Invisible illness diagnosed, a complicated elegy, tsunami dreams, bad apples...
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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Finding a Face for My Invisible Illness
by Lorraine Boissoneault (Image: Detail of Artemisia Gentileschi's "Judith and her Maidservant" (1615)/Palazzo Pitti)
"It was an enormous relief to put a name to the cluster of symptoms. But alongside that relief was a mountain of inarticulable questions. Illness, to me, had always seemed to exist exclusively on two poles: the inconvenient or the deadly. This binary thinking indicates both the privilege of the healthy and the power of the wellness industry: You trick yourself into believing that health is something that can be earned. Now I was discovering an ocean of other illnesses between the two poles, and I’d gotten myself stranded.”
Pickled
by Mohan Fitzgerald (Photo by Yangfan Gan)
"Naniji wasn’t a huge fan of India. She left Delhi for the West in her teens, and was the staunchest of Anglophiles. Audiences coveted her voice not for its Hindi rhythms but for a certain British refinement, polished up in Naniji’s youth by a gaggle of English nuns. As an adult, she occasionally cooked pakoras or put on some classical Punjabi music, but her disposition ran, in the main, European and conservative. Naniji loved German composers and Bill O’Reilly. She tipped her waiters ten percent and celebrated wildly the day rent control was abolished in Cambridge. Burying her here, in gentrified Harvard Square, is vastly more appropriate than the Ganges."
The Safe Zone
by Nina Mingya Powles (Photograph © Jay Cox)
"It was Boxing Day and I was eleven. The pictures on the TV were moving while everything else in the room stood still. Somewhere behind me my parents were transfixed, their eyes trained on the news, where a chunk of earth appeared to move across the screen. I was sitting on the polished wood floor, hard and cold through my flannel pyjamas. But it wasn’t the earth that was moving; it was the ocean. A wave. The newsreader kept repeating ‘the wave’ even though what we were watching looked nothing like a wave; it looked like dark mud, or the colour of wet clay we shaped with our hands at school. It looked like the earth was collapsing and the collapsed parts were swallowing everything else up."
Malus Domestica
by Angie Romines (Illustration by Meg Richardson for The Rumpus)
"For a working parent of young children, I spend a large amount of my evenings on genealogy websites. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but I knew exactly who Aunt Norma was talking about when she told me about the orchard because I’d seen Susan Bishop’s picture on Ancestry.com. In the photograph, she’s around the same age I am now and holding my great-uncle JB on her lap. Her features are clustered together beneath a heavy, overhanging brow, and yet, she’s lovely to look at. Even though the picture is that aged sepia tone, I can tell our hair is the same: stick straight, shiny, and regular old brown. Maybe I’m trying to understand how my life is so remarkably different than the lives of those just one generation ago."
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