The First "Memoir Monday" Roundup of 2024...
Sixteen stellar personal essays.
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring three 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 “The Hole in My Soul” by
. A new essay is coming soon.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing, plus writing prompts and exercises. It is primarily for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “Writing is About Making Choices,” an essay by novelist and Writing Co-Lab co-founder
.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
Motherhood Is Antarctica: On the Underexplored Landscape of Postpartum Loneliness
by Marie Doezema
“Giving birth during the pandemic prompted me to think about loneliness often, and I found myself reading everything I could about Antarctica: a lonely, endangered, exquisite place. I read Through the First Antarctic Night, by Frederick A. Cook, a travel log of the first expedition to winter-over on the continent, and found that his words from 1898 described, almost perfectly, the fear and trepidation I felt as a new mother; also, the illuminating, otherworldly splendor.”
Ghosts in the Mirror
by Kimberly Rooney 高小荣
“My adoptive mother tells me I was precocious enough as a toddler to ask if I came from her belly. She says this was a sign I comprehended my adoption so early she never had to explain it to me.”
Evaporation in the Boundary Zone
by Ilija Matusko and translated by Jen Callej
“There were two signs in the window of our small restaurant…NO REST DAYS and OPEN ALL DAY…My father in his workwear, a white chef’s jacket and black and white checked trousers. Never without a fluttering tea towel on his shoulder, as if he’d trained it to sit there. The speed with which he would cut onions, the look of concentration on his face, red and glowing from the heat, mouth slightly open as if he couldn’t get enough air. The kitchen full of hissing and rustling. A flash of flame shooting upwards from time to time.”
My Mom Rage Is a Response to the Avalanche of Worry That Comes With Parenting
by Jill Kolongowski
“My anger had at last forced me to look at it. I wasn’t even sure what I was raging about. It was never rage at my daughter. I loved her so deeply even something as small as the precise sound of her tiny teeth crunching an apple made me ecstatic. I try, every so often, to write about my love for my daughter, but I always fail. Instead I build a garden around it; I cannot get to the heart of it with language. I worried I could not stop the world from taking the best person I knew, that they would never know her either. I don’t even like writing those sentences.”
Identity, Heritage, and a Lost Sister
by
“I clicked on the tab marked Eileen Williams DNA matches. There was Mary, a 51-58% DNA match — no surprise for a sibling. But, a mysterious other woman was pictured as well…This stranger was a 27% match. She could have been an aunt or a niece, but the math suggested a different relationship. Eight years my junior, I knew she had to be a half-sister. However imprecise region-pinpointing on the site might be, identifying a blood relative through the test tends to be terribly spot on.”
Tell Me How You Love
by Elizabeth Rush and Liza Yeager
“I had gotten an assignment to report on how climate change is impacting online dating—it was the kernel of an interesting idea, but my instinct told me the question was probably bigger. I also felt like maybe I wasn’t the right person to do that reporting. My son was born in May 2020, right in the scariest part of the pandemic, so I hadn’t really gotten out much and I hadn’t online dated since 2009. So I called Liza.”
House of Snow
by Michael Winter
“When I was sixteen, my father asked me if I’d take a boy out hunting. My father had taught him shop and liked his family. He’s a year older than you, he said, and he’s a hemophiliac. This frightened me, the idea that his insides could spill out. It was February, late in the season for birds, but my father had a camp in the Gaff Topsails.”
You Talk Real Good
by
“Growing up, it was easier to just pretend I got everything — and for the most part, I did. I nodded at boys. I said yeah a lot. How was this different from any number of (hearing) girls, how we were all expected to be: silent, supportive, watching on the sidelines, our fingers curled around chain link fences while the boys played sports, our hips glued to the arms of couches while the boys played video games?”
Essays from around the web…
Cheryl Strayed on Her New Sober-ish Life
by
“I don't know why it took a week sick with Covid in a foreign country to rattle myself out of what I can only call denial, but it did. Perhaps it’s that, in my feverish state, I felt my own fragility and I knew I could do more to safeguard my health once I felt better again. Perhaps my sickbed sobriety allowed me the touch of clarity I needed to finally commit. Whatever it was, once I exited that rented apartment, I’d stepped into the world of someday. A world in which I’d radically change my relationship with alcohol by drinking less.”
My Unraveling
by
“I rolled to my knees and discovered that was as far as I could make it. My legs couldn’t get me upright again. One guy streaming by broke stride, asked if I was okay, and hauled me to my feet. I checked myself: no torn clothes, no blood. Another 1 was pulling in, one minute behind the train I’d missed. I got on and went where I’d been going. I had just had a fall.”
Imaginary Problems, Extraordinary Coincidences
by
“He told me that the universe had definitely sent us to the booth next to Nicolas Cage that day, or that perhaps by searching for him for so long, I had drawn him to me, or me to him, or us together. That whatever desperate searching I was doing was in fact working, even if not in the way I wanted. This was a few martinis in, but it felt correct. Uncertainty is everywhere, even the silliest and most nebulous correlations feel important even when we are in our most rational mood. But usually, it’s when things suck a little with me and the world that I reach for these things the most.”
My Best Friend Died On Pan Am Flight 103. I Should've Been On That Plane — And It Haunted Me For Decades.
by Annie Lareau
“I was a junior studying abroad in London. I should’ve been on that plane too. A few months earlier I had begun having nightmares about planes exploding. The dreams gave me panic attacks, and I was convinced I would soon be dying on a plane. Theo pleaded with me to change my flight back to the U.S. so she could hold my hand but, in the end, I lacked the money to pay for the change fee. Now she was dead, and I was barricaded in this cramped office by walls of cameras and reporters outside, and mocked by the Christmas decorations strung up around me.”
A Bleeding Body
by
“Her face seemed too kind when she called my name, as if she needed to soften a blow. ‘Negative.’ I exhaled. ‘I see by your chart this is the third time you’ve been in for a test. Are you using protection?’ It broke, I lied. I forgot the spermicide, I lied. ‘Sweetheart,’ the woman leaning her hip against the exam table said to me, ‘are you sure you’re ready to be sexually active? Are you afraid to say no?’ I didn’t understand. Weren’t all women afraid to say no?”
Wind Telephone Booth
by
“Sasaki’s telephone booth sits on a hill overlooking Ōtsuchi. I imagine it projects tranquility, intimacy even, in the face of memories from the awesome terrifying power of the Japanese tsunami of 2011. The tsunami is also known as Great Sendai earthquake and Great Tōhoku earthquake—emphasizing the rupture of life and history. Officially, about 18,500 people were killed or reported missing and presumed dead, and hundreds of thousands were displaced in the wake of the tsunami’s devastation…Soon after the tsunami, people began to visit and ring up their dead on Sasaki’s wind telephone.”
Clocking Into Neopia
by Nancy Huang
“The kitchen staff call me sour girl. Citrusblood, my hands cool and hot at once. I’ve slung lattes. I’ve helped butchers unzip animals for their slick organs. I still drink coffee and eat meat. But I can’t stand the smell of limes.”
Tidewrack
by Michael Bird
“It was two months after Mum died. I would not meet anyone. I would not answer messages. I would not talk about my feelings. I didn’t want to chat. I didn’t want people. I didn’t want feelings. I wanted nothing, except a place where I could spend my days walking through bare, remote, even boring places, and my nights drinking hard liquor until I passed out.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 , is accepting submissions.
Submit your essays that explore the ways that individuals confront systemic problems—and the ways they navigate the line between what they can control (such as calming the mind through meditation) and what they can't (a world where distracting technology is entrenched in our daily lives). Seeking essays that explore these ideas in relation to food, health, money, work, relationships, family, and everything else! Payment information and submission guidelines can be found 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.
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!
Thank you so much for featuring my Electric Lit essay! I'm so honored to be listed alongside all these other phenomenal essays; I also screamed with joy in the public library, which I will forgive you for :)
Would love to know more about the decision not to use Twitter anymore (I've been off it for years and years but am following the choices people are making around social media right now pretty closely)