Soooooo Many Essays...
PLUS: An in-person event with Susan Shapiro and several readers, and a solicitation for advice column letters in the announcements.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, 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 “The Re-Parent Trap” 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 #24,” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #25: Hyeseung Song”.
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 “Washington Square” by
.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
What Cruising Taught Me About Love
by Peter Dubé
“I learned how the need to see validation in another person’s eyes is universal; how kindness brings light into the world; how the smallest gesture, whether noble or cruel, can have unforeseeable consequences. I learned how, despite all the heteronormative narratives of romance, it was utterly true that one could love someone passionately, deeply, for twenty minutes without knowing anything about him.”
Bali, Crete
by Leslie Jamison
“On vacation, I become an anthropologist of other people’s delight, or their ideas of delight. A student. The young couple who brings no books down with them to the rocks. The woman films the man jumping into the water. The man puts sunscreen on the woman’s back. Will they pass an entire day in this way?”
Universal Mother
by Momtaza Mehri
“In 1985, a nineteen-year-old Sinéad O’Connor moved from Dublin to London. At Heathrow, she was welcomed by the suited Special Branch officers who greeted Irish arrivals at baggage claim, routinely pulling aside suspicious-looking men. Dublin, her birthplace, couldn’t accommodate her artistic dreams or the pent-up howl she needed to shake loose. Ireland was, like her, an abused child – they had too much in common. She washed up at Portobello Road Market, jackbooted, young and hungry, with a record contract under her belt, and fell in with local Rastas. They bonded over a penchant for cursing the devilry of the Pope. Among those reed-like men debating scripture and flogging tapes on street corners, she found her people. The oppositional inclinations of Rasta chants and rebel songs would go on to shape her music and visual art. O’Connor would later dedicate ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’, a song on her second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got to Colin Roach, a young black man shot inside the foyer of Stoke Newington police station.”
Dialing In
by Heidi Diehl
“At first Bennett and I took turns answering calls in our sweltering living room. I preferred doing it together, because then I wasn’t alone with my doubts: that I was ripping off people who likely couldn’t afford it, that I wasn’t clairvoyant, and at just a couple months past teenage, that I didn’t have the life experience to advise an adult.”
My “Mesearch,” Then and Now
by
“A funny thing happened then, gradually and then all at once, as these things do: I got old. As I finish writing this piece, I am just a couple of weeks away from my 56th birthday. If I wanted to, I could now buy a condo at the ‘old people place’ where my parents lived before my Dad passed. I am no longer mistaken for a grad student, let alone a freshman. It’s mesearch in a whole new way…Being an older worker studying age stereotyping really has provided me with new insights. The evolving lived experience is sparking some new ideas.”
Voices On Addiction: Incorrigible, A Love Story
by
“...the shape of a bottle stayed inside him, waiting to be filled again as soon as we split, and the fumes from that bottle and all the bottles before it in his family and mine still float over my life and the lives of our children even as they, one by one, choose sobriety.”
Essays from around the web…
Inside Out: The magical in-betweenness—and surprising epidemiological history—of the porch.
David Owen
“During hot months in the era before air-conditioning, a porch was usually the coolest room in a house; now it’s often the hottest. I can tell from Google Earth that most of the screened porches I knew when I was a kid have been closed in, presumably so that they could be air-conditioned, too. Artificial climate control has become such a standard part of American life that to most people the loss doesn’t register as a loss, but it is one. My wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, and I finally got air-conditioning a few years ago, after surviving thirty-seven New England summers without it, but we’re determined never to enclose either of our porches. One of them has recently become our favorite place to sleep.”
The Takeover
by Zibiquah Denny
“Sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night not to party or drink but to participate in a historic event that would change her thirteen year old perspective forever.This is a story of a thirteen year old girl who witnesses history, but had no idea what it meant at the time. The event changed the path she would take going forward with her young life. A rebel she was not but one she turned into after this experience”
My Teenager Ended Her Life. At 70, I Did the Unexpected to Honor Her
by
“About to be on the receiving end of the buzzing needle, I smiled. I didn't tell him what my desire to have one inked on my arm meant to me. Or that for many, it symbolizes the choice to continue living. A reminder of strength and perseverance. A signal to some that we are kindred.”
The Day You Ate Our Deliveroo Delivery
by Farah Ahamed
“The day you ate our Deliveroo delivery we had ordered Indian food from Chachi’s Kitchen for four people…You knocked on our door and said, “I ate your food.”…We were annoyed. It must’ve shown on our faces because even though we said nothing, you kept repeating the word, “Sorry.”…We tried to ignore you, your pleading voice, your desperate face, the whole problem of you eating our dinner and apologising.”
Eating Ashes
by Maria Fernanda Garcia Lozano
“Walking into the kitchen the next morning was worse than the actual funeral. The familiar silence of my youth was usually broken by my dad ruffling the newspaper in the mornings while everyone else slept. ‘¿Quieres café?’ Was always his first question. Eating pan dulce, he would go back to his reading as I poured myself a cup of coffee and ate cereal. The kitchen table was now filled with leftovers and funeral flowers, everyone still asleep, the coffee maker unplugged and the silence unbroken.”
After 30 Years of Dieting I was Exhausted. So I Started to Ask: What if I Stopped?
by Jason Prokowiew
“By the time I reached 45, I was utterly exhausted by my 30-year quest to stay small. For the first time in my adult life, I started to wonder: what if I was just fat? Shortly after I broached the topic of my body with my therapist, I found a nutritionist who specialised in intuitive eating and the radical idea that my body knows what it needs. Diet culture demands that calories are counted, that the number on the scales is recorded, that success or failure is based on measurable progress. Intuitive eating rejects that, and instead asks you to simply listen to what your body is asking for.”
You May Not Notice My Disability
by Elizabeth Kleinfeld
“My disability may not be apparent to you, but it isn’t invisible. You might notice the dramatic prisms in my glasses that refract the edges of my face, or you might see me wearing an eyepatch. You might observe me hunched over my laptop, leaning much closer to the screen than most people do. You might learn that I haven’t driven since 2019 and assume, like many do, that I had too many DUIs. You may see me walking into a retaining wall or a parked car or a pile of boxes and think I am drunk.”
My Octopus Boyfriend
by
“While Richard and I were in Maine, I spoke on the phone with my former shrink. I had been reading notes I’d written in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I felt a wave of love for her fall over me. I told her she had helped me, although I am just about the last goat caught in a fence you could release the horns. She didn’t care that much about the fence or the horns. It’s the secret of a long relationship you don’t care that much. Yes, it was a job for her, and she had been paid to stick it out with me. I wish I’d been able to pay all the other people I’d known at the time.”
One Day I’ll Move Back to India
by Harshini Rajachander
“Four years, Six years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty. The years one grows into an adult, marries, buys a home, adopts a dog, builds a community, or maybe has children…Those are the years we spend in the in-between.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Memoir/Publishing Guru Has an Event Tomorrow:
Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, July 30th, attend “NYC Shrinks Are Away” an in-person reading (where Shapiro will be reading from The Forgiveness Tour) at P&T Knitwear on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
📢 Do you have a personal problem you could use help with? Ask ’s “The East Village Yenta” (me) about it.
Send your questions about interactions with romantic partners, friends, coworkers, neighbors, or family members to eastvillageyenta@gmail.com (If I choose your letter, I’ll work with you on editing, and to blur identifying details. And we won’t use your real name.)
📢 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.