Unrequited mother-love, maybe baby, writing while ill, psych ward photojournalism, and the fleeting nature of certainty...
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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Benzo Mama
by Eaton Hamilton (Illustration by Eaton Hamilton )
"Line up,” Mrs. Morris says on my first day of kindergarten, “boys on that side, girls on this one.” By now, I’m more sophisticated about my gender. I watch everyone split, two schools of fish, and I stake out a third row right in the middle, where I belong.
On Baby Fever
by Krys Malcolm Belc (Art by Lisa Lee Herrick)
"In trying to decide whether to become a parent again—for the fourth time—[…] I feel I am held up by lack of faith in the world. How to move forward again in faith that there is a forward? But if I cannot give into the desire to get pregnant again, what does this say about my other children, especially about the one I gave birth to in 2013? What a hopeful and stupid act, this thing I desired and did. The desire came, and it was satisfied, and it went. It was not like my desire for coffee or sunshine which stays with me no matter how much of the thing I get. I wrote about this desire, thinking it was over, and revised it knowing it was over. But then it came back, this feeling, this bodily desire, out of nowhere and yet."
Writing a Novel Through Illness: On the Inseparability of Body and Mind
by Cai Emmons
"The diagnosis exposed the work in a new light. This piece of writing, I suddenly saw, had been served up by a body beginning to break down, a body that knew something was wrong. The novel could only be read as a metaphorical chronicle of my developing illness, an autobiography of the last year, despite the fact that there is not the least bit of discernible autobiography within its pages."
My Radical Instagram Sangha: A Love Letter
by Shira Ehrlichman (Illustration by Sirin Thada for Catapult)
"Fourteen years after that first stay in the psych ward I stumble across an Instagram user whose self-deprecating memes about mental health make me cackle. The humor is dark enough to make an able-bodied person cringe, which admittedly makes me like it more. I can’t stop scrolling. A meme reads, ‘Tip: Spice up your panic attack with a harmonica.’ I smile. Another, ‘me: *wakes up* me: why.’ I smile again."
An Interesting Question
by Abigail Thomas (Photos by Jennifer Waddell)
"A friend asks me an interesting question. What were you once certain of, she wants to know, that you can no longer count on. I love the question, but for the life of me, I don’t have an answer. I was never certain of anything. I was never certain things would work out for the best, or that everything happens for a reason, or that there was some guiding force in my life."
Introducing: Oldster Magazine! (Well, really a newsletter.) Examining age and aging among all genders, at every phase of life. Brainchild of/edited by Memoir Monday editor Sari Botton.
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