Ten Personal Essays Not to Be Missed...
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.
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now occasional original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers. If you haven’t become a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.
The fourth original essay, published in First Person Singular in June, is Bargaining for My Life in the Sanctuary of the Woods, by Memoir Monday editor Sari Botton, and excerpt of her memoir, And You May Find Yourself… The fifth original essay is coming in mid-June.
Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
Essays from partner publications…
A Lineage of Nonconsent
by Amanda E. Machado
“Lately, the blood I carry feels like the story of everything: of my queerness, of my experience of assault. Regardless of the chosen family I have built and will continue building, I cannot ignore the reality of my bloodline, a bloodline that belongs to both those who were hunted by their oppressors and those who are haunted by their ancestors’ sins.”
States
by Ashley Lee
“Scientists in San Francisco and London recall psychedelics’ ability to alter the brain. I wanted to help mine loosen its grip on particular hopes, rules, and beliefs. I wanted to continue deepening into myself, uncovering closed rooms, stiff muscles, memories stuck and glitched.”
Un-Matched
by Candy Schulman
"I wondered if I’d be the oldest one in a new tennis clinic. I’d been playing since my early twenties, but that day I felt jittery as if I were taking the SAT’s in a classic anxiety dream where I couldn’t locate the room number. Would my classmates politely humor me, at 69, as a codger they had to contend with? Or feel annoyed that they had to share the court with an ‘old lady?’”
Medical Care Needs More Space for Patient Narratives
by Agnes Arnold-Forster
"I don’t want doctors to just listen to me better; I want them to be able to use what I say to make me better. I want an altered, alternative version of medicine. One that is richer, baggier, and capable of incorporating all that makes me both well and ill into what doctors do and how they think. I want more space for stories. I want medicine to meet me where I am, not where it wants me to be."
The Stars are Blind
by Anna Dorn
“My Virgo Sun would frequently tell my Leo Rising to shut the fuck up and put a bra on. My Leo Rising would retort, get a personality, loser. My Aquarius Moon would chime in, oh, trite babies, there is no self. And my Mercury Libra would be like, y’all are too serious, what’s the tea! And my Scorpio Venus would scare everyone silent with, EVERYTHING IS AS SERIOUS AS DEATH. I found myself using astrology to detach from the present, from emotions, from intimacy. I would write off entire signs (cough: Tauruses), half-joking but not really, while romanticizing others (cough: Geminis). While astrology started as a fun way to get close to people, joke around, boost myself and others, it was becoming a way to judge, criticize, isolate.”
It’s Never Too Late For Your First Tattoo (excerpted from And You May Find Yourself…)
by Sari Botton
“I had something of a mental breakdown in the hours before getting my first tattoo. According to everything I learned growing up, nice Jewish girls aren’t supposed to get them. And according to everything I learned about women and aging, we’re not supposed to get inked when we’re much too old to be considered “girls,” or even young women…These “rules” overtook my mind October 1, 2012, the day before my 47th birthday, as I prepared to walk into East Side Ink on Avenue B in Manhattan…”
Essays from around the web…
Bad News 101
by Meg Senuta
“The students find us difficult. In truth, we are. When Walter’s pretend-doctor asks him if he is free to come in the next day for follow-up tests, he answers, ‘Why, do I have a choice?’ as if the student, and not the medical system, were doing this to him. Nina insists that her doctor find a way to treat her without resorting to needles for blood draws and infusions. This obsessive fear of needles is larger, more real to her than the cancer…”
As The Non-Bio Mom, I Always Felt Like My Son’s “Other Mother”
by Samantha Mann
“I felt like an other mother before my son was born. At the time, I diagnosed myself with a novel condition I called belly envy, a lesbian-specific complex in which one develops jealousy surrounding the pregnant partner. Symptoms included: feeling excluded, irritability, irrational urges (such as zipping off your wife’s stomach and attaching it to yourself), and clinically significant levels of concern for your wife’s physical safety. Most distressing, though, were the preoccupations about my lack of shared molecules telling me I would be perceived by my newborn as a stranger.”
Still
by Casey Mulligan Walsh
"…but he didn’t make it, that’s what the doctor said when she came to tell me moments ago, sadness in her eyes, her shoulders stooped like someone had given her a thousand-ton weight to pass on to me, and everything got quiet in my head, as if snow had fallen all around me and nothing, not the hugest boulder dropped from the highest height could ever make a sound that would reach me in there…"
Live Alone and Like It
by Rebecca Johnson
“Right before graduation my grandfather, who owned a gas station in Amarillo, Texas, died and left me $10,000. It was more money than I had ever had, but it wasn’t life changing money. One Sunday, while scanning the New York Times real estate listings, I came across a listing for an apartment on Riverside Drive for $30,000. This was an unheard of price for an apartment in that neighborhood of stately limestones and aged intellectuals like Hannah Arendt. If I put 20% of my inheritance down, I could just swing the mortgage. I went to the Open House trembling with hope.”
🚨Announcements:
Through June 27th, you can apply for Narratively’s Spring 2022 Memoir Prize.
“Narratively is accepting entries for our Spring 2022 Memoir Prize. We’re on the hunt for revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view — the best of which we’ll reward with four-figure cash prizes, publication and heavy promotion, and a lot more.”
Judges include:
Ashley C. Ford, New York Times–bestselling memoirist of Somebody’s Daughter
Nicole Rocklin, Oscar-winning film and TV producer behind the movie Spotlight
Glynn Washington, host, creator and executive producer of the podcast/radio show Snap Judgment
📢 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.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, 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!
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