The mom archetype, intimate prosthetics, and learning to sleep
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
Sleeping With Myself
by Eve Ettinger (art by Honey Gilmore)
Every time I wake up, it is with a start, a panicked urgency that I must be alert, all of me “on” now. I wake with a start next to a new lover, an old friend I’m reconnecting with after years drifting apart after college. We’ve just slept together for the first time and we are in my home, in my bed. His body is soft and absorbs the shock of my body jerking awake. His arms around me are unshifted by my terror. I am safe.
Bleak Midwinter
by Catherine Taylor
In November 1980, after Sutcliffe murdered Jacqueline Hill, a twenty-year-old Leeds University student studying English, who was followed and struck down as she got off the evening bus to make the short walk to her halls of residence, I was no longer allowed to walk home alone from school. The fear of the Ripper was tangible. Where would he strike next?
Tracing the Seams
by Jericho Vincent
I was thirty-four years old when I finally acquired my prosthetic penis. I bought it at a sex store in the Lower East Side, a lamentable place to get it done, though I could think of no better ones. I resented the cheerful pink walls. I resented the other shoppers nosing around me. I resented the windows looking out onto the filthy sidewalk. I longed for privacy.
Against the All-Consuming Archetype of ‘Mom’
by Sarah Langan
There’s this massive identity shift happens when women become mothers. It’s like living in a Shirley Jackson short story. You go to the dentist and fall asleep in the chair while getting drilled, because at least it’s a break from the crying. When you wake up, you temporarily forget who you are. You visit your parents and they look at you differently. The existence of your baby unearths memories in them—they see you as a child, themselves in their prime. What they also see, often more powerfully, is themselves as children. In this new constellation of family, everybody relates differently from how they used to, and nobody quite recognizes you, specifically. They see you more generically, as a MOM.
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