Bend It Like Beckham, road trips, and the untranslatable
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
Taking a Much-Needed Road Trip to Italy, Texas
by Andrea Bajani (translated by Elizabeth Harris)
We have three options, according to the navigator: the shortest route, skirting Waco, also takes the longest. So we’ll head up past Conroe, and the Sam Houston National Forest. When we see Buffalo, it means we’re almost to Italy, Texas. We looked at a few pictures before going. In this Italy we’ll reach today, we found out there are horses and prairie. Men wear cowboy hats, and pickups rumble down the road. Not much different from where we live, then, which is what poets teach us every day, in their writing.
The Women Who Don’t Bend in ‘Bend It Like Beckham’
by Nadya Agrawal
For years, I only knew how to watch a diaspora film sprawled out on someone’s couch. At family gatherings we tripped into the TV rooms, pulled these indie films out of their special boxes with their grainy printer-paper covers, and watched them with our feet dangling. They were usually bootleg copies passed down the line from a cousin with a camcorder until they reached us, the kids craving some kind of outside-world recognition. Even then we knew how rare it was to see people who looked like us in movies.
Hinterlands
by Matthew Byrne
Every week in the spring of 2018, I drove from my home near Concord to the north shores of the San Francisco Bay to teach Spanish in San Quentin State Prison. I tried to shake the inkling of melancholy I felt traveling to a prison—a city of cages—on one of the United States’ quintessential “open roads,” but I never could.
Uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken
by Polly Barton
Yet rarely in my life have I felt a greater discomfort at being paraphrased. Barely, only just barely had I managed to eke out what it was that had happened, and it had been immediately recast, into what I felt was the anime adaptation, the manga version of my story. Uwaa: the sound that you make when something shocking happens.
Writers’ Resources
Read this conversation with Sonora Jha about her new memoir, How to Raise a Feminist Son, over at The Rumpus!
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