for people to talk about. No one really knows what to say about death in general, and especially not about the death of a small child. The advice you do get is vague and overarching. Stuff about patience, resilience. Not unwanted wisdom, per se, but loose concepts that are difficult to put into action. I wondered a lot about how to be patient and resilient on the days when it felt like I was melting into the ground.”
Reprise and the fantasy versus reality of becoming a writer
by Brittany Ackerman
“All artists must find a way to reconcile the gap between the life we imagine for ourselves and the reality of the one we end up inhabiting. I have felt myself akin to both Phillip and Erik, unable to choose a side, unable to pick a way of being and stick with it, afraid of the mistakes I’ve made and that I might make them again, proud of how far I’ve come and daunted by how far I still have to go.”
Listening to Trees: A Circle of Life
By Priyanka Sacheti
“In my mind, though, each tree sings a unique song, its rhythms and cadences open to myriad interpretations contingent on whoever is listening to it, much like a person encounters a poem or a work of art. Some trees are more loquacious in their songs, others economical, each choosing how much and what to convey. And for some reason, whenever I imagine a concert of singing trees, I imagine them doing so in the stillness of the night, submerged in darkness, when they become entirely different creatures as opposed to their day avatars”
Of Course My Dad Gave Me Puzzles
by Erin Williams
“The puzzle binder is the clearest evidence I have that my Dad loved me. I come back to it again and again in my mind, the way you circle an object in a dim room trying to understand what it is you’re seeing. It has the weight of proof.”
Living Past the Age at Which My Mother Passed Away
by ROCHELLE NEWMAN-CARRASCO
“I always understood that my mother died too young, which didn’t stop me from thinking of her as old. She made it to sixty-four. As my birthdays came and went, I knew — or, at least, believed — that one day I would reach an age she never did. I wondered what that birthday would feel like. If there would be sadness. If I would resent friends my age who still had their mothers. If crossing into the years she never lived would somehow change our relationship. Last year, I turned sixty-five. And suddenly that woman, my mother, seemed incredibly young.”
Manufactured Landscapes
by Erin Langner
“I started wondering about mill tailings when my father offhandedly mentioned how I’d been raised on a Superfund site. When he said this, it was 2017 and I was thirty-six years old. As with a lot of other things, I felt like he should have told me sooner.”
It Stops with Me: On the Children I Didn’t Have
by Gretl Claggett
“‘You’ve never been married or had children?’ a man twice-divorced—with kids from both marriages—probed on our first and only date, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ He wasn’t the only one to ask that question. Others did, too. Including me. ‘Didn’t you want children?’ an acquaintance recently inquired over coffee. ‘No,’ I replied. Unblinkingly. I could tell he was taken aback by the speed and directness of my response. So was I.”
Lost and Found: George’s Serbian Textbook
by Tamara MC, Ph.D. 💖🦄🌈🌍🦋🦄 🌵🍭🛼
“The book wasn’t mine. This feels important to establish right away. Colloquial Serbian: The Complete Course for Beginners sat in my tote bag from Book Culture, wrapped with a note that said, “Hold for George,” secured by a rubber band. George had paid $54.95 in cash. I know this because the receipt was tucked inside the front cover like a bookmark to someone else’s life.”
This Is the Only Photo I Have With My Dead Best Friend
by Maria Cassano
“This photo shows him the way I remember him: wild and unbothered and infectiously golden. He’s flashing his signature thumbs-up. He’s wearing his favorite Dropkick Murphys T-shirt. He’s shamelessly sporting his sister’s sunglasses because he couldn’t find his own. But that’s not how Will was at the end.”
A Raw Hunk of Amethyst
by Jill Rovitzky Black
“Deven and I were there to discuss equitably splitting up the stuff we owned in common. I had tallied everything I could think of with material, sentimental, or practical value, inventorying furniture, books, pictures, dishes, even the contents of the liquor cabinet. I had some jewelry, of course, but I also owned jeans and dresses and a bathrobe. It never occurred to me that anything I wore would be subject to the division of property in our separation agreement.”
I Was a Figure Skater
by Sam
“I think what I’m struggling with, at its crux, is no longer having something in my life at which I can excel. There is nothing at which I am the best, the expert, the prodigy—and, right now, I’m not even an amateur. As a result, it feels like everything I do is subpar.”
FWB: Feral with Benefits
by Dominique Reed
“I kept seeing the half ear, the missing tail, the bony rump that told me the begging had not always paid off, the way he looked at you like he knew there was a good person buried in you, one who wouldn’t leave another creature behind to scrape his way through life. I lay there feeling like a person who steps over someone in the cold and goes home to a made bed.”
Saying Yes: To Singing, to Aging, to Life
by Susan Moldaw
“For so long I ignored my body. I could get away with it when I was young. My body did everything I’d asked it to, and I’d assumed it would forever. Someday my body will stop. I can embrace that too. But today I rejoice in what’s life-giving.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 From The Shipman Agency: Master Class: Writing Your Memoir with Jerry Stahl
Award-winning author, journalist and screenwriter, Jerry Stahl is the author of twelve books, including three memoirs -- Permanent Midnight, made into a movie starring Ben Stiller; O.G. Dad: Weird Shit Happens When You Don’t Die Young, and Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tourof the Holocaust, which was included in Kirkus Reviews 100 Best Books of the Year and optioned by Robert Downey Jr.
In this masterclass, he shares the techniques and ingredients you need to turn your life into a compelling book. This session is geared for writers who believe their personal journey is one worth sharing. But before they do, they’ll need a structure and blueprint to get them going.
Saturday, August 15 1:00-3:00pm ET; $150.
📢 Telling Your Story: Memoir with Laurie Woolever September 21-26
Join New York Times bestselling Care and Feeding author and longtime Anthony Bourdain lieutennant Laurie Woolever for a special writing retreat on a private island in West Cork. Indulge all of your creative senses on this bespoke 5 night writing retreat featuring Laurie Woolever, the author of the memoir Care and Feeding. Our all-inclusive experience includes craft workshops on topics such as recipe writing and the purpose and function of food and travel writing, as well as individual feedback sessions. We’ll meet local artisans and chefs and spend time in nature as we hone our craft.
This takes place on a small private island in the heart of West Cork, Ireland’s food artisan capital, complete with 50 acres of woodland walks, a walled garden, and an indoor pool. $5,000.
📢 From Off Assignment, "Writing the Book Proposal" led by Raksha Vasudevan, with class visits from writers Irvin Weathersby Jr. and Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, as well as literary agent Noelle Falcis Math, & editor Pilar Garcia-Brown
How to craft a book proposal? How to begin when there are so few examples publicly accessible? How do you get agents and editors excited about a project that doesn’t yet exist? And how do you do it all while allowing space for the mystery and experimentation that’s crucial to the artistic process? This course will address these questions and more. Together, we will study the anatomy of successful proposals from real-world examples, learn how to balance clarity with imagination, and explore how to make the case for a book’s urgency and perspective. Open to writers at any stage, this course is designed to transform the proposal from a daunting publishing requirement into a generative, guiding force for the book to come. By the end, students will have a working draft or detailed outline of their proposal (25–35 pages, not including sample chapters), and a deeper sense of how to shape it into something that excites agents, editors, and themselves.
Dates: Tuesdays: July 28 - August 18 // 7 - 9:30 p.m. EST
Price: $420 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)
Also from Off Assignment: “Ethics of Memoir“ led by Haley Mlotek and featuring Susan Orlean, Hanif Abdurraqib, The Real Sarah Miller, & jamie hood
There’s no way to write about ourselves without writing about all the people we’ve encountered over the course of our lives. In the intimacies of all kinds of relationships, writers often find both their subject and their story. What are the responsibilities towards someone you trust and love? What about the responsibilities for someone you distrust and hate? What about all of the above, all at once? How can a writer, in their work, keep their standards for their art high and the standards for their people fair?
This course is an invitation to discuss the ethics of writing a memoir that includes the lives and stories of other people, as well as a practical exercise in writing and revising memoir pieces. There will be a wide range of readings from memoir essays that provide valuable insights into the delicate balance a writer must keep when writing about real people. Classes will be seminars, each including a craft discussion, a prompted writing practice, and conversation with guest authors.
Mondays: August 3 - 24 // 7 - 9:30 p.m.ET; $450 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)
📢 Two New Offerings from Literary Liberation: Sentence Club and Eating Our Poems: Writing About Food with Karen Zheng
Sentence Club, a craft book bookclub from Literary Liberation, starts August 1st! Join Sherisa de Groot, Shawna Ayoub, and Emma Akpan as we work our way through our first selection over the next three months. We all need to take words more seriously. We also need to play more. Maybe that sounds contradictory, but something that social media has made blatantly clear is we all have a responsibility to learn language. To be meaning makers.
Order the book! We’ll read together, annotate together, and meet a few times live to write and discuss what we’re learning. This is free for all subscribers. Don’t miss our kickoff event on July 31st!
Eating Our Poems: Writing About Food, led by Karen Zheng, will explore the works of poets like Jane Wong, Nikki Giovanni, and Kemi Alabi to discover how contemporary poets “eat” within their poems. Learn tactics for cooking food into poetry and discover the metaphorical depth of food as a love language, economics, scarcity, and doubt.
Details: Sunday, August 16 | 11a-2p ET | 15 seats available.
📢 Submissions Are Open at How I Learned
Blaise Allysen Kearsley is considering essays of up to 1500 words and micro-essays between 500 and 800 words for her excellent magazine, How I Learned.
“What to send: Sharp, personal narratives with an evocative spin on existential-leaning themes. Stories about the horror and the hilarity of being in the world. The profound and the absurd; the texture, the nuance; a particular way of seeing. How we change, or don’t change; how the world changes, or fails to. How people try. Moments of discovery conflict with the old narrative and challenge a long-held belief. Little things are big. Not everything aligns. Nothing resolves neatly. Make meaning out of chaos, but leave us wondering what happens after it ends.”
📢 ONLY TWO SPOTS LEFT! // From Jen Doll and Elizabeth Voetsch: Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30
Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.
Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026
Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY
Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)
Rooms: All private rooms
Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions
Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot).
📢 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.
Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Please be advised 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.
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Super excited to dig through these essays!
Thank you so much for including one of our pieces, "Saying Yes," in Memoir Monday. So honored!