Montaigne, postpartum psychosis, and nonviolence
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.
My Father, Montaigne, and the Art of Living
by Ann Tashi Slater (Photograph by Jim Hobbs/Flickr)
After high school, I worked for a year in Paris and, like my father, fell in love with France. Short on money and time after the divorce, my father no longer took vacations, but he came to see me, striding joyfully off the plane at Orly Airport early on a June morning. Back for the first visit in almost thirty years, he plunged once again into the streets where he’d been a young man caught up in the heady, intellectual fervor of the city of Sartre and Camus, worlds away from his small-town New Jersey upbringing.
Does it Matter Why
by Saeide Mirzaei
When I decide not to play the part, I tell the well-meaning Americans that back home, in my banned country, I wasn’t a kitchen-dwelling goblin as they like to imagine. But when I don’t play the part, they change the script. They change the script with no warning. They immediately conclude that I must have been different, an exception to the norm, an anomaly: “It makes sense. That’s why you had to come here. You weren’t like the others.”
On the Language of Nonviolence and the US Criminal Justice System
by Michael Fischer
When I started writing, I didn’t specify that my offense was “nonviolent”; I just wrote that I’d been to prison. My work doesn’t focus on why I was locked up, so I thought that would be enough. But a pattern quickly emerged. Upon accepting one of my essays, almost every editor asked me to “characterize” my incarceration: something to let readers know I was one of the good ones and it was okay to empathize with me.
Inferno (excerpt)
by Catherine Cho
When my son was born, I was reminded of this tradition daily by my family and by my in-laws, because we were breaking all the rules. I took a shower after birth, ignoring the week-long rule of no water on the mother’s body, and my first meal wasn’t the traditional seaweed soup, it was sushi. We opened our doors, let in guests, bundled my son in layers and took him on walks in the falling snow. And then we did a fateful thing: we left our home.
Writers’ Resources
Check out this Lit Hub interview with Memoir Monday reading series alum Alisson Wood—on the myth of catharsis in memoir.
The next Memoir Monday reading will be on Monday, December 14—full line-up and details expected next week!
Thanks for reading! If you enjoy Memoir Monday, please consider making a one-time or recurring contribution (if even a fraction of subscribers signed up to contribute $1 per month, Memoir Monday could be self-sustaining!) by clicking here.
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!