Ten Essays to Start Your Week Off Right...
PLUS: A workshops from Literary Liberation, and "Summer Salons" From FAWC.
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, 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 “American Studies” by Nina Sharma.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #16,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #14: “White Lotus” Producer Mark Kamine.
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 “The Free Pied-à-Terre that Spoiled Me,” something I wrote.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
The 30 Steps of Reporting A Rape as A Transgender Anarchist
by Alex DiFrancesco
“ 23. Call your rapist’s mother and tell her that her son is a rapist one day when you are in a shitty hotel in Youngstown, Ohio. Hear her gasp. Keep talking, not realizing she has hung up on you.”
The Loneliness of Donald Trump
by Rebecca Solnit
“I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.”
Godfather’s Hotel
by Michael A. Gonzales
“Recently while watching Ripley on Netflix, I smiled when I heard the characters were going to stay at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome. Though I’d never stayed at the swank spot where Patricia Highsmith’s characters dwelled, I was once a frequent visitor at a different Excelsior Hotel, this one on the upper west side of Manhattan, where my godfather, Uncle Hans (Wolfgang Schwerin) lived for decades…Located at 45 West 81st Street, the Excelsior stood across the street from the American Museum of Natural History. Whenever Mom took me to that building, where a giant whale hung from the ceiling, I knew that we might go see him.”
How to Feed a Dying Body
by Xi Chen
“I met Mister Softee the week before he died. He was a stroke patient who, in his most lucid moments, only ever wanted to eat the vanilla ice cream that was stored inside the unit fridge. I was a third-year medical student at the University of Rochester about to take a leave of absence. While my classmates were rallying to face the summer COVID wave of 2021, I was second-guessing my career in medicine. My rotation in the Palliative Care unit at Strong Memorial Hospital, which tended to see end-of-life patients, would be my last taste of medicine before I left.”
Essays from around the web…
Split Ends (selected by Maggie Nelson for Sonora Review's "Mercy" contest in nonfiction)
by Kristi D. Osorio
“Some days, when Mom and I are alone, she talks to me like I’m a grown up about things I won’t understand until I become one. She tells me things like how much she wants to die…I don’t want you to find me, she says. I can’t do it in the house. Sometimes it gets so bad she says she wants to lie down on the street in the middle of traffic. I’ve always known about the gun in her room—the black nine-millimeter pistol—because that’s how she proves she can really do it. Sometimes she tells me she’ll drive out somewhere far from home and do it in the car. Other times, she says she’ll stand in the middle of a forest where no one can hear the bullet leave the barrel. She always says she’s going to wear a lot of makeup the day she finally dies, so when they find her, wherever she is, she’ll still have her beauty.”
A Mad Woman’s Forgiveness
by Roshni Subhash
“Mrs. P could make the bravest, most gutsy child faint, and I was just a timid kid back then. Rumour had it that Mrs P was the way she was because she was a divorcee, or was it a widow? I remember the sting both these labels carried in the 80s. A few years ago...I felt a wave of empathy like never before. It startled me, but I had more in common with Mrs P as an adult. I have been angry. I raged enough to burn down the world itself. Deeply judgemental, with a razor-sharp tongue, I walked through years of my life leaving many friends and lovers wounded.”
A Cancer Lexicon
by Kathleen Quigley
“Adriamycin. The red devil. This is your first—or second—chemo drug. Did the nurses administer them alphabetically or in order of which drug was most likely to kill you? Until it was synthesized, Adriamycin was harvested from bacteria in the soil of an Italian castle near the Adriatic Sea. Your urine is red for a couple of days after each infusion. Prior to beginning chemo, you have a cardiac stress test to make sure your heart is strong enough.”
The Descent: A Search History
by Abigail Oswald
“To be a final girl is to make a series of choices while knowing that any one of them could lead to your undoing. But consumers of these stories sometimes make the mistake of attributing intelligence or morality to the simple fact of survival. When I wrote these stories, when I listened to them, it was a way of mapping every possibility in my head. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe I thought that if I memorized every permutation, I could handpick the best path forward. Make the “good” choice every time. Save myself.”
Shalimar
by Ellen Notbohm
“It was the smells I thought I could never forget. The deeply awful smell of her house those last years. My beautiful, fastidious mother didn’t always dwell in a house of pong. It crept up on her as insidiously as the dementia it rode in on…Through the decades, her house smelled of baking bread, of her peonies and roses, of Tide detergent and Ivory soap, of mint meringues and brisket, of the lipstick and soft leather coat she wore. So intent was I on preserving the independence and privacy she treasured to the point of desperation, I missed the sly, sinister creep of her final illness. By the time I became undeniably aware of how craftily the stink had usurped all the other smells and taken ownership of her home, it was too late.”
Be Bold. Be Brief. Be Gone
by Deb Sinness
“Major Megan McClung was the first female Marine Corps Officer to be killed in action. A Naval Academy graduate, triathlete, and accomplished marathoner, she served with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force during Operation Iraqi Freedom as a Public Affairs Officer in Al Anbar province. On December 6, 2006, during the last month of her year-long deployment, Megan was the first female Marine officer killed in action. A common refrain from veterans is that they wrote a blank check made payable to ‘The United States of America,’ for an amount of ‘up to, and including my life.’ The country cashed Megan’s check.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 LETTERS FOR REVOLUTION: A Two-Hour Workshop from Literary Liberation on June 8th
Throughout history, Black women have resisted oppression. From colonization to the #metoo movement, Black women have done the labor of building community, seeking justice, and creating safe spaces for others. Letters For Revolution is a historical fiction writing course, where true historical stories of women who resisted oppression are combined with epistolary writing techniques. This story combines the best of history and fiction and gives you the tools to ground yourself in storytelling.
📢 Attend “Summer Salons” at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center:
A lineup of influential figures in the arts and culture scene will host Summer Salons at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center from May 31st to September 7th. Poets Tracy K. Smith and Major Jackson, curator Helen Molesworth, photographer Catherine Opie, author Sarah Schulman, and journalist Peter Slevin will lead intimate weekend conversations and workshops.
Whether attending in person or via live stream, participants will engage directly with the artists in unmoderated discussions, followed by Q&A sessions and hands-on workshops. Prices are determined based on affordability, and all ticket sales will support the Fine Arts Work Center’s commitment to providing free arts and culture events, including this summer’s nightly readings and artist talks hosted each week Monday through Wednesday nights, open art studios, and open-mic readings on Thursday nights, among other free events. The lineup:
📢 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.
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!
Thanks for including me! 😊
Thrilled to be included in this curation!