The Last Memoir Monday Newsletter of the Year...
Welcome to the final Memoir Monday newsletter of 2021. ***There will be no newsletter next Monday, 12/27.***
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 January, 2022, there’ll occasionally be original work as well—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!
You can read all about expansion plans here. Subscribe and follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday for updates!
✨ For those of you attending the 2022 edition of the AWP conference in Philadlephia, mark your calendars for the AWP edition of Memoir Monday, to be held on Wednesday, March 23rd! Check back here for more information as it develops… ✨
The Aesthetics of Safety
by Freda Epum
"I now can definitively point to my desire for an aesthetic of safety. I find beauty in being protected from danger. I want to bottle up a perfume with scents that read as a ‘whisper of freedom from hurt’ combined with a ‘splash of security.’"
Dear Irene, I'm Still Learning How to Be a Feminist Too
by Giaae Kwon
“To be a K-pop fan is to bear witness to a whole lot of dumb shit ... It reinforces everything I learned by just being a daughter in a Korean family. I was expected to help cook and clean and peel fruit while my brother could slip away after dinner to play games. It was always assumed that I loved kids and couldn’t wait to get married (to a man) and stay home to serve my husband and family. I was expected to be demure and fit Korean beauty standards, and I was bullied and shamed when I couldn’t bring my overweight body to bear.”
Love and Dirt
by Alizabeth Worley
"When I hear expressions like ‘cleanliness is next to godliness,’ I sit silently, derelict in my duty to stand up for suckers like me, the ones who are falling far from heaven. If I say nothing, I am tacitly supporting the notion that to be ‘dirty’ and human is offensive and morally repugnant, rather than the result of complicated and often subjective factors — from cultural values to health limitations to personal aesthetics. Saying nothing, I am complicit in the notion that to be dirty is to be inhuman, corrupted. Still, too often, I say nothing."
Afrodisiac: A Textual Meditation on Greg Tate
by Michael A. Gonzales
"It was a critique that was so eye-opening, funky fresh and inspiring, I felt like a kid who just watched a rocket blast towards the moon and decided he wanted to be an astronaut."
Rapunzel No More
by Sejal Shah
"What I would do to have a thick braid now! I look in the mirror in the morning and find myself thinking what I've heard my mother say: I don't even like to look in the mirror anymore. My hair has thinned out: wispy, sad, grey. I wear it back, which I did when it was longer and thicker, too. But it's not thick anymore. When I run my fingers through my hair, a kind of comb, untangling it from the bun or ponytail or braid it's usually in, a cloud of hair fills my palm. It's unsettling."
Discovering Dr. Wu
by Jada Yuan
"In China, my grandmother was a rock star. Then, in early 2021, she became a kind of rock star here, too, when the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative Forever stamp in her honor. (You can also buy a T-shirt featuring her and other “Women of STEM” on it. Recently, she and her stamp were a clue on “Jeopardy!” — “Notable Asian Americans” for $800.) My grandmother’s stamp brings the grand total of Asian American women featured on stamps to two, alongside chef Joyce Chen, who popularized moo shu pork.”
Churn
by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann
"What has to happen to bury your own life? To care so little for yourself that you disappear and don’t hold onto anything by holding onto everything? I try to work it out over and over again, but I’m not really able to. Then it comes to me. In each photograph, Jackie has captured what I’ve been trying to understand. This is my mother’s creation.”
Pride
by Judy Bolton-Fasman
"I visit my mother twice a week in her nursing home at Hebrew Senior Living. I go out of duty, out of an ancient, vestigial guilt. I often time many of those visits to sit in on her Wednesday Spanish class. Her nonagenarian students, a decade older than she, jerk awake when she starts testing them on vocabulary they will never absorb. To them, she is an alien—the assignation given to her when she first came to America in 1958."
The best $210 I ever spent: My sobriety
By Amanda Montei
“I didn’t want to be that cowed girl, doomed by male authority to forever perform work in which I found no pleasure. I wanted the sheen of an unstructured journey, one in which I could falter and not be made to view it as faltering, others lifting me up with slogans that reminded me I wasn’t forgoing indulgence forever but seeking it in a way I never had before. I liked those perspectives. They felt true. And I was beginning to see that choosing to no longer dissolve one’s body feels like that: like locating what makes you fall apart and what holds you together.”
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
The artwork and the 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!
If you received this email from a friend or found it on social media, sign up below to get Memoir Monday in your inbox every week! You can also follow us on Twitter at @memoirmonday.