Seaweed soup and Disney cosplay
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, 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. If you’re gonna be quarantined, you might as well have some good reading material!
Seaweed Soup (Miyuk Gook 미역국)
by Maria T. Allocco (art by Lisa Lee Herrick)
My pregnant grandmother walked through miles of man-made bombs in North Korea to reach the south. Once a wealthy woman, she now wore her remaining possessions. A local South Korean woman allowed my grandmother to enter her empty shed. There, my grandmother gave birth to my mother.
The Curious Language of Grief
by Gabrielle Bellot
DEW, we would eventually christen ourselves: Dominica Extreme Wrestling. Though we had only a handful of actual members, we had big dreams: a website, a ring we would import from overseas with money we didn’t have, character bios. I was known as Enigma. We were a motley crew of offbeat teenagers, cool in our heads if in no one else’s.
How Conquering the Disney Cosplay Universe Helped Me Finally Love My Body
by Tabitha Blankenbiller
I smiled wider when I was asked by random passersby if they could take my picture. I no longer fretted that people would notice that I stood out in a crowd. I didn’t ask myself if my body matched the artist’s rendering. This was about making their pop-culture touchstones my own; duplication wasn’t nearly as interesting as reinvention. The ways my body and personality varied the familiar made it interesting and exciting. I visited Disneyland to be seen. To waltz down Main Street like I owned the place.
What Do We Do With Feelings Now That They Don’t Matter Anymore?
by Sarah Miller
That night I woke up at around 3 AM and couldn’t fall back asleep. I thought about all the feelings that we have. We love people, we stop loving them. We feel attractive, we feel ugly, stupid, and then smart. We go to work and weddings and cook and eat things, and those of us lucky to have any spare time have opinions about those things: this is a good friend or a bad one, that meal was not worth it, that movie was too violent, my parents loves my brother more than they love me, everyone thinks I am great, everyone thinks I am a piece of shit, everyone wants to fuck me, no one does. And all around me most people are still having those feelings. They are like, this is my life, what’s up for my life today, what’s up for me and what I will eat and what I will get and who I will like or not like and what will I buy? And I am so jealous of them because I can’t think of anything except when the end of humanity will come and how.
Red Sands
by Caroline Crampton
From far away, the towers look black, but close to, they are the ruddy colour of metal long abandoned to the sea. For me, these ugly, squatting towers out in the water have always been an eagerly anticipated waypoint. Sighting them huddled together atop their sandbank means that no matter where I have been, I am almost home.
Writers’ Resources
Support authors whose book launches and tours have been delayed or cancelled due to the pandemic—and stock up on quarantine reading—by buying some books off of this list from Entropy! (And don’t forget to shop indie—local bookstores are hurting too, and many are offering home delivery.)
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Until next Monday,