The weight of motherhood, disappearance before death, Beirut burning, and grief baking...
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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ENOUGH: Encumber (A Brief History)
by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers (Art by Luna Adler for The Rumpus)
"Is this body even the same body as then? If cells regenerate, making a new self every seven years, by now, at least according to poetry, I should have shifted twice. But in truth, some cells we carry with us our entire lives. The parts of the eye, for example, or the neurons that control our balance. Whatever is making the baby toddle upright will still be with him when he is my age. Will he remember this?”
Fire and Ice
by Debra Gwartney (Photo courtesy of the author.)
"Barry had been ill for a long time, but his death swooped down on us like a hawk, talons first. Startlingly fast. Everything that gave me stability and safety – our long marriage, our house, the surrounding woods, the river – was unreachable now, in dodgy shadow, and this was probably the source of my irritation toward the book in my lap. It dared to tap into what terrified me most: a reminder that there’d be no clear answers for a good long stretch; that I would have to swim in bewilderment and confusion before I could emerge on some distant shore. Solutions would roll out in front of me in their own time and at their own pace, in their own shape. In the meantime, I would have to learn to drift."
Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse
by Charif Majdalani, translated from the French by Ruth Diver (Photo and illustration by Samer Mohdad)
"A few years ago, a literary journal asked me to write a dystopia set in Lebanon or the Arab world. I came up with a story of wide-scale real estate speculation in Beirut, of which there has been so much in the last few years, of ultramodern skyscrapers and business centers built by the mafias connected to those in power on land reclaimed by compressing and dumping millions of tons of trash into the sea. A shadowy business world, covered in gold leaf and knee-deep in garbage."
Baking Her Recipes Keeps My Mother Near
by Matt Ortile (Photos courtesy of the author.)
"In grief, I am told, we grow. We rise to the occasion by filling in the gaps our beloveds have left. If needed, we become breadwinners, caretakers, counsel to those who knew them. For the most part, I have been shielded from the responsibility of loss. Mom ensured a tidy exit; Dad took care of most else. Still, I can feel my molecules shifting, adapting to a world without her. My desire to reclaim her old habits may be a symptom of my fear—fear that my next chapter, this next arrangement of my atoms, will have no trace of the woman I love most in the world."
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