Some Excellent Personal Essays to Get You Through this Week...
Plus: My guest-speaking in Paulette Perhach's 'Posing Naked on the Page' workshop 11/13, a Narratively Academy Workshop in incorporating monologues 11/9, and Memoir Land merch, in the announcements...
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
“MRI of a Rose,” 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 #49: Sarah LaBrie,” “The Prompt-O-Matic #38,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #50: Former U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell”.
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…
My Husband Wanted to Have a Child. I Didn’t. Here Is How It Went
by Nicole Louie
“The peaceful days Erik and I spent attending to our art forms and each other were everything to me. I was happy with things exactly as they were. But Erik was older. Twelve years older. So my twenty-eight was his forty, and his clock was the one ticking, while I just wanted to make time stop.”
Stereo Instructions
by M.D. McIntyre
“I spent a lot of my early years wishing the dead back to life. They were always on my mind, always the center of some story being told around the dinner table. The collective family grief was palpable. In Beetlejuice, there are rules for getting used to the afterlife: The Handbook for the Recently Deceased. This is what I wanted too, a guide to make sense of the losses in my life, a way to navigate a world where the recently deceased still felt so close by, staring at me from picture frames on the stairway every morning, floating over the table as my parents talked at dinner. When my son lost his father, I knew that to get us through it, I had to revisit everything I’d internalized as a kid about grief and death.”
The Older You Get, the Less Time You Have for Bad Books
by
“I try to find works of fiction, I promise, but it’s like pushing a wonky shopping trolley round a supermarket. I constantly veer off toward literary biographies, books about the Replacements, and so on, and only with a concerted effort can I push it toward the best our novelists have to offer. I suspect it’s to do with age and risk. A bad book about, say, the history of Indian railways will inevitably tell you something about railways, India, and history…Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, however, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire.”
The Isley Brothers: Unsung Pioneers of Rock 'N Roll
by
“As one of the first groups on the scene when the rock and roll genre broke, they spent their peak years fighting through an environment where rock morphed into a White-exclusive arena. Countless Black legends—Sly & The Family Stone, Labelle, Shuggie Otis, Richie Havens, Rufus, Betty Davis, Mother’s Finest, Funkadelic, and others—have been erased and reduced by the industry, being classified as “R&B and soul” acts, with fewer economic opportunities than rock musicians, and never getting recognition equal to their White peers…”
Essays from around the web…
My Mom Was a Magazine Editor in the ’90s. We’re Finally Talking About What It Did to Our Body Image
by
“While I had to separate my body stuff from my mother’s to immerse myself fully in my eating disorder recovery, it has been powerful to fully acknowledge the messaging I was raised with and to get to speak to one of the messengers herself. Inviting my mom into my healing process has deepened my compassion not only for myself, but also for her. I am so grateful for her openness to hearing me and for her willingness to take accountability.”
The Lost Art of Date Night
by
“‘This is our first real dinner out-out since the baby,’ she said. ‘We’re in Manhattan, it’s almost 10:00, but everything is fine. Just enjoy being here.’..It was hard to argue. Our daughter, Lulu, was nearly five months old and we had a babysitter. I decided it was Date Night in America, dammit. Getting the glass of red Burgundy to go with my veal—even though I’d already had a martini—was fine. Date Night comes only once a week, after all. Maybe I’d even have a digestif with our dessert.
Athens, Revised
by Erin Wood
“Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He has traveled the world as a pilot. Or so he tells me. This may be a version of the truth, or nothing like the truth whatsoever.” The essay braids in the Persephone myth and a reading of the Bernini sculpture, The Rape of Persephone.”
My Father Thinks Danger Is Beautiful
by Sari Fordham
“At Christmas, we hike in the foothills of Mount Kenya. The air is cool and fog hangs from the white sky. I drag a stick through the mud, while my father points to a pile of wet dung and then another and another. ‘Let’s find some buffalo,’ he says…My mother shakes her head no, her mouth the line of a needle. She will not try to stop him today, but neither will she follow behind, grousing. She will wait beside the hedge that runs up over the hill and disappears, and because I’m the daughter most like her, I will stay, too. We are the makers of things. We find satisfaction from the objects that arise from our hands. I cannot understand the chances my father takes. Each time he gets too close to a crocodile, I nearly weep.”
You Said There Wouldn’t Be Bears
by Camille Griep
“Taking a group of adult women out on trail came with its own set of hopes and expectations. As young women just entering the cadre of adulthood, we wanted to appear mature and fun and strong and, most of all capable. In return, we wanted to be passed the wisdom and love and knowledge we thought every adult woman wanted to bestow. These women would surely have the secret keys to the confounding tumbler locks of real life. We’d seen, in previous years, leaders of the women’s backpack showered with heartfelt letters and shipments of cookies, and photo albums. This would all belong to us soon….Imagine our surprise when they refused to get out of their minivan.”
Chasing the Ghost of the One I Wanted
by Sara M Hajri
“I wish I could rewrite a few moments, the ones where my story could have changed. The unspoken rule for a repressed queer person at 17 is to always mask, to keep escaping instead of staying. I didn’t create this rule; it was made for me, and I followed it because the introvert in me didn’t want to ruffle any feathers. Living on the margins feels safer than being exposed, safer than being seen for who I truly am—someone different. And normally, I’m alright with that; I’ve grown into it. But not in this situation. Because, at that moment, I wanted to be seen. But I let her hop out of the cab at her hotel, and said nothing.”
The Girl Who Dressed as a Turd
by Mckenzie Watson-Fore
“Nevertheless, as my elementary school years waned, I grew anxious in ways I didn't know how to express. Middle school lurked like a hungry predator just around the corner. I could practically hear saliva dripping from its fanged mandible. Soon enough, I would be transferring from my small Christian elementary school to a K-12 college prep charter school that was basically a normal public school, and everyone I knew believed that public schools were filthy dens of iniquity, which begged the question: What would become of me in that sullied arena?”
Poisoned
by
“I send don’t forget to vote texts for a local candidate, hundreds at a time, with the push of one button on my computer, and receive threats in return. I am told that my whole family deserves to die in a fire. Yulia is told she shouldn’t have been born. We try to laugh it off but these words also can’t help but sting. I remind myself that the recipients don’t see our personal phone numbers through this system. I send another batch, 250 then 250 more. I schedule and attend meetings, talk about things like volunteer engagement and organizational structure. What we’re doing might matter, it might.”
Abby... Normal?
by Aisling Walsh
“If autism representation in media leaves a lot to be desired, then epilepsy representation is practically non-existent outside of the horror genre. And here, seizures often become a signifier of profound mental, physical or spiritual disorder and/or demonic possession…The one exception, I would argue, is the Mel Brooks’ classic, Young Frankenstein. Though it does not address epilepsy per se, it focuses on the workings of an “abnormal brain” which has been reanimated using electricity and the struggle of The Monster to find love and acceptance in a world which is primed to hate and fear him.”
Depression in 100 Word Doses
by Judith Hannan
“The coldness comes first. It slithers in while I sleep—in the middle of the night or during a late afternoon nap. I gasp awake. Hypnos and Thanatos do battle. The lifeless air is littered with murdered molecules. Is this nightmare or death? I focus my eyes, recognize my bed, my white cotton sheets, my pillow. I identify my telephone, clock, and tissue box and the table they rest on. But an aura shimmers around the familiar sights as if they, and therefore I, have been beamed to another world and fallen short of reassembling ourselves as we were before.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 I’ll Be Guest Speaking in this Workshop on 11/13: Dive Deep into Personal Essay Writing with "Posing Naked on the Page"
Ready to bare your soul through words? Consider the upcoming "Posing Naked on the Page" class, led by Paulette Perhach, an essayist who's had two essays go viral to more than 2 million readers each.
This intensive 12-week course will transform your approach to personal essay writing, helping you craft raw, authentic pieces that resonate with readers.
Throughout the course, you'll learn to:
Overcome writer's block and self-doubt
Develop your unique voice and perspective
Master the art of vulnerable, impactful storytelling
Whether you're a seasoned writer or just starting your journey, this class will push you to dive deeper into the emotional work of essay. Use code “PosingNakedWithSari” at checkout for $50 off the course fee!
Spots are limited to 20 students, so reserve yours today!
📢 Narratively Academy’s “Using Monologues to Power Your Memoir Writing” with Rebecca Evans November 9th
What Do Killing Eve, Angela's Ashes and Toni Morrison's Beloved All Have in Common? They all make brilliant use of monologues. In a post on Narratively this week, memoirist, essayist and poet Rebecca Evans breaks down why she loves monologue on the screen and the page—and why it should be used more in memoir.
Want to learn how to incorporate monologue into your own memoir writing? This Saturday, November 9, Rebecca is teaching an intensive 3-hour craft workshop at Narratively Academy: Using Monologues to Power Your Memoir Writing.
📢 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.
Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!
A wonderful round up as always! Especially the exquisite “Athens, Revised” by Erin Wood. 😍
Thank you so much for including me among this stellar list!