New look, same great newsletter
Welcome to the new Memoir Monday!
As you can see, the newsletter looks a little different this week, and is coming from a different email address. That’s because Memoir Monday is going independent!
As you know, Memoir Monday is a partnership between Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, Tin House, Granta, and Guernica. Previously, the newsletter was hosted by Narratively, but as of this week, Memoir Monday is an independent project run by Lilly Dancyger (that’s me!). I spearheaded this project as Narratively’s then-Memoir Editor, and I’m excited to start this new iteration.
Behind-the-scenes stuff aside, not much will change about the weekly newsletter. It will still include the very best first-person writing from around the web, selected by the editors at the fine publications listed above, as well as additional resources related to memoir writing and information about the NYC-based Memoir Monday reading series.
As I’m striking out on my own and will no longer have institutional backing to help create each week’s newsletter or cover costs associated with the newsletter and reading series, your support is greatly appreciated. If you so choose, you can leave a tip via Paypal—every donation is helpful, big or small!
Body Boundaries, Indian Culture, and Healing Enough to Be Mothers to Our Mothers
by Madhuri Sastry (art by Lindsay Stripling)
I have been building a safe space around myself, somewhere I can mend. The body-talk embargo is its roof. I’m still healing. I think I will be recovering all my life.
Sometimes, we heal enough to be mothers to our mothers.
Stuck in Trees
by Jessica Francis Kane
On 8 January 2018, I noticed a large bunch of purple balloons in a tree near my apartment building. I know this was the date because it is the day my children returned to school after the winter break, and the tree in question is one we pass on our walk to the subway. I’ve described it as a ‘bunch’ and so you may be picturing the traditional, upright arrangement featured, for example, in the movie Up. If you are picturing that, I appreciate your sense of scale, but the shape is wrong.
Magic Numbers: A Story of Wanting in Pairs
by Christie Tate
At my first twelve-step meeting—for my eating disorder, two days after Roz made me promise to go—seven women sitting in a church multi-purpose room greeted me with unguarded smiles. There was no coffee pot, no smoker’s room, no half-eaten box of Entenmann’s crumb cake—none of the props I’d seen at my dad’s recovery meetings growing up. There were no men. I chose a faded red upholstered chair with a lumpy cushion and a wobbly left leg. I busied myself to avoid eye contact, surveying the bookshelves and crossing and uncrossing my legs.
My Secret Life as The World's Worst Professional Matchmaker
by Karie Fugett (art by Alice Yu Deng)
In my strange new job, listening to other women recount their traumas, I was angry for the women who came to me with stories of abuse. If they’d written in their journals what I’d written in mine, I would have been devastated. I would have told them they were wrong. I would have said that they deserved to live. They were not responsible for their husband’s or anyone else’s rage. Leave, I would have told them. They could do better.
Master Sauce
by Grace Hwang Lynch
My brother was the one who brought up the topic of genetics. He had sent a vial of saliva to get his DNA analyzed, which seemed to me a high-tech form of divination, revealing secrets from the past—maybe your ancestors aren’t who you think they are—and predicting the future (high blood pressure, diabetes, and a higher than average chance of cancer loom on the horizon). My brother’s results revealed that he had Okinawan markers on his maternal side. Which implied that I did, too.
My Unsexual Revolution
by Diane Shipley (art by Chloe Cushman)
It didn’t make sense. I’d had sex once, why couldn’t I do it again? We broke up after five years and the answer seemed obvious then: Deep down, I always knew we weren’t right for each other, so my body had stopped us from getting too close. That was plausible. But if I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted that it wasn’t about him, that my having sex in the first place was the aberration, not the fact that I hadn’t had it since.
Before the Shaking Starts
by Trevor Quirk
Before Utah, I had never known the specter of local cataclysm, of something that endangered not only myself but everything around me. It was eerie to feel my personal landscape of terror merge with the state’s arid highlands. (Gerard Manley Hopkins: “O the mind, mind has mountains.”) I imagined the earthquake wherever I went. I would see a federal-style cottage and think of the family doomed to be buried alive under it. I would see the mansions and villas of Utah’s wealthy, installed on mountains or balanced atop sleeping landslides, and feel a blackened satisfaction.
Writers’ Resources
This is really a whole bunch of resources in one: An excellent round-up called “Why We Write Memoir: A Reading List” from Jacqueline Alnes at Longreads.
A craft post by yours truly about one of the hardest aspects of memoir: Writing a satisfying ending even though you’re still living the story.
Pre-registration ends July 23 for HippoCamp, a conference in Lancaster, PA dedicated to creative nonfiction. (August 23-25)
The Memoir Monday reading series will return in September as an official Brooklyn Book Festival bookend event! More details coming soon.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoy Memoir Monday, please consider making a one-time or recurring contribution (even $1 per month could help make Memoir Monday self-sustaining!) by clicking here.