Don't miss our reading tonight!
This is tonight! You can still register for tonight’s (June 21) edition of the Memoir Monday reading (still virtual for now), featuring Anjali Enjeti, Lilly Dancyger, Krys Malcolm Belc, and Larissa Pham!
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and a quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each personal 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.
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Diary of a Bachelor Who Suddenly Became a Solo Dad to a Teenage Girl
by Diary of a Bachelor Who Suddenly Became a Solo Dad to a Teenage Girl (illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick)
"It was a victory. But at the same time, I also felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. My daughter’s relationship with her mother was fractured, much more deeply than I realized even at that time. As relieved as I was for this battle to finally be over, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d done something terribly wrong. After nearly 14 years of defective coparenting, what I’d thought was the reason for those deficiencies was gone. In its place crept a slither of doubt. Could I actually be a better parent on my own?"
A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
by Kimberly Grey (Art by Madeline Kreider Carlson)
"Memory has worked to bring me here. Everything that was once
unimaginable I try to manage now as if I am a body made of glass. How
do I distinguish what is verifiable and what is unverifiable? How do I
tell the truth of a fact that only my mind owns?"
Hell Is a City in Texas
by Reverie Koniecki (Photo by Martha Dominguez de Gouveia on Unsplash)
"We have little in common. He is knowledgeable about psych drugs and knows the therapists and nurses from previous visits. He arrived at the hospital straight from prison and will transition into a group home when he is discharged. His diagnosis is schizophrenia and bipolar I. My diagnosis is major depressive disorder, though, after discharge, I found out that I actually have bipolar II. We compare diagnoses like they are report cards. Who has the higher dose? What are you on for sleep? For anxiety? For psychosis? For moods? We belong to the same species of illness."
Business in the Front, Rebellion in the Back
by Alex Manley (Photo courtesy of the author)
"As a shy kid with undiagnosed anxiety issues, most of my youth felt like a game of cat and mouse: Selfhood was less a question of desire and more a question of saying yes to the right opportunity at the right time. It would be decades before I started making more confident decisions about my life, whether the choice was a job or a haircut. All I knew then was I’d seen the Saint-Henri boys with rat tails, they looked different in a cool way, and a group of that size surely couldn’t be wrong about something like that. So I made my request to the hairdresser, a shaky declaration of agency, a step toward the making of the self."
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