Old dudes on skateboards and rewriting the dead girl
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and monthly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, Tin House, Granta, and Guernica. 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. It may be the start of a new work week, but at least we have this great new writing to get us through it.
Spines of the Finwomen
by Lidia Yuknavitch (art by Lizz Ehrenpreis)
I was born cesarean. I have thought about that endlessly. What does it mean? Does it mean anything? Does it mean nothing? To be born cesarean means to be born extracted from the motherwaters. Her body sliced open to free you, the creature. I’ve constructed elaborate theories at different times in my life around my own birth—intense fictions about how I think I missed something important by not fighting my way through water into and out of the birth canal. About how maybe I was lifted too soon from the mothergut. Or about how I didn’t want to leave her body at all, and I was pulled out and thrust into some fucked-up dimension that had nothing to do with me. They say I resisted extraction. That I turned my stubborn little baby back and butt to them. They say when they rolled me over and pulled me out, my eyes were already wide open. Like I had my stink eye on them from the start.
Translation and the Family of Things
by Crystal Hana Kim
I wanted to weep. My mother and I primarily communicate in Korean, and we rarely talk about literature. We have a complicated relationship, but in that moment, I felt a new closeness—rooted not in the inextricable tie of family, but in choice. I have an immediate affinity for others who have committed to the impossible act of writing.
On Horror Movies and What It Means to Rewrite the Dead Girl
by Lindsay King-Miller
Jane Doe is perfectly passive. She is the page on which the story is written. Her body is a crime scene, and the victim of the crime, and the perpetrator of a crime, all at once, but the clues she contains are for someone else to assemble. Her objectification is absolute. She goes from tragedy to mystery to monster when the men who catalog her organs say she does.
Old Dudes on Skateboards
by Aaron Gilbreath
Naturally, losing JR made our friend group nostalgic. We reminisced about our countless trips to coastal California, about all the bands we saw play during the ’90s, all the parties and lunatic nights tripping on mushrooms and laughing. We were always laughing. Alcohol had diminished JR’s health and his desire to do strenuous activity, but during the last years of his life, he’d started reading skateboarding books and collecting vintage decks with a surprising intensity. Like many Gen X’ers wrestling with the reality of middle age, he found comfort in his past love of skating. I hadn’t yet.
My Father Scared Me Speechless. Here’s How I Got My Voice Back.
by Brijana Prooker
You know those nightmares where you try to scream but nothing comes out? When I was a child, that nightmare was my life. I wasn’t just “shy,” as my teachers said. My sadistic, abusive father turned the simple act of speaking up — about anything at all — into my most paralyzing fear.
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