Your Weekly Dose of Personal Narrative Has Arrived...
Welcome to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter featuring the best personal essays from around the web, and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, and Orion Magazine — plus many additional publications.
You might have noticed we also have a nice new logo, thanks to Ian MacAllen of Design is the Message!
In addition to the weekly curation, there are now original personal essays under the heading of First Person Singular, for paying subscribers.
The latest original essay, published in the First Person Singular series in November, is “My Big Break” by Jennifer Dines. The next original essay is coming later this week. Submissions are open. You can find submissions guidelines and more on the “About” page.
Our first in what will be a series of seminars was Publicity 101 For Writers with book publicist Lauren Cerand, was held October 8th. Paying subscribers can view the resulting video here.
Essays from partner publications…
Mother or Weapon: Retired Cage Fighter Jenny Liou on Navigating the Body After Birth
by Jenny Liou
“At 6 a.m. on a Thursday, I stand in front of my mirror pinching and rolling the stiff white skin of my C-section scar back and forth between my fingertips. My belly flesh can’t really feel my touch, but a web of nervy pain buzzes through the numb skin of my abdomen. I release the scar and dig my fingers down into the two-inch space where my rectus abdominus muscles gape around my belly button.”
Gooseberry Marsh
by Gretchen Legler
“Hunting with Craig has never been like this. My heart aches and I am afraid. I hate what we have done this year. It feels like murder. In the beginning, when Craig and I were first in love, everything was different. I wonder if I will ever hunt again. I wonder if I can make sense of what has happened here. I think now that hunting for us has every thing to do with love; with the way we feel about ourselves and each other. The heaviness or lightness of our hearts, our smallness or our generosity, shows in the way we hunt; in the way we treat the bluebills and mallards and teal that we shoot and eat; in the way we treat each other.”
Haunting Myself
by Seán Hewitt
“Lying is something I had become good at with practice. Before I came out, it was so deeply integral to the way I lived my life that it was hard, afterwards, to unpick which parts of myself were armour and which parts of myself were real. For years and years, I curated my mannerisms, my hobbies, my taste in music, books, friends, clothes, haircuts.”
I’ve Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates
by Anna Armstrong
“One day in the Summer of 2019, my friend Michelle posted a picture to her Instagram account of her newly purchased roller skates. Everything I loved about roller skating rushed back to me through that picture. I immediately purchased my own pair of skates and made a pact with Michelle to partner up, with the goal of joining the Oakland Rollers—a skate crew made up mostly of women who met weekly to roll out around Lake Merritt. I could hardly wait for this new wild gift of freedom to arrive.”
I’m No Longer Chasing “Literary Success”
by Madison Jamar
“There may be no official council of writers dictating who is most legitimate, but there are pressures to attain an appearance of career advancement—where one is published, who is sharing one’s work, how much one is getting paid, and how one balances being funny but intellectually rigorous but not morally inept and hot, obviously (especially if one is a woman). Much of the performance is done in vain and, increasingly it seems, without adequate systems of support.”
Space to Breathe
by Krista Lee Hanson
“I am so good at clearing my son’s airway that I am like Sam-I-Am in Green Eggs and Ham. I can suction on a train. I can suction in the rain. I can suction at the zoo. I can suction, why can’t you?”
Essays from Around the Web…
My Boyfriend, a Writer, Broke Up with Me Because I’m a Writer
by Isabelle Kaplan
“I know how it sounds to suggest my boyfriend dumped me because he’s scared I’ll become like Nora Ephron. You’re thinking: that’s what you’re going with? Or maybe: what’s her name?..The truth is, I’ve gone with that line because it sounds as deranged as the breakup felt. Because the absurdity of it feels safer than alleging that my boyfriend was uncomfortable with my success.”
It Must Have Been
by Lori Yeghiayan Friedman
“We must have joked to our boss, who we called Mr. Manager, before he left for the night about how we were going to break into the shop and try on all the costumes, starting with the most expensive ones, the taffeta dresses from the Moliere plays and the hand-stitched wigs. They trusted us with the money, why not the keys too? There was no one around except the ghosts.”
I Had Korean Double Eyelid Surgery at Age 18. I Look Back Now with Regret.
by Iris (Yi Youn) Kim
“As I’ve pieced together the larger forces that have converged to birth the Korean beauty and plastic surgery industries of today, my understanding of their implications oscillate between the personal and the political. Is the knife a colonial weapon that haunts us, inflicting an age-old wound, or a 21st-century tool that can help us feel more empowered, despite the costs? Can we acknowledge the critiques of plastic surgery and its capitalistic beauty constructs while refraining from condemning those who opt into it? On the spectrum of body alteration—from widely applied Korean anti-aging lotions to blepharoplasty surgery—where do we draw the line between the natural and the uncanny? Do any of us have a right to draw a line at all?”
Wild Organic Apples
by Natalie Tomlin
“Thoreau had no barrels or scales, nor a camera for seasonally appropriate photo shoots. “Let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. That should be the 'going' price of apples,” he said. And while his experience with apples was so different from my own, I related to his romance with apples—and also his sadness. “The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past,” he said. “It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.” I wondered if the same would happen with organic orchards. In the meantime, I decided to follow Thoreau’s lead, seeing apple picking as both a utility and something to become immersed in.”
A Day in the Life of a Hypochondriac
by Caren Chesler
“‘Uncle Nat, he had thyroid cancer,’ my mother said. His doctors kept telling him to wait and see if it grew. ‘It did,’ she said. ‘He died of it.’…My family peddles medical tragedy like a broker selling municipal bonds. Is it any wonder I’m a hypochondriac? I’ve been fed a constant diet of death and doom since childhood. Mosquito bites that turned out to be tumors. Sun freckles that were cancerous moles. A headache that turned into an aneurysm. It killed him on the spot.”
My Dad Was in the CIA - I'm Trying To Make Peace With His Complex Legacy
by Leslie Absher
“When I was younger, I didn’t understand that kind of fear at all. All I saw was paranoid Dad, constantly looking over his shoulder while passing strangers on the street or checking the rearview mirror while driving. By the time I learned he was in the CIA, I was twenty and had formed my own worldview. According to my thinking, America was mostly on the wrong side of things. Not just America. Dad was on the wrong side of things.”
I Had an Abortion in my 40s. I'll Never Forget The Shocking Thing The Doctor Said To Me.
by Jennifer S. Bassett
“Afterwards, the nurse sent me to the office of a doctor there, which felt strange, like I was being sent to the principal’s office. Usually the doctor comes to you…The man sitting behind the desk was about 60 years old. He told me to shut the door…‘Now, how did we get here?’ he asked after I was seated facing him. ‘You should really be more responsible, someone like you. You should know better. I recommend you come back after this for an IUD so this never happens again.’”
Let’s Talk About the Weather
by Pragya Agarwal
“I think of it often when we have the fire blazing in our living room and it is raining outside, yet again, in this small town in the north-west of England, where I have put down roots, where it rains most of the time. I don’t jump into puddles now even when my children want me to. And it is a hassle to make the pakoras every time it rains, sometimes four or five times a day. The smell of the rain is mixed in with homesickness, a longing for home, even as I am home.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 “I trusted that using story would be a helpful form of advice because it’s a story that has saved me, over and over again. Dear Sugar is an advice column, but the columns are also essays about life, wouldn’t you say?” I had the great good fortune of speaking with Cheryl Strayed for my “How’s the Writing Going?” series in Catapult’s “Don’t Write Alone” series. Check it out.
📢 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.
A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.
Because of data limits for many email platforms, going forward we will only include artwork from our partner publications. No need to send art.
*Please be advised, however, 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!
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