Sooo Many Personal Essays...
Plus: Narratively Academy's new class, 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…
I Lost My Son to Addiction. No, Privilege Didn’t Protect Him
by Scott Oake
“Whatever drug Bruce had been on—meth, or maybe oxy, I still wasn’t sure—he was now coming down, and it wasn’t pretty. I sat in that waiting room with my twenty-year-old son in my lap, trying to calm him down and hold on to him. His brain had shifted into panic mode, and he was desperate to leave. It took everything I had to only barely convince him to stay.”
Friends
by Jia Pingwa (Translated by Dylan Levi King)
“When I first heard young men in the city declaring each other ‘iron brothers’ – a phrase snatched from the mouths of the rough, upright heroes of martial arts epics – I misinterpreted it as an evocation of an industrial process. Friends joined together as firmly as iron welded to iron. I would still like to think of friends composed of iron, but joined together by magnetism instead – their every plate, rivet, screw and fitting charged, so that they can be summoned to your side, or you to theirs, from any corner of our mortal world. There are bonds that can be broken, and there are bonds that are harder to break, but magnetism brings things together again.”
Jabs, Real and Imagined
by
“As a grownup, before reaching some negative conclusion about another person’s belligerence, I now surmise that some private difficulty explains such behavior. Because there is virtually always an explanation, even if we usually can’t discern it.”
Southings, an Excerpt from Take My Name But Say It Slow
by Thomas Dai
“If my parents ever did go back to China, I’d feel like one of the decoys: an amber-colored molt left behind by my predecessors. These shells seem more intact than former selves have any right to be, each with a telltale tear by the head through which their wearers got away. Seeing my parents’ yard covered in cicada shells was reason enough to come home this summer: how a skin deprived of its body still stands, clinging crab-like to fence posts and stems. One brisk rain might wash them away, but up until now, they’ve stayed.”
I Was the World’s Worst Cancer Mom
by Elizabeth Austin
“When Carolyn was diagnosed with leukemia two months into the Covid-19 pandemic, I’d already been a social drinker for almost two decades, spending weekends out at a local bar and always staying until last call. I had casual acquaintances I mistook for actual friends, because the only socializing I did was after 10 p.m. and we smoked and drank together until the lights came on and the bartenders begged us to go home. I’d been a single mom since my kids were babies. I kept motherhood on the front burner all week, attending school events and playdates at the local park (while going back to school myself full-time, followed by working full-time for a tech company). Drinking was how I’d always known to unwind, and I treated weekend bar nights like a religion. Six months into Carolyn’s cancer treatment, I’d become a full-time drunk.”
What We Can Learn From a Dog’s Way of Looking At the World
by Mark Rowlands
“Each morning, Shadow and I exit the gate at the bottom of the garden and walk out onto the bank of the canal that lies behind our house. He is leashed for the first few seconds, while I make sure the coast is clear. We could do without any surprises—such as the unexpected appearance of the American bulldog who lives next door, for whom Shadow has an occasionally violent antipathy that is mutual. As I prepare to unleash him, he thrashes his head and shoulders back and forth, the excitement too much to contain.”
Essays from around the web…
The L.A. Fires Taught Me How to Accept Help
by
“Until three weeks ago, my idea of accepting help was allowing another driver to let me in front of him while changing lanes in stop-and-go traffic, a gesture I always met with a hand wave of gratitude that doubled as an apology for the inconvenience. Maybe this is nothing to be proud of, but, as a rule, nothing makes me prouder than being self-reliant. Nothing makes me feel more like myself than not asking for anything. So suffice it to say that since Jan. 8, when the house I was renting in Altadena, Calif., burned to the ground, turning all of my material possessions into ash, I haven’t quite been myself.”
When You’ve Been in the Hole Long Enough, Even Your Dreams Take Place in a Cell…
by Kevin Light-Roth
“As the months of isolation proceed, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish dreams from reality. Then reality itself takes on a dreamlike texture. You drift between the sad little tasks you’ve invented to give your day a semblance of purpose. Making your bed and stretching the threadbare wool blanket to a pristine smoothness, tucking and re-tucking the corners. Cleaning the cement floor with a washcloth and soap. Getting the edges of the papers on your desk lined up just so.”
How I Crossed the Border Back to Myself
by
“During these clandestine trips, I was trying to form a fuller understanding of who I was. I don’t think I strongly identified as a Latina. I sometimes said I was Hispanic, the more common term then. But even that felt ill fitting, like a very small coat. More often I called myself Mexican and Puerto Rican.”
Sail, Baby, Sail
by
“Long ago, my mother sang this lullaby to me before I had words to tell her how much I wanted—no needed—to hear it. She must have known, so often did she hold and rock me against her cashmere sweaters as she sang, my heart pounding from my latest night terror. “Your little heart is going pitter-pat, pitter-pat,” I hear her, in memory, croon. Enveloped in softness and Arpège, I am safe.”
I Was Gay, He Was Understanding
by
“The first woman who joined us in bed was charming and lovely and had dimples as big as the fingernail moon that hung in the sky on the night the three of us spent together. We poured expensive wine into three matching, long-stemmed glasses, and we toasted a new adventure. Her lips were soft, and her hands were gentle. Although I did not enjoy sharing her with Charles, I did enjoy what I shared with her.”
Beauty Mark
by
“At Grandma’s Texas salon, there’s my future. There are waiting rooms filled with wrinkle-cheeked women, passing around advice. Chin exercises to avoid turkey neck, five times a day. Sugar scrubs against the backs of thighs to send cottage cheese cellulite running. Kegels to keep a lover loving. In the salon bathroom, there’s me, in the mirror, turning, finding neck creases and thigh dimples and betrayals hickeying my olive skin. I will carry the magic tricks of beauty these women give me into my future.”
Permanent Resident
by
“There was the woman in Albany, New York who lunged across her desk to demand how many children you were planning on smuggling in. There was that border-town woman in Vermont who made you take another unpaid day off work to drive through a frozen countryside because she swore your Irish Gaelic name was a typo or a ruse.”
Walking Off the Old Me
by Anna Sophia
“Last week, with two fine days forecast for the Tararua Ranges, I hiked for six hours, crossing narrow one-person swing bridges, climbing 400 metres through mud-filled tree root steps at one kilometre per hour. I navigated an equally muddy ridge line and slowly descended to camp alone next to a pale green clear river. I swam multiple times; in the evening the sky performed an iridescent light show. At midnight, enveloped by the stars, it occurred to me that I had walked into a magical alternate version of reality – one that has always been here, but was patiently waiting for me to wake up and notice it.”
Beyond Grammar
by
“Once there was a girl who wrote sly and curved, phrases unadorned and somehow piercing. A girl who framed her family’s immigration story as a subdued heroics tale, who pulsed her pace with gratitude, who wanted to say, who tried so hard to say, that she would carry the multitudes of her family’s goodness forward; she called that goodness sacrifice. But love seeps and spills and won’t be contained. The page is flat. Love is dimensions. When the girl disappeared after three long months of trying, she did not return.”
A Stillborn Foal
by Brock Henry Allen
“I heard you cradled a stillborn foal in your arms, carried it into your kitchen and laid it on old newspaper. I heard you sat for days staring at its body, watching placenta dry slick and hard between its ribs and knees. I heard PTSD. I never heard what happened to the foal, if it was taken to a field, a gift for coyotes and crows, eagles and hawks, but later, I liked to envision the foal jerking awake with a rush of breath, flicking sheets of newspaper into arcs as it lurched up and bounded into the yard, rending dirt and grass with soft thuds. I imagined I could see you jerk awake and follow. I could see you lean against the doorjamb, your mouth open wide with laughter.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Narratively Academy's “Deeply Personal: Writing First-Person Essays on Raw and Difficult Topics,” a 5-week workshop with Caroline Rothstein, starts on Tuesday, February 25.
Narratively Academy's Deeply Personal: Writing First-Person Essays on Raw and Difficult Topics, a 5-week workshop with Caroline Rothstein, starts on Tuesday, February 25.
In this intimate 10-person class, students will learn how to craft compelling personal essays about the experiences that matter most to them, with hands-on feedback from the instructor and peers.
📢 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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