Personal Essays to Read this Week...
Plus: Conferences, Workshops, A Call for Submissions, and more...
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals:
Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye.
~The recent crowd-sourced editions of Memoir Monday went well. Thanks to those of you who suggested so many excellent essays. I’m going to make it a regular mini-feature, like this: You are welcome, each week, to suggest to readers one essay you loved—***by someone other than you.~
Essays from partner publications…
What’s the Opposite of Taking Someone’s Virginity?
by Elizabeth Laura Nelson
“In the last days of his life, Jeff and I had finally confronted what he called ‘the elephant in the room’: the fact that we’d never had sex. We’d both been single for many of the years we were friends, and the chemistry between us had caused more than a few people to assume we must have been hooking up — but we never were. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to see Jeff in anything other than a platonic light, until I thought I might lose him. When we slept together, I still believed he’d get better — but he didn’t. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about his warm, smooth skin pressed against my own, our hands searching out places we’d never explored before, the foreign-yet-familiar feeling of his lips on mine.”
How Do You Faithfully Tell the Story of a Divorce, Including Your Own?
by Haley Mlotek
“The night I told him I wanted it to be over is the night I think of as our last, for reasons that are obvious and also my own. When we were done, I put one hand around his neck and let my fingers touch his ear, my forehead on his shoulder and my other hand on my heart, which had slowed so much I was light headed.”
The Secret Pattern
by Aube Rey Lescure
“When I return to Shanghai, my father is working as a food delivery man. Two years earlier, when he was fifty-nine years old, he’d been hired by an app that allowed its workers to ride bicycles instead of the ubiquitous scooters that zip around Shanghai. Smartphones were only beginning to gain popularity when I’d left the city, and now everyone could tap a button to receive anything, from a single coffee to business lunch-sets to crates of genetically engineered fruit from southern provinces. My father started delivering as a pastime and to make some extra cash. Sometimes he claims it is for exercise.”
About a Hat
by Cornelia Maude Spelman
“I sometimes stopped reading the news. If only everyone really cared about each other, the worst problems could be solved. But it was sad and obvious truth that some people in the world, like me, could have enough to eat, could sleep in a warm apartment, while, elsewhere, people went hungry, or slept on the streets, or in tents in camps. I could have a nice hat, and some people had no hat at all.”
Enemies to Lovers: On the Romance Genre’s Mainstream Come-Up
by Angelina Mazza
“I think back to my first romance and its garish pink cover. How I sat on my bedroom rug and read until dawn, buzzing with a pure, electric joy. Nora Ephron once likened the bliss of losing yourself in a great book to the ‘rapture of the deep’ experienced by divers, who get disoriented from inhaling compressed air at extreme depths. A comparable disorientation occurs, Ephron writes, ‘when I resurface from a book.’ Romance is the literature of rapture. This is what I tell the skeptics: that a great romance novel pulls you under, strapped to your back like a steel tank. That, in these waters, every word is a descent. Each page, a new breath.”
Skiing and Crying
by Sari Botton
“I’m not at all direct about my lack of interest, for the same reason I’m not vocal about most things I’d prefer not to do: I believe I’m supposed to feel differently. As a general rule, any time I have an instinct that runs counter to most other people’s instincts, I instantly try to override it. I want to be perceived as Up for anything! Low-maintenance!”
Essays from around the web…
A Pleasure to Have in Class
by Michael Narkunski
“I wrote about trudging through the snow, lost without use of my cell phone, and using the glowing Macy’s star of the mall as a beacon. I happened to be there after school when he was reading it (I always “happened” to be there) and saw him chuckle and choke. I made him happy, I decided. I made him laugh and smile and shine. ...I said I was available for babysitting.”
City Girls
by Wendy Mages
“I can see Nature Guy wading into a sea of prairie grass until only his head is visible. The grasses are so tall that the kids, following him in a single-file line, almost disappear behind him, as if the prairie is swallowing them up, one by one.”
For the Best in Town
by Rick Krizman
“It was who-the-hell-knows o’clock when I finally dropped them off. The man wished me a Feliz Navidad and slid a one-hundred-dollar bill into my candy cane basket. I wanted to refuse it, to tell him how this remarkable event—in fact the entire night—may well have saved my very soul, that I needed to pay for my shame and my doubts and give thanks that the world was not at its core the cruel and fearful thing that for so long had enabled my distrust and cynicism. But then he was gone, and I was left alone to sort out my own conflicting feelings. My conscious mind was done for the night and my exhausted brain burned with a collage of faces and traffic lights and blowing snow and doors opening and closing, the droning of the priest and laughter of the kids and howling of the wind.”
Trinity Knot: A Nollaig na mBan Story (in 3 Parts)
by Máire T. Robinson
“After my son was born, I didn’t know what birth story to tell. When people asked how it had gone, what version of the truth did they want to hear? The word traumatic was on the tip of my tongue but I swallowed it back. I defaulted. The important thing is he’s here now, I would tell people, even though, secretly, I felt I wasn’t fully there myself. There wasn’t one birth story. It had fragmented. There was the story I told everyone else; the story I would eventually tell my son; and the story I told myself – there were three.”
Maybe I am Lovable
by Leah Carey
“For the first time since my mom died, I allowed someone to hold my heart in their hands ever-so-tenderly, and he needed nothing more from me than to be present. He listened as I talked, still not looking at him but feeling his care in every cell of my body.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 I’ll Be On a Panel at The Institute for Independent Journalists’ Online Conference, to be Held Feb 27th & 28th
My panel is called “The Power of the Pivot”:
“At a certain point in freelancing, the routine gets old, your pitches aren’t landing, and you start to wonder: is it me? This session will explore how to know it’s time to change gears. Journalism recruiters and career coaches will share stories of a hard pivot: from one beat to another, out of journalism, or into a completely different field. Bring your soul-searching questions and wild ideas: we’ll get you started toward answers.”
📢 There are still a few spots open for the Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference, where I’ll be leading a workshop and giving a craft talk.
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and Literary Liberation will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.
📢 Call for Submissions: The Queer Love Project
Every week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay that reveals the truth behind heartbreaks, happiness, secrets, reflections on coming out, sexual encounters and the realities of dating, all to answer the question: “What do you know about love?” All of our content is free to subscribers and is supported by readers. You must be a subscriber to submit. Think “Modern Love”—but only queer stories.
Pay: $75 upon publication. Word length: 1,500-2,500 words is ideal. (Longer essays are welcome, too, but nothing too far from 3K.) Other ways to contribute: We also publish the QLP Questionnaire every week. Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to get the full template of questions.
📢 Open Secrets Live! May 3rd in NYC…
May 3rd I’ll be moderating a panel at Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Open Secrets Live! symposium in Manhattan. It’s a great lineup.
📢 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, NEW, the author’s Bluesky Handle.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.
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Thanks, @Sari Botton !
Thanks for including the Open Secrets essay by Leah Carey!