Perfume, reporting, and a Eula Biss excerpt
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.
Some of the Places I Am Stuck
by Cameron Gorman (art by David Dodd Lee)
Find a bench—one that is shaded, even in the darkness. Sit there—on this certain bench in this certain park. Can you feel that pricking on the back of your neck—a tiny, clean needle? A long time ago an earlier you sat here, made an impression of their body on the cheesecloth of time. There you are, here. Both of you, layered on top of each other—like tracing paper over the thing you’re trying to trace.
Having and Being Had
by Eula Biss
There wasn’t any furniture in the house where I grew up until a German cabinetmaker moved in with us. He arrived in a truck so heavy that it made a dent in the driveway. He filled our dining room with his furniture and then he made tiny replicas of that furniture with the machines he brought in the truck. I still have the tiny corner cabinet with lattice doors, the tiny hutch with brass knobs, and the tiny dining room table with expertly turned legs. They’re in the basement, wrapped in newspaper. The tiny dresser sits atop my dresser, which is from IKEA.
How Scent Returned My Life to Me
by Mishka Hoosen
Scent is notorious for collapsing time. Any reader of Proust can tell you that. But scent, for me, has always existed in the troubled borderland where narrative becomes a fraught thing. A smell could be a doorway, or a window from which I’d jump. Because of my trouble with sensory perception, the line between my body and the world would become blurred. When that is combined with trauma, time takes on a different, more troubled aspect.
In the Land of Fiction and Fake News
by Elizabeth Mitchell
A cop once told me that, in a chase, the officer in pursuit is not supposed to make the arrest. His adrenaline is running too high for rational thought. Embarking on a scavenger hunt for information—going down the “rabbit hole”—can apparently make a person more likely to believe propaganda because they become not just a recipient of information, but a “truth seeker.”
Trouble for Your Thoughts: On Reported Creative Nonfiction
by Kenneth R. Rosen
I had wrongly believed once that fiction was the only vehicle through which one could glean a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world. But I had also learned that some of the greatest fiction ever published had its roots in journalism. Meanwhile, the nonfiction I found wielded the tools of the novel and married them with journalism to better understand a person’s, or a family’s, history.
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