Eleven Absorbing Personal Narratives to Dive Into this Week...
PLUS: "Reckon True Stories" podcast featuring Deesha Philyaw and Kiese Laymon; Two new workshops from Lilly Dancyger; A workshop and storytelling event from Literary Liberation, 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 reprinted “Secrets of the Two by Twos,” 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 #21,” “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #20: Rachel Zimmerman,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #21: ”.
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…
Notes on Conviction
by Tania Pabón Acosta
“The noise inside me would quiet with God over me but I couldn’t keep God around long enough for the peace to be permanent. Each Sunday, hungover and sick, I vowed to be better, to be worthy. The pressure to keep up my personas of a perfect girlfriend, wise Christian, and fashionable city girl was breaking me. I did not know why I had to be so many people, but in doing so I was unraveling.”
Are You There, God? It's Me, J, and I'm Getting Old
by
“Do you enjoy unsolicited opinions? Folks a few decades younger will tell you how to age way better than you are. FYI, I used to live in a farmhouse built in 1895. Now I live in a sprawling very faux chateau known as a CCRC – Continuing Care Retirement Community. A pseudo Downton Abbey boasting premium personal care, companionship, and management of seniors like me when we need management.”
How I Found My Way After an MS Diagnosis at Twenty-Seven
by Meredith White
“It turns out that being diagnosed with a chronic disease does not chart out a clear path to the future, it only highlights the risks in a way that is both useful and useless at once. I take medication to reduce the rate of demyelination, an act that lowers the risk of an attack while bringing its own set of attendant complications with it. (“In case of heart related death,” the patient information tells me, “stop taking the medication and see your doctor immediately.” Noted.) But I cannot know with certainty what is coming next any more than I knew three years ago, or five years ago, or yesterday.”
Generation Franchise: Why Writers Are Forced to Become Brands (and Why That’s Bad)
by Jess Row
“Of course, Gen Xers always knew this would happen: the gradual folding of everything that could possibly be called “culture” into one image-spectacle-and-sensorium corporate machine that thrives on endless niche differentiation as a way of metastasizing its market share. It’s there in the song Kurt Cobain wrote around the dumbest chord progression he could think of. You could say we saw late capitalism coming in real time, planned for it, in many cases enabled and amplified it.”
Essays from around the web…
The Last Rave
by Emily Witt
“The possibility that Andrew was suffering a mental break as a reaction to having been arrested, or that he might be having a manic episode, occurred to me. I had seen it before in other people, and I knew what it looked like, but I doubted myself—he insisted that he had simply come to his senses and that his sudden shift in behavior was caused by me and our relationship. I went back home on a Saturday to get some things. In my absence, he had moved everything I owned into one room. But he had also left flowers and written a letter.”
What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained
by Mary H.K. Choi
“The common denominator had to be me. Because it wasn’t just my marriage; I was flummoxed by the vagaries of most human interaction. Each one confounded me in its own way. I had yet to successfully hold down a job that required “teams,” which is to say, most jobs. I was “bad at Christmas,” prone to meltdowns and manufactured crises whenever special occasions loomed. Terrible at gatherings, I was capable of making even the most low-stakes kick back spectacularly un-fun.”
How I Almost Had Dinner with Dave Letterman, and Walked Away
by Deanne Stillman
“It was obviously a big deal, not just an invitation to dine with the right people, but a summons to the peak. Now I could hang out with the guys who ran the joke factory of my era, cracking wise with the best of them, and even one-upping my relatives in the process. If the dinner went well, I’d have a lifetime pass on the comedy train, so of course I accepted the invitation and fast-forwarded to what was I going to wear. But there was a serious problem. I had reached one of those forks in the road, and everything in my life was changing. Not much seemed funny anymore.”
Creation of Woman: Evangelical and Transgender in the Bible Belt
by Lane Scott Jones
“We reached a tenuous agreement: D could explore his gender identity—but only so far. Only as long as it didn’t threaten the life we’d built. Where that line was, neither of us really knew. Nail polish, but no makeup? Jewelry, but no dresses? Would he shave his legs? Pierce his ears? Begin taking hormones? It would have seemed ridiculous to reduce gender down to such surface-level signifiers, some acceptable and some arbitrarily not, except that we’d been doing it our whole lives.”
The Dead-End Date that Changed My Life
by
“I suddenly realized that the path to self-respect was remarkably simple: Behave in a way that you’re proud of. It had nothing to do with winning first prize or gaining the love of a cute, smart person. It was something to develop gradually, almost invisibly, by working for something larger than myself.”
The Big Chop
by Kristen Gentry
“Seeing ourselves through white eyes renders Black women invisible or beastly, dismembered to the juiciest parts, chopped, and screwed so bad that freeing our nature becomes a danger that spurs our mothers to attack us before the world can…The problem with that protection is that it still hurts.”
My First Year in New York, 1969
by Angela Bonavoglia
“1969 turned into 1970. There came Iron Butterfly in Central Park, Jimi Hendrix on Sam’s stereo, and Joe Cocker at the dilapidated Filmore East on Easter Eve, singing in the glow of our flickering cigarette lighters, until 4 a.m., when his chronically fractured voice finally broke completely.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Tomorrow, 7/9, the “Reckon True Stories” Podcast with and launches.
Reckon and Ursa Story Company are proud to announce Reckon True Stories, a new podcast hosted by acclaimed authors Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) and Kiese Laymon (Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Long Division), all about the stories we tell and how they impact our culture.
Guests for Season One include writers
, , , Minda Honey, , and .Reckon True Stories is a celebration of new and classic nonfiction – the essays, journalism, and memoirs that inspire us, that change the world, and help us connect with each other. (Ed. note: I’ll post my interview with them later this month! - Sari)
📢 New Workshops from !
Telling Shared Stories: Writing About Other People in Memoir, a one-day session that will guide writers in creating their own ethical rubrics and craft approaches to writing about the people in their lives—from legal reads and whether/when to share pages with loved ones, to navigating power dynamics and figuring out which stories might not be yours to tell at all. (Sunday, July 21)
Essay Collection Incubator, a nine-month workshop including author visits from Melissa Febos, Esmé Weijun Wang, Kiese Laymon, and Jill Christman; generative and revision exercises to develop individual essays and your collection as a whole; agent and editor panels and guidance on the book proposal, querying, and publishing process; and more. (Deadline to apply is July 15!)
📢 New Workshop & Events from Literary Liberation!
-
July 27 | 11 AM - 1 PM ET
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.
KIN KEEPERS LIVE STORYTELLING: FIRST GENERATION & FIRST BORN DAUGHTERS
Submissions close July 10!
Kin Keepers is a live storytelling series where established and emerging voices share a virtual stage to uncover things that aren’t typically said aloud. We are making the invisible, visible. We are taking the approach that we belong to a global community, each of us on this single thread. For our first live event this August, we are seeking 5-7 daughters of immigrants from the Global South to share their stories. Learn more about Kin Keepers, submit work for our inaugural reading and/or to grab your seat here.
📢 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.
Thank you for including my piece here, among so many other amazing essays!
Hi! Do we want to add a small note about Alice Munro and the news that her family has shared this week? It seems relevant given that it talks about how she lived and using her as an example.
Not sure how widespread the article is, as it’s in a Canadian newspaper.
https://www.thestar.com/news/in-the-home-of-alice-munro-a-dark-secret-lurked-now-her-children-want-the/article_69a63202-34cd-11ef-83f4-9b4275c26d84.html