Vin Diesel, Toni Morrison, and Hong Kong
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and monthly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Longreads, Tin House, Granta, and Guernica. It may be the start of a new work week, but at least we have this great new writing to get us through it.
On Being Seen by Toni Morrison
by Katherine D. Morgan (Art by Susan Ito)
As a child, I’d read about fifty books a month. I loved reading because it presented me with the chance to escape my troubled home life. I read so many books, and yet, if you’d asked me then when the first time I felt seen in a piece of literature was, I’d have shrugged my shoulders and returned to my book. I didn’t have an answer. For me, characters were white unless otherwise stated. Even though I am a Black woman, I never imagined myself or anyone who looked like me in a leading role in the stories I read. Sassy Black friend? Absolutely. Receptionist or cafeteria worker? Sure. The main character in a romance novel? Unheard of. It wasn’t until college that I’d come across the phrase “white gaze.” Suddenly, it all made sense. It turns out that I was a main character in a story: it just wasn’t a story that I’d read yet.
Conversations with My Loveliest
by Melissa Berman
In the kitchen the tea-making began. You couldn’t just boil water and pour it in the mug over the bag. You had to pour the bottled Evian water into the kettle, and you had to run hot water into the mugs to warm them. And you had to use an egg timer for four minutes to steep the tea bag. And you had to do a whole lot of things to put a spoonful of honey in your tea if you wanted that. I usually skipped the honey. Once we had our tea and were seated at the small round table, and I was ready for whatever we were going to discuss, she decided on a change of venue. “Let’s go in the living room, it’s more pleasant.”
How My Song Became an Unlikely Protest Anthem—in Hong Kong
by Kashy Keegan
Right there and then, it was like I was a pop star on stage and, for the first time in my life, I was literally living the dream. When it was over, as I walked off stage with the sound of applause still ringing in my ears, my only thought was that I wanted to do it all over again.
Bookshelves: John Berger in My Family Album
by Amitava Kumar
I had never met Didion or Berger, so neither could be aware of this, but I had turned them into my mentors. ‘The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait,’ the critic Anatole Broyard wrote. I was trying to create a family album, accurate for who I was as a writer at that time in my life.
Of Floods and Ruination
by Amy Lee Scott
The summer I miscarried my whole city flooded. The rain came down and down—not just buckets of it, but whole harbors. Oceans. It fell so fast that underpasses filled to the brim like swimming pools. So the freeways closed. Abandoned cars dotted the lanes, small islands hunkered in the storm while water coursed around them.
What Vin Diesel Taught Me About Singing and Sincerity
by Joshua Bohnsack
Vin is wearing a suit jacket, jeans, and a pained expression of wavering devotion. His eyebrows furrow and raise with each of Rihanna’s notes he fails to match. The crux of this bizarre performance hits me at the one minute, twenty-five second mark when, in an attempt to harmonize with featured artist Mikky Ekko, Vin unveils his falsetto for the second verse.
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