Sunflowers, nihilism, and a Black physicist
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.
Sunflower Sick
by Sara Heise Graybeal
I feel comically irritated at the sunflower, how serenely she manages to petition for her needs. I have peanut butter on my cheek, the hard edge of a Hess pickup truck under my heel, dirty plates beneath my elbow and on the counter and in the sink. There are still two hours before bedtime. J does the laundry on weekends and vacuums sometimes and he’s exhausted, more exhausted than I can imagine, I know. But I find myself envying the meticulous tending he gives our plants; I resent his cigarette breaks, when he stares across the parking lot with parted lips like a monk on the cusp of a religious revelation, M clambering into my lap—as he is right now—to read Llama, Llama, Mess Mess Mess for the hundred thousandth time.
A Black Physicist Is Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past
by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
During winter break that year, I called my mother and said I was switching to anthropology. Another Black student had just dropped physics and switched to another concentration on the advice of their physics adviser, who suggested they would be “better suited” for it. This conversation still regularly replays in my head: my mother’s guilt-tripping insistence that she hadn’t worked a job as a night secretary, allowing me to stay jobless and enrolled in my nice magnet high school—which required a three-hour commute on the school bus—just so I could quit physics when the going got rough. I’m old enough now to know she wasn’t being mean: She must have been terrified, unable to protect her daughter who was alone among wolves who were telling her she wasn’t good enough. My mom wasn’t wrong: When I called home, that humiliating moment in my electromagnetism course was still two months away.
How I Wrote Myself into a Real-life Romantic Comedy – That Turned into a Survivalist Thriller
by Melissa Johnson
I hadn’t spoken to Mountain Man in almost a decade. Missing him and missing the mountains felt the same — a tug to abandon acceptable society and get dirty. I considered reaching out to him. I’d done hard things. I was stronger now — his equal, right? Maybe it could work?
Nihilism, Optimism, and the Noble Cause
by R.A. Frumkin
I had realized I wanted top surgery five months before the runoffs, and had been binding ever since. Assigned female at birth and finding myself on the masculine side of nonbinary, I’d been excited for Biden to restore the dignity of the LGBTQ+ community; this was one thing to look forward to, at least, even if the rest of the future was ominously uncertain. I was wearing a binder while listening to Biden condemn conservative malarkey on that cold day in Atlanta, and I felt in that moment that by flattening my chest I could become mannish and invulnerable, moving through the world unquestioned and undisturbed, a foot soldier in the quest for liberation.
If you missed last week’s Memoir Monday reading featuring Candace Jane Opper, Marcos Gonsalez, Jeannine Ouellette, and Randa Jarrar, you can watch the video over at The Rumpus!
Writers’ Resources
Memoir Monday host Lilly Dancyger’s one-day essay revision intensive is coming back to Catapult on Saturday, May 8. Sign up here!
Thanks for reading! If you enjoy Memoir Monday, please consider making a one-time or recurring contribution (if even a fraction of subscribers signed up to contribute $1 per month, Memoir Monday could be self-sustaining!) by clicking here.
You can also support Memoir Monday—and indie bookstores!—by browsing this Bookshop.org list of every book that’s been featured at the Memoir Monday reading series. It’s a great place to find some new titles to add to your TBR list!
If you received this email from a friend or found it on social media, sign up below to get Memoir Monday in your inbox every week!