Stuttering, vulnerability, and a year without libraries

Mar 08, 2021

Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.

How a Year Without My Library Has Changed Me

by Lauren Du Graf

The internet is vast and it is deep, but not mystic. Our experience of libraries, as Howe reminds us, is physical and material. The way we encounter an idea there can be traced to the moment we find it on a shelf, the warm light that hits your thigh as you sit in the oak reading chair with the flat, broad arms while strangers drift in and out of the periphery. A library exists apart from the tempo of commerce. It is a place where, through quiet encounters with otherness, we are able to peaceably locate the edges of our finitude.

My Stutter Scared Me—Until I Found My Community

by Sophia Stewart

First, he told me about his stutter. He recounted giving fake names at Starbucks; the insurance agent who hung up on him because she thought the call dropped when he paused between words; ordering a meal he didn’t even want because it was easier to say; the chest-cracking panic he felt when a realtor benignly asked, “What was your name again?” I didn’t realize I was crying until I felt a tear slide warm down my cheek.

Men I Hate: The Stasi Men

by Lynette D'Amico

We were also there to try and put our marriage back together following my husband’s gender transition from a queer woman to a man, which began two years earlier, in 2016. How would it be to live someplace where nobody knew our specific relationship history or had known us in a previous incarnation as a queer couple? Were we still a queer couple?

On Vulnerability

by Katherine Angel

It’s tempting to insist that women are themselves the authority on their desires; that they categorically know what they want. But is anyone an authority on themselves, whether on their sexuality or anything else? I don’t think so – and I’m not sure that insisting so gets us very far. Women are not the authority on themselves – not because they, unlike men, have difficulty detecting their ‘true’ desires, but because no one, perhaps especially when it comes to sex, is an authority on themselves.

Writers’ Resources

Check out this interview with memoirist Georgina Lawton at The Rumpus!

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