So Many Personal Essays to Delve Into this Week...
Plus, a new slate of writing classes from Narratively, in the announcements at the bottom.
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, Guernica, 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
“Becoming Becks” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also week 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 Prompt-O-Matic #28,” “When Your Pseudonym Carries More Clout than Your Real Name,” and interview with Some Strange Music Draws Me In author Griffin Hansbury, and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #31: Rosie Schaap.”
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 reprinted “Minnesota Nice” by Cheryl Strayed, which appears in both editions of Goodbye to All That.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
When Art Talks Back: Graffiti As Visual and Written Expression
by Jonathan Lethem
“As children in New York City in the 1970s, we were born into a world covered with paint. Walls, baseboards, moldings, even radiators might be six or seven layers deep with it, architectural edges and corner blurred into globs, approximate shapes. Sometimes you’d find paint over old black-and-white checkerboard tile on the floor of a bathroom, or covering leaky pipes beneath a sink. Old landlord strategy: Throw on another heavy coat. It might be holding the building together.”
How Not to Ask Your Dad about Family Secrets
by Sadiya Ansari
“There was so much distance between my life and my grandmother’s—between the choices I was able to make versus the choices made for her—I didn’t feel as though her story would unravel me. For my dad, the few choices she made for herself ended up being incredibly painful for him—losing his mother for nearly two decades.”
Parallel Practice: Story at the End of my Fist
by Button
“I have rewritten this scene dozens, perhaps hundreds of times. A father demands his little girl punch him. Should I make this an amusing tale, turn it into an exploration of gender, or hone it to a flash essay? When should I use short jabs: banged, punch, and gut, and when should I slip in baffled or splintering? I press on the edges of my story like a bruise. Why do I chase this moment from childhood that skirts outside my vision, playing with words, turning sentences, inverting paragraphs?…And why, at sixty-six, do I stand before a punching bag—one hundred pounds of deadweight torso hanging by a chain from the ceiling—still revisiting that punch, still dreaming of power, my fist raised?”
"Can Everyone Talk Louder?" On leading a writing workshop for seniors...as a senior myself.
by
“I look forward to the weekly session and meeting my fifteen students. And I’ve come to realize that showing up for class is not just about writing and self-expression. It’s a reason to leave the apartment — a chance to socialize, an antidote to loneliness and depression. Many students stick around for the inexpensive hot lunch, and when I have the time, I join them.”
Essays from around the web…
On Cancer and Desire: Images from a Complicated Year
by Annie Ernaux
“I didn’t take off my wig in bed. I didn’t want him to see my bald head. Chemotherapy had left my pubis bald, too. Near my armpit, sticking out under the skin, was what looked like a beer-bottle cap, a catheter implanted there at the start of treatment.”
The Oyster Diaries
by Nancy Lemann
“The worst things that happen, you don’t see them coming. That’s what makes them the worst. One of the vagaries of age is a loss of the ability to see or detect things that are right in front of you. Usually it’s when you’re cooking and you can’t find the oregano. But this is a metaphor with a bigger meaning—like when you don’t notice that your husband has turned into a Hieronymus Bosch painting.”
Sometimes a Revision Really Is a Re-Vision
by Elizabeth Stone
“When a former student died of AIDS and left me his diaries, I couldn’t unearth the real story I needed to tell—until I began wondering why my long-dead grandmother made a lengthy appearance and why my elderly mother kept popping up in my first draft…Granted, much revision is about word choices and graceful sentences, but sometimes a revision really is a RE-vision—a new vision yielding a new story, often retaining the same people, anecdotes, narrative elements, and even original timeline. And RE-vision, rather than revision, was what my editor was asking of me after reading the first draft of my memoir tentatively titled A Boy I Once Knew: The Story of a Teacher and Her Student.”
My Bookshelf, Myself
by Margaret Renkl
“People have been arguing that print is dead, or about to be dead, for at least half my husband’s teaching career. It is not dead in this house. We write in books. We dogear pages and underline passages and draw little stars in the margins. To read a book after my husband has read it is to have a window into his curious and wide-ranging mind.”
Adaptations I Learned Writing a Memoir With Cerebral Palsy
by Christopher L.L. Vaughan
“Clicking letters on a mobile device wasn’t what real writers did, I thought. Never mind. I knew navigating the keypad with one hand was faster than typing on the laptop that laid unopened.”
Brotherly Love, No Relation
by
“After a year of fuck-buddying confusion, though, I could now tell he wanted more. I had to break down and finally consider, what would it be like to actually commit to someone so similar? So… expected? After all, even more prevalent in the gay community than daddy/boy couples were “boyfriend-twins,” all populating the bars like Noah’s Ark, men pairing up with their convenient double to survive. Could I also, biblically, fall in line?”
Ella Emhoff is the Stepdaughter that Stepmoms Like Me Have Been Waiting For
by Chloe Caldwell
“For years Disney movies (and non-Disney movies) have told us that biological mothers and stepmothers are inherently enemies. We are pitted against one another, with stepmoms assumed to be the evil interlopers. And even if we weren’t “evil” per se, we definitely weren’t “real” parents…As my stepdaughter grew into a teenager, this was a topic we spoke about frequently, wondering aloud why stepmoms were treated so poorly. We made sure to nurture our relationship by celebrating Stepmom’s Day every year.”
I Thought We Wouldn’t Gel Because of Our 30-year Age Gap. Now She’s My Best Friend
by Deborah Vankin
“I didn’t for a minute notice the age gap — and haven’t to this day. Sure, Loraine has curly, silver hair and oversized glasses and, at 86, now walks a tad more gingerly than she used to. But I don’t see an older woman when I look at her; I see the essence of a person, timeless and ageless, housed in a corporeal shell (one that’s in pretty darn good shape, I should add). I see a teenage girl, still ever-curious about the world around her. I see a 20-something women, still evolving through new creative pursuits, most recently poetry writing. I see an accomplished power player in midlife at the peak of a highly successful TV writing career, self-satisfied and oozing with agency. I see a woman, late in life, struggling to unearth new pathways toward creative and intellectual relevance — and succeeding.”
On Sara Moulton
by Krys Malcolm Belc
“I liked that the women on television, the women teaching us to cook, talking to us while we did chores, were not yelling. They never cursed or demanded anything of me. Their gentle suggestions were offered with something I suppose I mistook for love.”
The Unyielding Pursuit of Freedom
by Andrea Fisher
“I see myself as if in a dream: I am standing in front of a mile-long glass wall, and I am screaming as loud as I can. My hands press hard on its cold surface, and all I can see are the patterns from the fog of my breath misting the glass.”
JD Vance and the White Trashing of America
by Deanne Stillman
“An Ohio native like Vance, I experienced a reversal of fortune as a child when my parents got divorced and my mother, sister, and I moved from an upper middle-class neighborhood of Cleveland into a working-class community, instantly becoming persona non grata to certain relatives who were embarrassed that we landed in the wrong zip code. At school, I quickly became aware of America’s dirty little secret – class – finding myself with diminishing access to certain amenities of life and instantly realizing that my schoolmates never had them. Later I came to understand that I was mired in a scenario called 'crabs in a bucket.'”
🚨Announcements:
📢 New Writing Classes from Narratively
Narratively Academy just announced 12 new writing classes coming up this fall, including memoir workshops with Kerra Bolton, Caroline Rothstein, Amy Barnes and Rebecca Evans. Today, August 26, is the last day to sign up early and get 15% off of any class.
📢 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.