Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, 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, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. ⬇️
First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.
The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.
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.
*While I have you…I could use some more support in the form of paid subscriptions. If I’ve featured your work or that of your publication’s contributors…if you’re a publicists whose clients I’ve regularly featured…if you just want to help me keep doing this and paying contributors, please consider becoming a paid subscriber…*
Memoir Land is on Substack Notes and BlueSky.
Essays from partner publications…
My Poor Parents
by Walter Siti, translated by Brian Robert Moore
“My parents watch television out of tiredness, to fill the void. Sometimes separately: my mother in the morning, busying herself in the kitchen with all the breathlessness of her ninety-six kilos; my father late at night, his ankles resting on a second chair. Without shoes or socks, head thrown back and mouth half open, he wakes with a start, follows the program for ten minutes and then sinks back into an unhealthy drowsiness. One can’t help but note the necrosis in his halluces – he’s starting to die toes first.”
My Mother Was My Critic
by Minelle Mahtani
“Her face was a canvas of perfection, thanks to years of cosmetology school. Didn’t I tell you how beautiful she was? In contrast, my own face was a refusal of that inheritance: blotchy, already showing signs of prepubescent acne, and so much darker. I was furious that it wasn’t good enough for her.”
The Songs Prove That We Were Here: Ocean Vuong on Sufjan Stevens
by Ocean Vuong
“‘What’s the point of singing songs,’ Sufjan croons in ‘Eugene,’ ‘if they never even hear you?’ And the question sits at the heart of all written art, and is the question I’ve been asking my whole life.”
Documenting My Life So I Don’t Forget
by Saachi Gupta
“Asfiyah constantly pokes fun at me for The List, insisting it’s a fuckboy thing to do, but I swear to her it’s not a hall of fame. Its purpose is not to brag about my sexual exploits or stroke my own ego. “I have this obsession with not forgetting things,” I explain, as we walk through the glistening lanes of Bandra. In the rain, my white ballet flats turn murky brown. We stop to take solo pictures of each other on an old digital camera I found in the drawer of my television unit a few days ago, a Nikon Coolpix from when I was thirteen, which I’ve been taking everywhere since. We pose together for a few, squealing when a rat races past us into a gutter. Then we snap a photo of our shoes in one frame, the toes of my white ballet flats pointing towards her grey Converse. Looking through the photos when I return home, I realize something: It’s not that I’m obsessed with remembering things. It’s that I have a fear of forgetting.”
This is 70
by Deborah Sosin
“My face sprouts moles. My once-jaunty breasts slouch toward my thickening waist. My pubic hair is gray, thinning. Nine crowns, one implant. I sleep with a mouthguard, wrist brace, orthopedic pillow. I’m lactose intolerant, allergic to scents, battling insomnia. Diagnoses: osteoporosis, tinnitus, arthritis, carpal tunnel, hyperthyroidism, IBS, reflux, dry eye, dry skin, dry everything. I ask my doctor about sex at my age. ‘Lots of lube,’ she says. ‘And patience.’”
At Disney, I Cry Over the Water Buffalos
by Hannah Keziah C. Agustin
“When I tell my mother I miss home and want to live in the barrio with the water buffalos, she asks why I keep wanting to go back to the imaginary home of her past. There is nothing to do and no one to return to. Everyone has either died or left. The house sits empty with memory. Silence haunts the concrete floors. In Disney, the water buffalos are all female and cannot give birth. You lay asleep in a makeshift home and wait twenty years for a slow cessation, unable to leave the haunt of ancestry pulling you back to Asia.Essays from around the web…”
Essays from around the web…
The Talented Ms. Highsmith
by Elena Gosalvez Blanco
“first read Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the fall of 1994. I was twenty and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves full of her first editions, organized in chronological order. Pat was seventy-four and knew she was about to die; she had been, it was rumored, diagnosed with cancer or some other terminal disease. I was trapped in her world with her, trembling. She had weeks left to live and had spent so much time writing about how to get away with murder. I fantasized that she might try to kill me.” (h/t Michael A. Gonzales)
To My Son From His Father
by Karim Dimechkie
“In that ten-second span, the world transformed from a radiant, expansive paradise to a war zone without allies. Pressure built rapidly, filling my torso, pushing for a way to break out and strike at the two people I love most in the world.”
Why I Let Our Kids Sleep in Bed With Us
by A.J. Daulerio (The Small Bow)
“It turns out some source, maybe a book they would’ve barely read, had convinced them that I suffered from separation anxiety, which, in my father’s mind, was the wimpiest, most pathetic form of anxiety. They took me to a child psychiatrist, and he encouraged them to let me fight through it. My parents set an early bedtime, pumped me full of warm milk, and gave me a bunch of self-soothing mantras I was to recite whenever I felt anxious. None of it worked.”
How to communicate in a stressful environment
by Istiaq Mian
“In medicine, mitigated speech happens frequently. A trainee can be admonished by an attending in front of others for not knowing something. Physicians can be rude or short to nurses seeking help or clarity on a patient plan. Consultants speak down to generalists like me. In turn, all these interactions affect how information is communicated.”
My son spoke up on the playground–now it's my turn not to freeze
by Alyson Pomerantz
“When I came out in the late 90s, my mother warned me that life was going to be harder. Somehow, I don't think she was picturing me, at 48, debating whether it was too late to cancel my eight-year-old son's playdate because I was afraid to tell the boy's parents that I was married to a woman.”
My Father Was Never a Dad
by Salma
“In my country, Egypt, we only celebrate Mother’s Day. We don’t even know anything about Father’s Day. It is like heresy to us, but recently people started celebrating it, while I had one more reason to cry. It was already hard enough to hear my friends talking about their dads while I thought of going home to find my father with his usual frown, yelling at me for something neither of us knew, since he would sometimes do it for no discernible reason.”
Cold Comfort
by Sarah Orman
“My babysitting career ended when I was 15 years old. It was December 1991, and I’d been hired to care for a toddler from my parents’ church. At the end of the night, I was flustered from wrangling the child’s flailing limbs into a onesie he’d clearly outgrown when I finally deposited him into his crib. Exhausted, I plopped onto the couch with the remote and flipped the television on to the local news, where a reporter informed me that the bodies of four girls had been found at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in northwest Austin. The news did not report that the girls had been tied up, shot, and burnt, or that three of the bodies were found stacked on top of each other. That night, I knew only that four dead girls had been found in a yogurt shop a few miles from where I sat. Afterwards, when people asked me to babysit, I said no.”
“Bwah-ju-yoh.”
by S. Isabel Choi
“The summer I arranged for my mother’s remains to be exhumed, burned, and transferred cross-country, I achieved what my mother could only in death: separation from my father. At age forty-one, I could finally answer a question she had posed to me when I was ten. If she were to leave him, which parent would I choose?”
Roy G Biv
by Jeremy Mauser
“I broke up with her via text because I was afraid of her rage, which unfurled itself in the least significant of arguments. A rage she had inherited from her stepfather. A rage that granted me an excuse to keep my distance while ending things. I texted him that it was done. She texted me that she wasn’t okay.”
Д as in Homecoming
by Ekaterina Petrova
“The print is the kind of predictable, ubiquitous souvenir sold in every tourist shop around Sofia and the sort of kitschy artwork I’d immediately, and snobbishly, dismiss if I encountered it back in Bulgaria. But here—in a musty, cluttered shop 5,340 miles, an ocean, and a continent and a half away—it’s all I can do to not immediately buy it and hang it over the writing desk in my Iowa apartment. Twenty-five dollars for a piece of home seems like a steal.”
Souvenirs of an Awake Craniotomy
by Camille Begin
“I decided to keep French. English is for work, rationality, writing. I love how active the language is; how familiar it has become, yet how foreign it remains. I love how it distances me from my experiences, how it gives me space to process them. I love how my intimacy with it has estranged me from ever being able to write in French again. I love how I get to avoid the convoluted sentence structures and tricky grammar of my first language; even though reading the sentences others have sculpted with it remains a voluptuous experience of clauses, commas, pure descriptive stamina that wraps me in words and worlds. French remains my emotional language. The one I cry in, the one I need to communicate with my son, to be silly and caring, to greet him with a ‘Bonjour mon choubidou d’amour’ as he wakes up.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Narratively Academy Workshop: The Way They Were: Writing About Parents and Formative Relationships
Journalist, writer and educator Ladane Nasseri will lead The Way They Were: Writing About Parents and Formative Relationships, a two-hour craft seminar at Narratively Academy on Saturday, June 28, from 10am to 12pm ET.
📢 "Writing the Book Proposal" with Off Assignment
A book proposal must do the seemingly impossible: Pitch a project that doesn’t fully exist, while anchoring it in practical details like structure, audience, and timeline. It must function as sales document, project plan, and creative vision—all at once. How to craft such a thing? This five-week Masters’ Series course, led by essayist and journalist Raksha Vasudevan and featuring guest authors Elisa Gabbert, Anni Liu, Noelle Falcis-Math, and Lauren Markham, will unpack why proposals matter, how publishers evaluate them, and how this strange hybrid document can actually support the creative process rather than stifle it.
The course includes close readings, structured assignments, and sample proposals that led to book deals. By the end, students will have a working draft or detailed outline of their proposal (25–35 pages, not including sample chapters), and a deeper sense of how to shape it into something that excites agents, editors, and themselves. Open to writers at any stage, this course is designed to transform the proposal from a daunting publishing requirement into a generative, guiding force for the book to come. Scholarships are available, and asynchronous participation is welcome.
Dates: Mondays July 14 - August 11, 7-9 p.m. EST. Price: $400 (Memoir Monday readers can use code MEMOIR20 for 20% off)
📢 Eliciting Stories: how to talk to your loved ones about the past with Margaret Juhae Lee via Corporeal Writing
Workshop Sunday Aug. 17, 2025, 11 am to 1 pm (PST) over Zoom (a recording will be made available to all registrants for a limited period)
In this workshop, we will explore how to approach and speak to loved ones about the past, especially when painful memories are involved. Designed for writers in all genres, we will delve into creative approaches to opening up real (and imagined) conversations with family members, in particular, reticent elders—and even those who are no longer with us. A combination of writing exercises and practical advice from a seasoned journalist, this offering focuses on eliciting stories from those who might not want to remember, including ourselves.
📢 Call for Contributors to an Anthology about Infidelity
Tentative title: Stepping Out: Writings on Infidelity
Editors: Susan Ostrov Weisser, author of LOVELAND: A MEMOIR OF ROMANCE AND FICTION and Nan Bauer-Maglin, editor of GRAY LOVE and LOVING ARRANGEMENTS
This essay collection explores the enduring and complex issue of infidelity in romantic relationships, a topic that remains taboo and emotionally charged despite the evolving norms around love, commitment, and sexuality. The book will feature personal essays from those with direct or thoughtful insights into infidelity, whether as participants, victims, or observers. Analytic essays approaching the topic through psychological, sociological, historical, or literary lenses are welcomed. Reprints will be considered. Please send inquiries or a 1–2-page description to both Susan at weisser@adelphi.edu and Nan at Nan.Bauermaglin99@ret.gc.cuny.edu by August 31st. Be sure to include a short note about your previous writing, your profession, and any other relevant information about yourself.
📢 Craft Seminar: How To Write An Essay Collection with Alexander Chee via The Shipman Agency
“This is a lecture class in two parts with suggested but not required readings and 6 writing prompts, 3 per class, that I have used to write essays for my next collection. There is no workshop component. Students will be sent a suggested reading list after registration. Reading the collections under discussion is recommended but not required.”
Two Sessions: Sundays, July 13 + 27 1:00-3:30pm ET; $200
📢 Submit to Blaise Allysen Kearsley ’s new “How I Learned” magazine…
The How I Learned Series was a live reading/storytelling/comedy show created by Blaise Allysen Kearsley in 2009. The monthly series ran for a little over a decade with events in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and New Orleans, and included benefits for Emily's List and Housing Works.
Featured guests included Mira Jacob, Alexander Chee, Ayo Edebiri, John Fugelsang, Anna Sale, James Hannaham, Hugh Ryan, Sasheer Zamata, John Wray, David Carr, Starlee Kine, Taylor Negron, Issac Fitzgerald, Aparna Nancherla, Emily Flake, Dodai Stewart, Choire Sicha, Jami Attenberg, Maggie Estep, Rosie Schaap, and many others.
How I Learned has been "on hiatus" since the Covid shutdown. Now, it's being resurrected as an online magazine.
What to submit: Nonfiction essays: 1500 - 2500 words Flash nonfiction: up to 800 words.
Email subject heading: “Submission - How I Learned.” Add a brief synopsis of your piece. Attach your submission as a Word or Google doc. Send to: howilearned@gmail.com
Soft deadline: June 16th Hard deadline: June 20th
📢 Call for Submissions for a Collaboration Between Memoir Land and Literary Liberation
Memoir Land and Literary Liberation will co-publish an essay series called “Writing A Liberatory Practice.” Rate: $150. For submissions guidelines, deadlines and more, visit Literary Liberation.
📢 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.
Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.
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.
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Thanks for including Salma's essay about her troubled relationship with her father.
Thanks for including my essay in this week's roundup! I just read Sara Orman's essay and it was so captivating. Making my way through reading this week's edition.