Thirteen Great New Personal Essays...
Plus, a new one-on-one mentoring opportunity with Narratively co-founder Brendan Spiegel in the announcements at the bottom.
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by
, now featuring four 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 “Happy Birthday to Me,” by
. A new essay by is coming Wednesday.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews and essays on craft and publishing. There are also occasional writing prompts and exercises for paid subscribers. Recently I posted “The Prompt-O-Matic #11,” and “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #8: Cait West,” the eighth installment in that interview series.
Goodbye to All That, where I’m continuing to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye. Recently I published “You Are Where You Eat,” by Vivian Manning-Schaffel.
*Please note: I am no longer posting about these roundups on X/Twitter.*
Essays from partner publications…
What Being a Bike Courier Taught Me about Our Broken Economy
by Sam Riches
“It’s surprising how many people order crepes. Half of the orders I get are for crepes. The address is somewhere I haven’t delivered to yet. Forest Hill. The rich neighbourhood. I bike uphill, the homes growing larger and progressively gaudier as the elevation climbs. I circle the streets, looking at the mansions that fill city blocks, then I find the address. A lady cradling a tiny dog, her face covered in ointment, a bathrobe on, opens the door just enough to stick her arm through.”
Mars the Father
by Eryn Sunnolia
“For years in my childhood bedroom, fiercely holding back tears with my dad’s wooden spoon, I learned that my dad would hurt me, and call it love. Maybe he and I have more in common than I think: I too was once soft and tender before it was beaten out of me. I wove barbed wire around me and hid within its protection.”
The Last Lecture
by
“A few years ago, in his mid-80s, Dad flirted with retirement. I’d been eager for him to start a new chapter, full of new things. Traveling with Mom. Becoming an expert on a new topic. (Baking bread! Dunkirk!) I have friends close to his age who’ve done it: walked away, never looked back, reinvented themselves well into their 70s. But the most he allowed was to surrender his full-time teaching spot to someone younger and move into an only slightly less demanding adjunct role.”
An (Ongoing) Taxonomy of the Sad Rich Girls of Literature
by Sanibel Lazar
“Some readers love thrillers, others love mysteries—my idea of a page-turner is a Sad Rich Girl novel. Show me a discontented daughter of privilege who wiles away her days agonizing over how dull life is, complaining about nepobaby accusations, or—most deliciously—wishing she were poor so there was some damn romance in her life, and I’ll read late into the night. I love nothing more than a protagonist who has so much free time she can ponder the meaninglessness of existence.”
Essays from around the web…
The Crime Novel that Wouldn’t, or Writing as Processing
by Ethel Rohan
“I can’t write crime. That’s the troubling discovery I made while drafting my second novel Sing, I. As a disciple of the crime genre for decades, particularly detective fiction and more recently true crime, I initially found my inability to write crime deeply frustrating and surprising. I knew from the outset that Sing, I would begin with a store holdup and the robber would continue to commit local crimes and evade capture. As I wrote on, I fully expected Ester, my main character and one of two victims of the store holdup, to become increasingly embroiled in the hunt for the repeat offender—along the lines of a heart-trembling psychological thriller. But Sing, I’s story and characters refused to bend to my will and instead insisted on veering full-throttle to the domestic.”
An Epistle for Edenia
by
“Dear Ma, I was in my early twenties when I told you I am a writer. You dug into the same bookcase you had in the living room since I was a kid (which still held the Compton’s Encyclopedia set you bought from a door-to-door salesman back in the mid-eighties) and took out a legal pad filled with your writing. “Yo comencé a escribir mi historia,” you said as I flipped through the pages. Your hand was so hard, the backs of the pages felt like braille. When I started reading you yanked the legal pad from me and laughed when I reached for it. I whined, “Lemme read. I wanna read.”…“Cuando yo me muera,” you said, still smiling. I’ve thought of those pages so many times over the years. I thought about them when you died last June.”
The End of All Wanting
by
“Here’s a story: I was listening to ‘That’s Just the Way that I Feel’ by Purple Mountains on the day I wrecked my wife’s truck. Here’s the truth: I was drunk on a Wednesday, the way I always was. I was in tennis clothes because I’d told my wife I had a lesson on Wednesday nights, allowing me to drink in the office till 8, then use the drive home to verbally practice stories about the lesson.”
Once upon a time in Xinjiang
by
“ErJiu, still a young and handsome man in his late 20s, beaming with pride at the center of the family crowd, told his stories from the Great Northwest—cotton fields with no end in sight, basketball tournaments on dirt courts, and the orchard night-watcher’s shed on moonlit summer nights. Some details may have faded with time, but I will never forget the feeling of being mesmerized. In a five-year-old’s imagination, ErJiu's world was a fascinating story land far from my world, our garden house in Shanghai. What a five-year-old did not understand, was that for ErJiu it was a world of hardship and possibilities.”
The Perils of Girlhood
by Melissa Fraterrigo
“At what point did a weird unsettled feeling shift to out-and-out terror? When did their innocent hike during a day off school become a failed sprint for survival? And then, what happened next? By 3:30 p.m. the girls weren’t answering their phones.”
When I Was Blind: A Story of Love and Darkness
by Emily Shetler
“When C was healthy, he was known for pushing limits in every way: playing music, eating, learning things, making things, having fun. He was bright-eyed and lanky, comfortably slouched, and his unabashed humor either made people shriek with laughter or alienated them into silence…He held my hands a lot. He had the best hands. Veined and meaty, scarred from cooking accidents. Playing guitar calloused his finger pads. My own seemed to shrink as soon as he cupped them.”
Over in a Flash (almost)
by
“The ambulance arrived, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Beaufort Street is a busy main road and this spectacle had attracted a large crowd of onlookers. I became hysterical with helplessness—the sheer horror of not being able to move my legs made me fear the worst. The paramedics attempted to move me, and that’s when the pain kicked in. The worst pain I had ever felt in my whole life, starting from my hip, spreading all across my pelvis and down my legs. ‘Am I paralyzed?’ I cried out to the medics. ‘Tell me! I need to know! Am I paralyzed? Am I? Please!’”
My Mental Health Drastically Improved When I Stopped Posting on Social Media
by
“When I saw new follower notifications, I cringed, sure that all of them were doomed to be disappointed by my lackluster output. After four months barely using social media, the idea of posting filled me with dread, like anything I shared should be totally momentous to warrant taking up space in people’s feeds. Not only was I coming up empty, the only reason I was working so hard to brainstorm what to post was because it had been drilled into me that, as someone who makes part of their living with words and has books (and an upcoming book proposal) to hawk, that’s what I should be doing.”
Never Too Late for Love
by
“Frances wasn’t looking for a man when she got a call from the newly widowed husband of a friend of hers. He was hosting a tea for the women who had loved his wife. Each guest was to choose a memento. Some picked costume jewelry, others ornamental spoons. There might have been a candy dish, and a silk scarf or a dozen. An African violet that required a knowing touch. The lovely remnants of a life all found takers.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 May Memoir Mentorship: Perfecting the Personal Essay
co-founder has 15 slots for one-on-one editing workshops in the month of May, with two rounds of feedback and a personal consultation on essays up to 2,500 words.📢 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!