Your Weekly Personal Essay Fix...
Plus: Electric Literature's fund drive, Narratively's 2024 Memoir Prize, and more...
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. Recently I published
“Happy Messes,” by
.The Lit Lab, featuring interviews 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) for paid subscribers. Most recently I posted “The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #57: Richard Scott Larson” “The Prompt-O-Matic #42,” and “The 'Memoir Land Questionnaire'-Takers on NPR's and NYT's Notables Lists”.
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 “Elegy in Times Square,” by
. A new Goodbye to All that essay is coming soon…
Essays from partner publications…
Shrink: An Excerpt from American Bulk
by
“I relished the novelty. I’d always been a shopper, never a seller, and I delighted each time the curtain was pulled back. I learned about the locked perfume cage in the back. I learned new names for the mundane: theft was shrink, a thief was a Thelma, free products were gratis, a customer was a guest and an item they plucked from the shelf and later abandoned was a go back, checkout was the cash wrap, a shelf was positioned by a planogram, a shelf was positioned by mandate from on high, a shelf was a gondola, a shelf was an endcap, a shelf was an étagère. I learned the satisfaction of a workday that dissolved in an instant. The sweet finality of clocking out. I learned just how pale my skin and just how pink my cheeks were. I learned the acute chemical effect of being called pretty a few times a week.”
Should I Be Home Or Something?
by
“Why is it considered such a miraculous feat that I’ve put on pants and shoes, walked outside my front door, and found something fun to do? Am I supposed to be maxed out on the wonders of culture in my 20s and 30s and be home, watching stories in a housecoat (which I sometimes also do, if you count Real Housewives as stories)? Am I supposed to be so jaded that I believe I’ve seen everything there is to see in this huge wild world by now?”
Inside James Baldwin’s Fraught Relationship With His Stepfather: An excerpt from Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father, and Me
by Douglas Field
“My own father, a ghostly presence of a man who was always so present in every room he occupied, is alive, but his memories of me have died. We can sound out words to one another, but we no longer converse beyond stop–start phrases. Each encounter with my father carries for me the burden of recognition when I believe, just for a moment, that he knows who I am, before these fleeting moments wither in the stale air of the care home.”
Carry Me With You
by Aimee Seiff Christian
“First. You will meet your mother. This will not solve all your problems, though you wish it would, and this will be a pitfall so deep it will nearly cost you your relationship. But she will look like you and smell like you and talk and walk and move like you. She will act like you and overreact like you so when people say your adoptive mother says oh, you really have no sense of humor, Aimee and you’re being so dramatic, Aimee, you will realize it is your mother you are being exactly like.”
Essays from around the web…
A Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education
by Julia Preston
“My own presence in Allentown, where I walked the streets with a green-and-pink shoulder bag carefully selected to convey joyfulness and filled with Harris campaign literature, had followed an abrupt life change. I’ve been a journalist for four decades, reporting on immigration and other subjects for the Washington Post, The New York Times, and, most recently, The Marshall Project. But, on June 27th, as I watched the debate between President Joe Biden and Trump, I was overcome with dismay.”
Breaking Up With My In-Laws Over Immigration
by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
“One afternoon in 2017, when my husband and I were ten years into our marriage and we were sitting with his parents at our dining-room table in our apartment in California, my father-in-law began to lecture me about my lack of deference to him — how a woman owed obedience to her husband and her church and all the men in her life. I remember tilting my head to the side in disbelief. My mother-in-law sat, attentive, nodding, holding her hands. Sitting next to me, my husband put his hand on my leg, letting me know he was there and waiting for me to signal if I wanted him to intervene.”
On Virality
by
“I’m not sure if it’s jealousy, or the peak of expectations reigning down from the tippy top of virality, but from “Cat Person” to “The Crane Wife,” “Bad Art Friend” (court outcome detailed here) to “The Protagonist Is Never in Control”—it’s like there’s a bonfire, and it feels great standing near it for a while, but eventually (either by the author’s doing or the turn of the masses) it burns the entire forest down. Sure, CJ Hauser got a book deal for The Crane Wife (at auction, but she had sold a novel already—so another book was likely), and “Cat Person” published the collection of stories, and then I believe, a novel.”
Help Wanted: Pre-Emptive Griever
by
“If you call ‘Don’t die today!’ as your partner leaves for work each morning, an inside joke that brings a laugh but leaves a lump of fear in your throat, you may be a good fit for this role. Picturing yourself in your house alone, though your loved one seems perfectly fine, is further evidence of your prowess. You can do life solo, but the thing is, you don’t want to, and you’ll worry full time to ensure that doesn’t happen.”
Illustrating an Odyssey—Three Days in a Life with Long Covid
by Maggie Bell
“In the final months of 2023, my symptoms mutated and escalated. Any assumptions I had about how my body operated, even with the brain fog and fatigue, were alarmingly upended. I had episodes of heartburn that felt like a heart attack. I had downward spirals triggered by a new allergy to alcohol. I had insomnia and restless leg syndrome and couldn’t regulate my body temperature or my mood. Maybe worst of all, my nervous system seemed adamant that we were under near constant attack. There’s a bear! it exclaimed. We need to stand guard! We need to stay awake!
There was no bear. Long Covid was the bear.”
The Vanishing
by Suan Barr-Toman
“One in eight pregnancies begins as twins. Only one in ninety births results in twins. Earlier in the pregnancy, one of them suddenly disappears. Maybe this is why people are obsessed with twins: they have a sense of loss, something missing, someone missing. It’s more than fantasizing about a person who could easily step into their place, their job, their relationship to take over and give them a break from the mundane and let them live another life. I think they long for a twin, so they’d never feel alone. They’d be understood. They’d have someone created just for them.”
This Black Friday, I'm Finally Giving up Buying Action Figures for Myself
by
“Shopping for toys gave my droll winter workdays meaning. It made parenting less wearying when I could flick through my kids’ toy catalogs, searching for the toys I wanted. When your days are monotonous — working and changing diapers and driving kids to school — scoring a rare collectible makes you feel accomplished. But at this year's New York Comic Con, as I stood before a dinosaur-sized inflatable Goku — the protagonist from the Dragon Ball Z franchise — with over 200,000 fanboys and fangirls swirling around me, hunting for exclusive bobbleheads, I realized I was just so bored with it all.”
I Was Always A Good Girl — Then I Met A Punk Rocker Who Changed My Life
by
“I reveled in this world where anger was exulted instead of verboten. There was a freedom there, and joy. The dark side of life was embraced, as it should be, because when we shun it, we confine ourselves to a thin existence.”
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Time
by Sarah Orman
“Fifteen years ago, I became a mother and lost track of time. The organizing principle of my life with my infant son was purely physical: milk in, milk out. I was a manager of bodily fluids. As I shuffled from room to room in our small San Francisco apartment, changing diapers and nursing pads, chasing down rags to catch the copious results of my son’s reflux, I caught myself muttering about “precious bodily fluids,” like the crazy guy in Dr. Strangelove. That guy didn’t seem so crazy anymore.”
Runnin’ Down a Dream
by
“Once, while my stepfather’s mother was dying, my brother and I took the Fiat to a Tom Petty concert miles away from home and found we’d locked the keys in the trunk. My friend Heather, she of the Mustang, picked up the extra keys in the middle of the night and drove up to rescue us, the sole car in the parking lot as the sky started to turn to daylight. I think we flipped a coin to decide who would call home; my brother lost. I can not hear a Tom Petty song without remembering the crew checking in on us before driving the last two trailers of gear up the hill and out of the Concord Pavilion parking lot.”
🚨Announcements:
📢 Contribute to Electric Literature’s Annual Fund Drive
Electric Literature is a nonprofit organization with 8 staff members and 3 paid interns. We publish 15 articles per week—essays, reading lists, short stories, flash fiction, poetry, graphic narratives, interviews, and criticism—by over 500 writers per year.
Our work costs $500,000 annually, and last year, 33% of that was donated by 2,000 of our readers—people like you! The average donation of $65 made a difference. We depend on you to keep the lights on.
Electric Literature may be free to read, but the costs are real and going up. We need to raise $25,000 by December 31, 2024 to keep Electric Literature going into next year. In these uncertain times, the only thing I know for sure is that we cannot afford to take the organizations and institutions we care about for granted. If the continued existence of Electric Literature means something to you, please make a contribution today.
📢 Narratively’s 2024 Memoir Prize…
Narratively is accepting submissions for their 2024 Memoir Prize. They are looking for “revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view." The guest judge is New York Times bestselling memoirist Jami Attenberg. One Grand Prize Winner will receive $3,000, and the two finalists will receive $1,000 each. There is a $20 entry fee and the deadline to submit is December 19, 2024.
📢 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, NEW, the author’s Bluesky Handle.
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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So thrilled to be included in this list!
What a surprise and an honor to be included here! 💜💜💜