Ten Great New Personal Essays...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub — and now many additional publications.
*Beginning in February, there’ll occasionally be original work as well, likely behind a paywall—the more subscription money that’s raised, the more original pieces we can publish. So, if you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one!
I’m working right now with the National Writers’ Union/Freelance Solidarity Project on creating a contributor-friendly contract. Once I have one, I will announce how to submit, although it will be a limited opportunity for now—one essay per month, to be called “Memoir Monthly.” Stay tuned for information in the coming weeks on how to submit…
You can read all about expansion plans here. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
Tala Zone
by Pascale Petit
"Take a deep breath, do that pursed lip breathing you must do. Watch your heart doesn’t race. The pump is exhaling, inhaling and I am walking, walking. No one is allowed inside the core of Bandhavgarh National Park after sunset. No one is allowed inside this cellar at the bottom of our building. But the caretaker has heard my story and unlocked the door. He told me not to stay long because there are rats down here and a bad smell from the poison."
Hosts
by Stephen Pfau
“But, of course, hospitality is never so simple: no matter the circumstances, it will always require me to yield some control over my body or my space to someone else’s desires, and it is always possible that I will be found wanting.”
I May Not Look Like a 'Respectable' Teacher, But I'm a Good One
by Edgar Gomez
"Everything that came out of my mouth went through a filter: Was that too gay? Too Southern? Too Puerto Rican? Did I even pronounce that right? An hour and a half later, as I sat in my empty classroom after dismissing my students, it occurred to me that I’d never reach the impossible respectability standard that’d been thrust upon me, because no matter what I wore on the outside, on the inside I was still me."
Age Hacker
By Elissa Altman
“My mother started lying about my age the year I turned 50…It wasn’t enough just to lie about her own age—You look fabulous for 80 someone would say; I’m 60, she’d answer—but during a birthday lunch at Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan, when a table of NYU psychology professors celebrating someone’s tenure passed us on the way out and saw me blowing out a single pink candle on a narrow sliver of chocolate cake, she looked up at them, smiled, and said It’s her 35th! I’m 55. Don’t we look great? Like sisters—”
You Keep Everything Outside
by Rachel Cochran
“Change doesn’t happen all at once. Change comes in the form of monthly visits to your new doctor’s office, being stabbed inside with dozens of needles, clutching your partner’s hand while his head blots out the glare of the fluorescent lights above.”
We’re All Just Extras Here: Wandering the Back Streets of Old Hollywood
by David L. Ulin
"To be fair, this had less to do with the neighborhood than with my inner weather. To be fair, this was the (bad) luck of the draw. Since the end of August, we had been living out of suitcases, driving back to our place on a daily basis to retrieve the mail. Now, it was December, and there was no end in sight. The sensation was of being rootless. The sensation was of the conditional. I kept thinking about Joan Didion, the period she’d spent on Franklin Avenue, a mile-and-a-half to the north and west. “[D]uring the five years that I lived there,” Didion recollects in her essay “The White Album,” “even the rather sinistral inertia of the neighborhood tended to suggest that I should live in the house indefinitely.” Sinistral inertia. This describes precisely the floating quality of our days and nights in Hollywood.”
A Film and/is a Prayer
By Naz Riahi
“In the mid 1980s, a film, especially a foreign one, was a rare treat in most Iranian homes. VHS tapes passed person-to-person, an informal black market video rental service. In post-revolution Iran, everything good was forbidden or scarce: Foreign films, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, dancing, music, bananas, talking to boys, exposing my hair in public, Nesquik powder, my mom’s makeup, her long red nails, my dad’s nightly beer, the wine we made in our garden, playing cards, the parties they had, the way my mom danced with her best friends and their husbands at those same parties.”
I’m 33 years old. I live at home. And I love it.
by Roland Mascarenhas
"So, where is your apartment around?” she asked me…Even before answering, I know where this is going. She isn’t asking because of romantic interest, the subtle hint of inviting herself over. Perhaps she wants to size me up, or maybe it’s just one of those gold-standard small talk questions someone asks, similar to “what do you do?” Either way, I don’t have the answer she wants to hear. “Uhhh…. Bathurst and St. Clair.""
Avoidance
by Madelaine Zadik
"My parents, Ursula and Erwin, didn’t leave Nazi Germany until 1939. By then my father had been in a concentration camp and my mother in prison. Growing up, I couldn’t fathom why they hadn’t fled earlier. After all, Hitler was elected in 1933, and they stuck around for another six years. My mother tried to explain, “Oh, we just thought Hitler was crazy, a clown. We never thought anyone would take him seriously, or that he would stay in power very long.” At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around that. Today, I have a better understanding. For the past five years I ask myself daily, “How do you know when it is time to leave?”
The Many Meanings of Family Estrangement
by Raksha Vasudevan
“People think estrangement is a final state, unchangeable and totalizing. For that reason, some also see it as the easy way out: Being in a relationship with someone—anyone—is inherently messy. Severing the tie cleans things up once and for all…I wish it was that simple, that static. It’s not. Estrangement, for me, has been an ever-shifting constellation of regrets and loyalties and, yes, joys.”
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
The artwork and appropriate credits.
*Please be advised, however, that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received.
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!
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