Read these Excellent Essays Instead of Doom-Scrolling...
Plus: Electric Literature's fund drive, Narratively's 2024 Memoir Prize, a Narratively Academy Workshop in reported essays, 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. Recently I published
“The Year of the Cat,” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews 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) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #53: Charlotte Shane” “The Prompt-O-Matic #40,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #54: Frances Badalamenti”.
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. Recently I published “Elegy in Times Square,” by
.
Essays from partner publications…
Letter to My Teenage Self: An Incarcerated Man Interrogates the Person He Once Was
by
“It’s the spring of ’97, and nothing has really changed. You spend a lot of time with Nancy’s family and the rest of the kids around that area. Eventually you’ll meet a guy who convinces you that there is a way to get some money and a gun without hurting anyone. What he describes as a “walk in the park” turns out to be a violent robbery in which you kick in a door and hurt a woman badly. You feel so much shame about the harm you’ve caused, but you keep it bottled up inside because there is no safe place in your life to be vulnerable and honest about your feelings.”
Doing the Work
by Emily Berry
“In the early 2000s, my first year out of university, I signed up to a temp agency called Office Angels, which is exactly the kind of company name one would expect to encounter within earshot of the 90s. Perhaps they were thinking of the Christian concept of angels: genderless, supernatural entities who do not eat, excrete, or have sex, and work in service of the supreme deity – arguably the ideal beings for office life. I aspired to be the other kind of office angel: one that looked like Denise van Outen in the pages of FHM, posing on a desk, a pair of spectacles slipping down her nose. I wanted the gleaming handset of a rotary dial phone in one hand, its curly wire twirled round the index finger of the other.”
The Super Saleswoman: An Homage to my 99-Year-Old Mom
by
“It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned why becoming a successful saleswoman was my mother's destiny. She had grown up in the Bronx during the Great Depression, the daughter of a second-hand vacuum salesman who sold door-to-door to support their family of seven. Mom was the second youngest of five kids but the one with the strongest sales drive at the time, so as a child, she assisted him, jumping in when he failed to close a sale. The pitch from his convincing daughter was so effective that buyers ponied up for those refurbished Hoovers.”
Waking Up Trans in Trump’s America
by Gabrielle Bellot
“Like Gregor Samsa, our story often begins with monstrosity: in countless conservative narratives, after all, we are sexual predators stalking bathrooms and locker rooms, or grinning fiends conspiring with schools to force children into sex-change operations, or hucksters trying to have an advantage on sports teams, or simply dangerous, delusional freaks seeking attention and following some trend of the blue-haired left. (None of these, I’m sad to have to spell out, are true.) We almost never get to just be people.”
Bodies, Lakes, and Other Uninhabitable Places
by AJ Romriell
“The Great Salt Lake stretches for nearly 1,700² miles. It’s the largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere, a terminal lake, Utah’s very own Dead Sea. I’m here now because I’ve heard you can’t sink when you float in the water. People say it’s a unique experience, and I’d like to feel it for myself. But I’m hesitating now. I’m afraid to step into the water and disturb it. I’m afraid of what lurks in the depths I cannot see. There are legends of a beast living here—the North Shore Monster, some cousin to Loch Ness—but I’m trying to persuade myself it’s fake. The lake is an inhospitable environment. Nothing but brine shrimp and algae can survive this level of salinity. Only they have learned to live with poison.”
To My Third Father
by Tiffany Yo
“You never asked me why. Almost three years ago, I announced on the phone, ‘I’m changing my last name,’ while tracking sweaty footprints in my Austin condo. I told you I submitted the court filings, $360.12, and my fingerprints; I emphasized the finality of my decision. If you had asked why, I wonder if I would have told you the truth.”
Essays from around the web…
A Former Drinker Asks, Am I Addicted to Running?
by
“And running is good. I don’t have to lie about it or hide it. It makes me happy, and it makes my life better. There are little parallels between running and drinking, though: I feel antsy, for instance, on days when I can’t run (that itch!). And I backpedal on the days I plan to rest—I’ll just go for a quick one right now and take tomorrow off instead. And I don’t understand the people—my friends—who run only once or twice a week. Why not more? Wouldn’t you want to do it every day?”
Lil: A Moment in a Friendship
by
“I tried to see things from Lil's perspective, the way you do when you are close to a person involved with something larger than you, something shaking the world. It’s like when Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, sending her back to her husband in Casablanca, “Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Except they do, of course. Love is also the thing they are fighting for as well as against Nazis in the movie and the Taliban in Lil’s life.”
Falling in and out of Love with Sierra On-Line
by Joy Lanzendorfer
“When I mentioned to adults that I might want to design video games for a living, I encountered a common scenario for girls interested in STEM careers. Relatives told me I’d hate game design. For one thing, programming required a lot of math. Did I want to do math when I grew up? they asked. No, I did not. I hated math class so much. After just a few conversations, gaming changed from building imaginative worlds to doing homework.”
How I’m Staying Sane
by
“After the 2016 election, I tweeted and posted like my life depended on it. I marched. I phone-called. I rallied—the whole resistance shebang. I have no regrets about this—the Cassandras were right. And many of the things I did were productive, like knocking on hundreds of doors in 2018 and helping to flip my congressional district from red to blue. I do regret how much I allowed those fuckers to invade my inner life.”
Our Connection Was in the Cloud
by
“Awaiting her visit, I spent the following weeks in a dream state, establishing feelings by phone. By the second week, I was sleep deprived from late-night talks, which enhanced the surreal feeling I had. My screen would light up with words like, “I can’t wait to fall in love with you,” and my stomach would do backflips. We fell into a hopeful loop that we might be everything each other wanted.”
In the Graveyard of Kung Fu
by Angela Wang
“In the second fall of Covid, my septuagenarian parents (who are both still of sound mind and body) decide to update all their estate planning documents because in our family, love means being prepared just in case things go bad—so now we’re shopping for gravesites. Love is weird, for sure, but you know what’s even weirder? Grave shopping. Turns out it’s a lot like house shopping, where only three things matter: location, location, location. Most importantly, you’re looking for that feeling you get when you step into a house you’re putting an offer on. You’re looking for the feeling of home—a forever home.”
The Kitchen with Two Doors
by Kristina Kasparian
“In spite of my confidence in cooking, I’ve never brought mulukhiyah into my urban kitchen. Eating it without my family’s elbows pressed against mine doesn’t make sense to me. I know I’d feel like an impostor, inserting myself into the sacred and altering it irreparably, as I can’t help but reinvent recipes with my own improvised impulses. As tempted as I am to try, I’m afraid to fall short. So, I leave the art of mulukhiyah to my elders, and secretly wonder whether I am protecting the dish or myself.”
Wrestling with Risk as a Parent
by C. R. Sisson
“He successfully ascended the stairs. Then, perched at the top step, he decided to attempt a triumphant jump down onto the walkway. It was a mere four-inch drop, but jumping with both feet was completely new territory for him. He crouched, preparing for the big move, but lost his balance, arms beginning to windmill before he keeled backward and somersaulted down the stairwell. I was close, but not close enough to catch him, instead chasing him as he tumbled down the rough steps. I didn’t manage to break any of the fall, but scooped him into my arms the moment he came to a stop.
🚨Announcements:
📢 Contribute to Electric Literature’s Annual Fund Drive
Electric Literature is a nonprofit organization with 8 staff members and 3 paid interns. We publish 15 articles per week—essays, reading lists, short stories, flash fiction, poetry, graphic narratives, interviews, and criticism—by over 500 writers per year.
Our work costs $500,000 annually, and last year, 33% of that was donated by 2,000 of our readers—people like you! The average donation of $65 made a difference. We depend on you to keep the lights on.
Electric Literature may be free to read, but the costs are real and going up. We need to raise $25,000 by December 31, 2024 to keep Electric Literature going into next year. In these uncertain times, the only thing I know for sure is that we cannot afford to take the organizations and institutions we care about for granted. If the continued existence of Electric Literature means something to you, please make a contribution today.
📢 Narratively’s 2024 Memoir Prize…
Narratively is accepting submissions for their 2024 Memoir Prize. They are looking for “revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view." The guest judge is New York Times bestselling memoirist Jami Attenberg. One Grand Prize Winner will receive $3,000, and the two finalists will receive $1,000 each. There is a $20 entry fee and the deadline to submit is December 19, 2024.
📢 Narratively Academy’s Focus on Craft: Reporting the Personal Essay—Wednesday, November 20.
In this intensive 90-minute seminar, Kristina Gaddy — author, essayist and editor at the literary journal true — will lead students in exploring how top nonfiction essayists use sourcing and reporting in their work. We’ll take a close look at a variety of personal essay forms (from traditional memoir to experimental), and dive into how personal reporting (such as family interviews) and academic research can help take essays to the next level. Sign up here.
📢 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.Nope…not doing Twitter anymore! Read and share the newsletter to find out/spread the word about whose pieces are featured.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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Hey Memoir Land. I write personal essays about the complexity of relationships. My most recent is a good essay and I wonder if you might take a look at it? https://open.substack.com/pub/honestlywritten/p/lullabies-myths-and-mothering?r=38s6n0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web