Nine Must-Read Personal Essays...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications.
*Soon, there’ll occasionally be original work as well, likely behind a paywall—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish. So, if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one!
I’m working with the National Writers’ Union/Freelance Solidarity Project on creating a contributor-friendly contract. Once I have one, I’ll announce how to submit, although it will be a limited opportunity—one essay per month, to be called “Memoir Monthly.”
Read about our expansion plans here. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
After the Family Cabin Burned
by Stella Cabot Wilson
"When I first moved to New York, I’d walk through the dark streets late at night feeling euphoric—feeling like I belonged in this place more than I’d ever belonged before. I’d look up at buildings illuminated by yellowy street lamps or at the black spots of birds sweeping past skyscrapers during a winter day, and it was like I was hiking through a valley and gazing at canyon walls. If you look upward, on a quiet cold day or a sleepy humid night, the stone faces of buildings are just like a desert: so much life moving underneath the surface; not visible but teeming."
At 53, Bucking the Great Resignation
by Martha Bayne
"Getting scammed forced me to face the actuality of age and the limited time I have left, and open up space for the rest of my short life to stretch and grow, in all its messy actuality with another human. I’m taking it seriously, even if I can’t help but laugh. Because while I may actually be well aligned with the Great Resigners in this quest for balance, getting a straight job at this particular cultural moment may well be the most contrary, GenX move yet."
Play for Camera
by William Horn
“I want to tell her that Hunter is Hunter and Daisy is Daisy and both should be allowed to breathe. I want to tell her I know the instinct to split yourself in half, too, that I know the violence required to hold your true self in shadow, that I have another name I only dare whisper.”
Easy Come, Easy Go
by Lan Samantha Chang
“Now, at last, I had sold my first book. The fledgling stories nursed through multiple revisions, through the stress and strain of financial instability, had been miraculously parlayed into a two-book contract. I was given a check for more money than I’d ever seen. With Eavan’s approval, I used most of the advance to pay off my student loans. Next, Eavan said, it was time to buy something for Myself. She suggested a pair of diamond earrings.”
Time
by Nitin K. Ahuja
“Dr. Elder has been seeing patients longer than I’ve been alive. He says it’s a calling. Most days, in the physicians’ workroom, he eats the same lunch from a lunchbox packed by his wife — thin sandwich, modest portion of potato chips, can of Diet Coke. I can’t fathom how I’ll weather the next thirty years, how this much repetition could ever strike me as nourishing.”
Notes on Craft
By Sara Freeman
“There’s a kind of necessary amnesia that sets in after you finish writing a novel. Like childbirth, you must forget; the future requires it of you. If you remembered, really remembered, then surely you wouldn’t do it again. Or perhaps it’s that the experience itself of writing a novel is a kind of sustained forgetting, a controlled fugue.”
In the Dark, I’m Not Fat and You’re Not Mean
By Michelle Weber
“You get to take your popcorn into a movie, where you sit in an actual seat and have 90 minutes or so to eat. There’s no rush, no shoveling. No hiding. No swallowing without tasting…And best of all: it’s dark. Everyone’s focused on the screen. When I got older and would treat myself to larger bags of popcorn (extra butter, please), no work was required to tune out the people around me. I could sit, and eat something buttery and salty at my own pace, and turn off the part of me that’s constantly scanning the faces around me to prepare for the next barb and never learning that you can’t prepare yourself to be hated.”
Happy Hour of the Wolf
by Michael Narkunski
"The second purpose is simply to say the word itself: 'sex.' To be hip, to be wise, despite your age, despite your utter in-betweenness, and young, dumb jokes. That both of your wavelengths can touch in the same adult, horny man-space of plain language. That he knows that you know that he knows—without a colored handkerchief, secret lexicon, code, or app, but just from normal words, normal gestures, from smiling and seeing and being. And after a lifetime of the opposite—of hiding, averting, and non-being—it’s exhilarating, it’s the most exhilarating thing in the universe to flirt with common signals and you are happy to operate this way until you die."
My Holocaust-Survivor Grandmother Found Happiness Everywhere. I See Her in My Daughter.
by Joy Netanya Thompson
"She had a bustling social life in her West Hollywood neighborhood. She danced at every opportunity and basked in the presence of her grandchildren like we were sunshine. When, on our wedding day, my husband smashed the glass under his foot and our guests shouted “mazel tov!”, Zelda told me afterward that the moment was “like the heavens opened.”
📢 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.
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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