Some Great New Personal Essays to Read this Week...
Plus: Narratively Academy's prompts, a retreat with Amy Shearn and Diana Friedman, our partnership with Literary Liberation, Writing Co-Lab's 100 Days of Resistance emails, Open Secrets Live!...
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.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—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) exclusively for paid subscribers.
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.
~Oh, hey: The recent crowd-sourced editions of Memoir Monday went well. Thanks to those of you who suggested so many excellent essays. I’m going to make it a regular mini-feature, like this: You are welcome, each week, to suggest to readers one essay you loved—***by someone other than you.~
Essays from partner publications…
Why Do I Minimize My Pain?
by Elizabeth Arbour
“When my now nine-year-old daughter was a toddler, there were times I couldn’t tuck her into bed because I was in too much pain to climb the stairs to her bedroom. She would kiss me through the railing as my husband took her up—stair kisses, we called them—and I would stay downstairs by myself.”
What Else Can I Do?
by Rebecca Shankula
“I heard my husband tell the bartender what amounted to: something bad happened here, and I saw the bartender nod. She took a breath and said, without prompting, that she worked with victims of sexual trauma; she knew things, too. She wasn’t my witness and I’d never see her again, but there was a recognition between us that buzzed like a cable no one bothered to bury. We thanked her and left. The place wasn’t special; it was just another bar. The men who raped me weren’t unique. They were everywhere. Undercounted, overlooked, their names bled together and their names would not last.”
Why Absolute Truth is Still Worth Pursuing In a Narrative-Driven World
by Jay Nicorvo
“Here’s a notion we memoirists lean into and hard: there is no larger, objective truth. Call it absolute truth, forever absent. Call it the inconvenient truth. Call it the reality we all share—and can’t agree on. There are only our personal truths, which we hold to be self-evident. If possession is believed to be nine-tenths of the law, then perception is ten-tenths of the world. Perspective is everything, according to this thinking. I am living my truth, you are living yours, and never the twain shall meet.”
Seasons
by
“My nursing care changed again in the spring of l999, when my 25-year-old son, Sky, was killed in a motorcycle accident. All the young patients became a part of me — each one taking up a small space in my heart trying to fill the emptiness. It all happened during the season that’s sometimes missed. During the season that hides; the one that smells like jasmine and sprouts tulips from the darkness of the earth. A season that cools the evening sky with its sweet resinous wind while orange tree petals drift to the ground like snow. The season filled with colors; fairy dusters with pink puffs radiating from their centers and clusters of purple wisteria trailing around budding trees. That’s the season my world caved in.”
Essays from around the web…
Band-Aid Over a Bullet Wound
by Damon Colquhoun
“I had developed rules of survival while running beer and cigarette errands for my father: Scan the horizon for trouble, and always be ready to run. My fast feet were my parachute. I tried making a break for the arcade, but my leg was crippled, so I crawled. Using the door to get to my feet, I hobbled inside. Inside, my whimpers were drowned out by the clamor of kids. Their lives were on autopilot. Mine seemed about to end.”
Lola Kirke Wrote a Book—Then She Waited for Her Family to Get Very Angry
by
“After sharing the manuscript of my finished book with my family last summer, I was filled with a sense of dread. No matter that I’d attached a very intentionally worded email I’d crafted with my therapist, a sage man somewhere in Oregon I’ve never actually met in person but who I understand has a predilection for sweater vests. I knew that my writing could be hurtful to them, even if it had been healing for me. For so long, I’d believed my value was contingent upon my seemingly unique ability to steer our family’s ship towards safe harbor. I was the voice of reason in screaming matches. The champion of the underdog in any fight. Perfect when they were imperfect, or so I thought. Now I was the one rocking the boat.”
I Wanted to Believe He Wouldn’t Hurt Us
by Moa Short
“I collated anything that might corroborate my testimony: emails and messages, the lapsed protective order, the safety plan written by a social worker, a single picture of glass shards on an infant shoulder. I needed the judge to believe a different story than the one I’d been telling myself for years, in which I’d explained Russell’s fury not as abuse but as symptomatic of PTSD — from childhood trauma and wartime deployment, from losing his best friends in combat and his mother too young.”
Not Nothing
by
“He could no longer speak or open his eyes by this time, but still, I hoped he felt the power and intricate beauty of a necklace crafted by someone who had lived inside the walls of a prison cell, the way he did back in 2012. I hoped Dad felt the spirit of his grandchildren wearing the necklace, and the lightness of a world spent on the shoulders of someone you love. There was something about the strength of these tiny beads, the way they stuck together all these years. I hoped he felt that, too.”
How One Perfect Strawberry Helped Me Survive a Scary Mammogram
by Jaime Lewis
“Every year, I bake a four-layer strawberry cake for a friend’s birthday potluck. Any dessert with four layers is a showstopper, of course, but mine requires no special equipment or know-how. The only trick is surrendering to the tyranny of strawberries, on whose quality the cake rides entirely. Summer fruit tends to be abundant, but strawberries are so delicate, so defenseless. To accept that one day, they may betray you, is key.”
The Guest House
by
“Three years ago, he was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, a ravaging and cruel form of what is euphemistically called ‘mild cognitive impairment.’ There’s nothing mild about it. It’s often misdiagnosed, mistaken for its close cousins, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. But Lewy Body is the trifecta of dementias, characterized by a steadily worsening maelstrom of movement, cognition, behavior, sleep, and autonomic function. (I looked that last one up. Basically, it means the total loss of control.) I am his caregiver. Full stop.”
I Was a Girls Gone Wild Merch Girl. I Quickly Realized That My Job Was About More Than Selling Booty Shorts.
by
“I’d grown up with their infomercials on late-night TV. 'Warning: This contains adult content that is not suitable for children!' is how the infomercials started. The girls, always attractive and always laughing, would flash the camera—spring break, wooooo!—playful pop-up censors covering their tits. I didn’t want to do any naked stuff myself—by 21, I’d already done my fair share of nudity for the independent films I’d acted in. But those girls looked cool. Maybe we could all be friends?”
From Abortion to Acupuncture
by
“I had also been frightened in my formative years into believing that woman was condemned to painful reproduction because Eve defied God’s command and fed Adam the apple of knowledge. Her act wasn’t recognized as the brilliant gesture it was toward the future of humanity, so, she had to pay for her egregious unveiling of human curiosity. As such she became the primordial scapegoat for sin and evil in the world. Woman. I am woman.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Narratively Academy's 28 Days, 28 Essay Prompts: A Month of Generating Inspiration and Ideas for Memoir with Amy Barnes, starting Saturday, 2/1.
Led by Narratively Chief Submissions Reader Amy Barnes, this fun and inspiring course is designed to help you break through writer’s block and figure out how to put your unique life experiences into words. Every day, Amy will post a short personal essay or two to read, paired with a prompt to inspire your own writing.
📢 April 27-May1, Attend and Diana Friedman’s “The Motherlode Retreat”…
Delve into the heart of your matrilineal story at The Motherlode Retreat, a transformative five-day writing experience in the tranquil foothills of Pennsylvania’s Poconos. The Motherlode Retreat is for writers of all levels looking to explore their complex relationships with their mothers. Through facilitated discussions, generative prompts, and craft workshops, we’ll examine themes like the mother wound, inherited narratives, and how to transform personal experiences into powerful writing. Whether you're crafting fiction, memoir, poetry, or plays, this retreat provides a safe, supportive space to deepen your writing and bring your stories to life. Via Pyrenean Writing Retreats.
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and
will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.📢 Writing Co-Lab’s 100 Days of Resistance
I'm inspired by Writing Co-Lab’s 100 Days of Resistance, and feel honored to be asked to take part. Look for my piece in February or March. In the meantime, check out the series so far, which already has contributions from R.O. Kwon, Melissa Febos, Denne Michelle Norris, Lilly Dancyger.
📢 Open Secrets Live! May 3rd in NYC…
May 3rd I’ll be moderating a panel at Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Open Secrets Live! symposium in Manhattan. It’s a great lineup. Early bird tickets are $25 through January 31 (or until they sell out) and they go up to $35 on February 1 if any are left.
📢 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, NEW, the author’s Bluesky Handle.
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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Love your weekly round-ups!! You highlight such wonderful essays each week. Thanks for featuring Not Nothing from sneaker wave :)
I made it! Thank you for sharing my story, "Band-Aid Over a Bullet Wound." It's my first published piece. Your SkillShare class helped me get there. And shout out to Sue Shapiro!