The Last Memoir Monday Roundup of the Year...
No Memoir Monday roundup the next two Mondays—Christmas and New Year's Day. We'll be back in January. Happy holidays!
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 “Reflections of Dad” 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 “Going for Broke,” an interview with Economic Hardship Reporting Project executive director Alissa Quart about the organization’s first anthology, Going For Broke: Living on the Edge in the World’s Richest Country.
📢 THERE WILL BE NO MEMOIR MONDAY ROUNDUP THE NEXT TWO MONDAYS, CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR’S DAY. SEE YOU IN JANUARY. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
A Loud and Hungry Darkness
by Samar Batrawi
“My father’s face looks down at me as my eyes ease open; his hand brushes the arch of my brows in the same motion that had sent me to sleep several hours earlier. An endless rumbling noise floats in the air around us. I lay a hand on the wall beside me and feel reverberations through the cold plaster. My first thought is an earthquake. Then I remember who we are.”
You Can’t Run Away from Homesickness
by Melissa Gismondi
“Although I blended in, the fact of the matter was that Virginia simply wasn’t home. It wasn’t just that I missed things I couldn’t find there, like Kraft peanut butter or the briskness that settles into the air on a late-August evening. Really, I missed what was familiar because it felt safe. Sitting there, in the counsellor’s sunsoaked office, I realized just how homesick I was and how homesick I’d been in the past.”
Sex, Death, and Plants
by Tove Danovich
“I tell a friend about my carnivorous plants, that I couldn’t keep the one that needed the most care from dying…He laughs. ‘Is that a metaphor?’..It probably is. I’ve lost track of the number of things I’ve fallen in love with that I couldn’t keep alive. Yet most of these plants require so little. I can give them that. Maybe this is why they make me think of seduction rather than romance.”
For Better and For Worse #3: The Shadow of Death
by
“By my calculation, the concert’s 7:30 p.m. start time on April 29, 1990, is approximately ten hours after Naeem had a heart attack on a treadmill in a gym near the YMCA in Syracuse. I know now, but didn’t know then, that the concert and my long, pleasant drive to Rochester with our friend fell within the twelve-hour window in which patients who do not receive medical treatment for cardiac arrest usually die.”
It’s Just My Memoir, B*tch
by Delia Bennett
“More than anything, The Woman in Me encompasses Britney’s palpable loneliness throughout her entire life. It’s an isolation I recognize. I feel it when I recall the long trips my parents took without me. In our kitchen, we had a calendar with velcro stretched across each day of the week. As days passed, I would take the small photo of me and move it one place closer to the date they’d return, affixed with a photo of my parents. There were years where my letters to Santa asked for them to stay home more.”
Reflections of Dad
by
“When he was of a sober mindset he took care of me, was my protector, fed me elaborate meals, even though we had little to no money. When he was using or drinking, our life was chaotic and at times violent…The story went like this. “You saved my life.” “No, you saved my life.” We said these words to each other. We were to blame, we were the heroes, we were the cause.”
Essays from around the web…
Hey Sinead: Why I Shaved My Head in the '90s and Stopped Shaving My Armpits in My 40s
by Sarah Orman
“Standing across from me at the wedding reception, my 13-year-old son’s face was a combination of pride and fear, as if he’d just pried open a heavy door and wasn’t sure what was about to jump out at him. I was not prepared for his question, so I said the first thing that popped into my mind: “Because not shaving is an easy way to say ‘fuck you’ to the patriarchy.” That, I thought, and it’s one less thing to do in the morning…My son nodded. He seemed satisfied with my answer, or maybe he was just relieved that I hadn’t reared up and chomped his head off. But as I watched him walk away towards a cluster of girls with long straightened hair, I realized there was a lot more I could have said.”
My BFF Ghosted Me When I Needed Her Most
by
“The morning after the fire, I collapsed on my living room floor and howled inconsolably. When I turned to my closest friend for support, the one I met almost every day for tea, she was sympathetic at first, but then she completely disappeared—no texts, no calls, no asking to go for a walk. A few years before, she had gone through a terrible divorce, and I was there through her heartache and subsequent dating fiascos. I had leaned in to support her, and now that it was my turn to crumble…poof…she was gone.”
An Orphan’s Guide to Celebrating Christmas
by Maura Kelly
“My father’s holiday behavior got more chaotic as he aged. He’d refuse to leave the house on the 24th and 25th, telling my sister and me that we should do what we liked. But I couldn’t leave him alone. We’d sit in the dark living room, and at some point, he’d tell me again about P.J. — how his body got stiff as a board, how no one could help.”
Army Specialized Depot #829, 1942
by
“I don’t need to mention that, however old I may be now, I never knew those men, but these ages later, as I contemplate their expressions, each at least outwardly stoic, I feel some odd combination of flame and lead in my guts. Is there anyone left to remember the person to whom each face in the photograph attests?”
On the G.O.D gang of Sydney’s 1990s, queer objects and archives
by Lisa Salmon
“The distinctly queer desire pulses off the pages in front of me. It is very apparent that these pictures were made for the lesbian gaze. You can see it in the poses we struck and the clothes we wore. You can feel it in the relationship between the photographer and subject…Lesbian erotica made for and by dykes has a specific tension. It is unapologetic. Amongst other things, it says ‘I am not for sale.’”
Searching for Heather Donahue
by Abigail Oswald
“Years have passed since I first saw The Blair Witch Project, and I keep coming back to the character of Heather Donahue. Why do I return to her? I think about the film as if it’s a puzzle I can solve, a maze I can write myself out of.”
The Song of the Body
by Kristen Leigh
“Not Sophia, our daughter. 18. She is at the Connecticut State Medical Examiner’s lab. They are inspecting her body. Cutting her open. Testing her blood. Weighing her. They will write a report and release her to the funeral home when they’re done. The funeral home director will call us. He will say, “We have Sophia in our care.” He will ask when we want to come. He will ask if we want to see her before sending her to the crematorium.”
Forgetting
by Mona Angéline
“My grandmother’s decline started long before the beginning of the end…It started long before she began repeating the same questions over and over, in thirty-second intervals. A long time before she tried to leave the house at night to go find her long-deceased mother in town. It started long before she thought she’d make coffee for the guests of her childhood boarding house that had been torn down some 50 years earlier.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 THERE WILL BE NO MEMOIR MONDAY ROUNDUP THE NEXT TWO MONDAYS, CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR’S DAY. SEE YOU IN JANUARY. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
📢 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 including me; really looking forward to reading these!
Thank you for including The Song of the Body. It's an honor to be part of your list.