Plagues, astronomy, and a Freddie Mercury party

Jul 06, 2020

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.

In Protest of a Body that Refuses to End

by Clara Trippe

I grew up in a town nestled at the base of two peninsulas. At night, my friends and I drove out of city limits and onto the limbs of the land, reaching around our bay, whose blue was hidden in the darkness. Out there was the best spot to look at the stars: the top of a hill, giving us a 360-degree view of grape vines and cherry trees, water stretching out black on three sides. On a clear night, we could see a band of star clusters and dust lanes heading toward the core of our galaxy, looking like someone up there had tripped over a bunch of stars and shattered them. On a cold night, every point of light looked like a dagger. I’d take a deep breath and wait for a star to puncture the atmosphere and fall burning to my feet.

Do Not Marry a Politician and Other Kitchen Table Things

by Clarie Gor

Luo funerals are extravagant. They could last as long as three weeks and loud performances of grief are often delivered mostly by people a little removed (or not even touched at all) by the harshness of the loss. The bereaved family is expected to feed hundreds of people for a week or so and people are often annoyed if they don’t get at least one proper meal and a refreshment on the day of the burial. But these rituals are also community and history: funeral committees by day and discos by night; quiet mourning in the evening and laughter around fires in the dark.

That Time I Spontaneously Flew Across the World for a Dead Rock Star

by Erica Commisso

I ran back to my room, about 10 minutes from the casino, and got ready. I changed from one Queen shirt to another, and tried to shed any appearance of my fatigue. It was pouring rain and my phone was dead, but I didn’t care. I had to get to the casino an hour before everyone else to pick up the wristband and have first access to the party, thanks to the VIP status bestowed upon me by Justin Shirley-Smith.

Seeing Things

by Emily LaBarge

The City of the city is jagged and spiky, tangled, twisted – burned down, paved over, rebuilt, unruly with wealth and poverty side by side, as they have always been. A punished and punishing place. In the City of the city, with each cardinal boundary guarded by a gothic, cast iron dragon, I feel dwarfed and secret and ancient and a little bit powerful, on the wide, now-vacated streets. Walking through a city within a city within a city with no temporal end but the seemingly interminable present, I make my way to Fore Street, where Daniel Defoe lived in one of only two houses on the street to survive the fire of London in 1666, one year after the Great Plague of London killed an estimated 100,000 people – roughly a quarter of the City’s population. Defoe was just five years old at the time: his famous A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is based on the journals of his uncle Henry Foe, a saddler who lived in Whitechapel.

Letter From Newark: I Hated That I Had to See Your Face Through Plexiglass

by Nyle Fort

I was anxious the first time I visited you in jail. What could I say to comfort you? How could I explain, in 30 minutes, that your 10-year sentence testified to centuries of racial bondage? I didn’t want to lecture you, but I wanted you to know that the system didn’t fail you. It’s rigged against you.