Here’s the 236th installment, featuring humorist , author most recently of I’ve Got a New Complaint: Essays on Aging Disgracefully and Other Small Disasters. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Subscribe now

Laurie Notaro has written a lot of books and is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. A former journalist, Notaro watched her own colonoscopy and has taught her dog to “drop it” when she has deceased things in her mouth. Notaro is currently at the height of her powers and once shoplifted a pork roast. For more information, visit www.laurienotaro.com.

—

How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’m now 60, and I’ve been writing since my mother started annoying me. So like when I was 3 or 4.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

This book is I’ve Got a New Complaint: Essays on Aging Disgracefully and Other Small Disasters, and it was published earlier this week, September 1, 2026.

What number book is this for you?

I’m super bad at math. Ask the IRS. I think seventeen or eighteen.

The book is about what it’s like to be 27 in a 60-year-old body. You can no longer stand up without sounding like you’re crushing a sleeve of saltines in your hand, but you can shoplift basically anything because no one cares you’re there.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

I don’t know what some of those terms mean, but I still call them “columns” from when I worked at the daily newspaper in Phoenix. Sometimes I call them “pieces.” It’s a jumble of pieces and column. What do you call that? Assortment, maybe.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

What it’s like to be 27 in a 60-year-old body. You can no longer stand up without sounding like you’re crushing a sleeve of saltines in your hand, but you can shoplift basically anything because no one cares you’re there.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

There’s no origin story. It’s just your average run-of-the-mill growing up and being introduced to books. I read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books and I started wearing sunbonnets, gingham dresses and writing stories. That’s to say that the obsession was complete, I find one thing I like and I rarely stray. People are drawn to things that they like, naturally, and then hopefully one day, they do it for a living.

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

Honestly, not being able to pull fourteen-hour days like I used to. I did it for my last book, but this one, no way. Also, it’s getting in the groove. Once I’m there, I’m good, but this time it took a lot of stops and starts. I lost my job at Stanford in the middle of it, and it was stressful. It took longer to find my way in this book, which is odd because I couldn’t wait to get started on it.

I read Erma Bombeck when I was growing up—we both lived in Phoenix. She made me laugh. I loved that. I didn’t know if I could do it, so I gave it a shot. Humor is subjective, so there are still a lot of people who I do not make laugh. My mother is one of them.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

That is a loaded question. But my columns are centered around something true that happened in my life. So, yeah, people are going to be mentioned, my opinions of them will be known. Like I said, I lost my job while writing this book. I was not happy, but honestly, I don’t know if you can be an uproariously happy person and be a humor writer. I don’t know if it would strike.

There is really only one person I will change anything for, my oldest friend, and I will always have her read a piece if she is in it. She was fine with it, even though we killed her ex-husband. She didn’t ask me to change a thing; she never does, but I never want her to lose her job because of something I’ve written. I have had to tell people before that if they don’t want to be in a book, stop doing stupid things in front of me. They don’t listen.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

I read Erma Bombeck when I was growing up—we both lived in Phoenix. She made me laugh. I loved that. I didn’t know if I could do it, so I gave it a shot. Humor is subjective, so there are still a lot of people who I do not make laugh. My mother is one of them.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

I was trained as a reporter, so process is an empty word for me. You just sit down and write. You can make a list of objectives, facts and time changes you need to incorporate, but I don’t think writing is this mysterious thing you have to discover. It’s the same thing as changing a tire. Step one, step two, step three. Writing is a job, it’s not romantic or gauzy or mysterious. It’s just like changing a tire but with different tools.

What do you love about writing?

I love that I get to laugh at myself and hopefully get others to laugh, too. Life is ridiculous, weird, absurd and stupid. You can’t take it always so seriously. I’m lucky I get to point out those moments of the bizarre and lower the temperature of life, so to speak.

What frustrates you about writing?

Sometimes it takes longer to get in the groove than other times. Some books I can just jump into and it goes. Other books take a couple of false starts, but in the end, you do get there. You just have to warm up. I hate warming up. I just want to go.

What about writing surprises you?

That no matter how carefully you construct a plot and your map to get there, things can always change. That happened in the most recent book I wrote, which is a novel. I thought I knew the ending and was heading there. But the day before I finished the book, the ending changed and went into a different direction that I liked much, much better. It was a great surprise.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

I go to work just like anyone else goes to work. For the past decade, I have been working a full-time job and writing books at the same time—so that just means I work two jobs. And I go to those two jobs just like I would any other two jobs. I went to my day job at Stanford, and then went to my night and weekend job writing.

I’m no longer able to pull fourteen-hour days like I used to. I did it for my last book, but this one, no way. Also, it’s getting in the groove. Once I’m there, I’m good, but this time it took a lot of stops and starts. I lost my job at Stanford in the middle of it, and it was stressful. It took longer to find my way in this book, which is odd because I couldn’t wait to get started on it.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

I’m an old Italian lady. I grow heirloom tomatoes from seed. And I also restore antique dollhouses. Which sounds weird, but it is great fun.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

Yep, it’s called Lady Motel. I finished it last week; it’s a humor novel about ladies who are 59 and 60 who all pretty much get DOGE’d. They are unemployable because they’ve “aged out,” they have five years until social security clicks in and they have nowhere to turn but to crime.

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Readers,

During my eight years as the editorial director of a wonderful storytelling non-profit called TMI Project, I often had to come up with writing prompts for workshops I led. I had a knack for consistently coming up with a varied assortment that jogged people’s brains, eliciting productive writing (something I’d first developed as a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs), and leading the executive director to nickname me “The Prompt-O-Matic.” I thought I’d repurpose that knack over here, in The Lit Lab, offering weekly prompts for paid subscribers. This is the 134th installment.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Your mind can latch onto a prompt very literally, or lead you toward something altogether different from the suggestion at hand. I’ve also found there are some writers for whom, no matter how they’re prompted, the same story emerges—a story that stubbornly won’t go away until it gets dumped onto the page. Sometimes it’s the story you need to write; other times, it’s the story you need to get out of your way before anything else can come through. Either way, being prompted helps move the writer forward.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Writing prompts can also help dissolve writers’ block, especially when you respond to them while racing against a timer. I know from experience; when I started at TMI Project, I myself had been blocked for some time. To encourage workshop participants, I figured I’d “take the workshop with them,” doing twenty-minute free-writes alongside them, using my own prompts. It instantly unblocked me, freeing me to write story after story.

Below the paywall is the 134th prompt in this series. Use it however you’d like to spark new writing, ***but please don’t share it with anyone else. I hope to someday publish a book of these. And I use them in my teaching.

My writing prompts are offered as a perk for those who pay to support my work. Thank you for your support! 🙏

Subscribe now

I invite those taking part in this to leave, in the comments, up to a paragraph of the writing the prompt has generated.

Here goes…

Read more

It is a genre, the widow’s memoir. What are its purposes, what its themes? To understand, I seek out commonalities and differences in six quite recent memoirs, including my own:

Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths (Vine Leaves Press, 2025)

Memorial Days (Penguin, 2025), Geraldine Brooks

The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage, 2005), Joan Didion

Must You Go? (Doubleday, 2010), Antonia Fraser;

Ghost Stories (Simon & Shuster, 2026), Siri Hustvedt;

Our Time of Day: My Life with Corin Redgrave (Oberon, 2014), Kika Markham

Subscribe now

These six widows, who published memoirs about the deaths of their spouses—or, their beloveds, as I prefer to say—were each happily married to a prominent man, whose death is not only catastrophic for their widow, but ends a public career of note. Two of these men were actors; the other four were writers.

Three of the men, Harold Pinter, Corin Redgrave and George Bartenieff, were from the theater; three were writers: Paul Auster, a novelist, John Dunne and Tony Horwitz, journalists and authors. Five of us widows are already writers, of fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Kika Markham is an actor, married to Corin Redgrave, both from English acting dynasties; Corin’s severe memory loss, led her to write a book of their life he no longer knows.

The cause of death is cancer in three cases, heart disease/memory loss in another, and those four memoirists, including myself, were caretakers first. We knew that death was coming when we began to germinate our books, and each of us quotes diary entries we made during the long illnesses of our beloveds, when we nursed them as a mother might.

Joan Didion and Geradline Brooks, popular, best-selling writers themselves, were also married to best-selling writers, John Dunne and Tony Horwitz, both of whom dropped dead suddenly of heart failure. Dunne slumped and fell to the floor in mid-sentence after Didion handed him his second scotch on the rocks. Horwitz dropped dead on a Washington D.C. street, while on a book tour. He was also a heavy drinker. Brooks is at home on Martha’s Vineyard when she receives an impersonal phone call. It takes several days before she can even view his body.

Didion and Dunne had just returned from visiting their only child, Quintana, who was intubated and in intensive care, from a flu that turned into pneumonia and septic shock. I always wondered, though Didion does not, whether seeing his daughter so close to death brought on Dunne’s heart attack. The Year of Magical Thinking, in which Didion keeps thinking Dunne will, or should, or might, come back if only such and such is done (if she does not give away his shoes, for instance), became an immediate best-seller, then a hit one-woman play in London and New York. Quintana died within the year, after a catastrophic fall and brain surgery, causing another memoir, Blue Nights, a mother’s bereavement story. Didion attains the unwelcome status of a two-time, best-selling grief memoirist.

Geraldine Brooks, best-selling author of novels and nonfiction, begins Memorial Days three years after the death of her husband—when she finally finds the time to travel off the coast of New Zealand to “Flanders Island to do the unfinished work of grieving.” The shock, then the bureaucracy surrounding Tony’s death, plus the demands of her own successful career, and her two sons, keep her occupied, until she realizes she cannot continue to go forward without stopping, finally, to mourn. Tony, she finds out, knew he had a heart defect. He had every good intention to give up cigarettes and booze, once he completed his hectic book tour. Three years after Tony’s death, she cannot go on; she takes the time to live alone in wild nature, swimming, walking, watching the animals and remembering. “This story of a death is the story that dominates my life,” she writes. “Here I have retold it. But I cannot change it…I can only change myself.” In solitude, she relives in order to become present in her new reality—that of a woman alone.

Death for all of us, means not only living through our sorrow, but writing of it. In fact, it is through writing that we allow ourselves to experience the pain; we are driven to tell our stories, for our own comfort, to memorialize these significant men, and to leave grief maps we hope might be of use to others. We write, also, because we believe our stories to be exemplary; the intensity of our feelings tells us that—these were not ordinary relationships; we shall not experience their like again.

The four of us who participate in the daily-heightened life that comes with the daily dying of the men we love, write books that are illness-love stories. We are there and present for their suffering; we do not turn away, or run away. We comfort, we participate, we stand the sight of suffering; we nurture their waning careers more so than we pay attention to our own. We suffer with them. Death is no less of a shock than are the sudden deaths by heart attack; for us, too, he is here and then not here as if an instant, but we record each precious second, the humor and the fears we share.

Death for all of us, means not only living through our sorrow, but writing of it. In fact, it is through writing that we allow ourselves to experience the pain; we are driven to tell our stories, for our own comfort, to memorialize these significant men, and to leave grief maps we hope might be of use to others. We write, also, because we believe our stories to be exemplary; the intensity of our feelings tells us that—these were not ordinary relationships; we shall not experience their like again.

These long illnesses come in second marriages for Kika Markham, Antonia Fraser and myself. We have irresistible love affairs with these men in mid-life and we each pay some price. Pinter’s first wife, the actor, Vivian Merchant, like my husband’s, also an actor and his producing partner, both create messy divorces, which alienates their sons. Pinter’s son changes his name and disappears from his life, perhaps crowded out by Fraser’s six devoted children. My husband’s son, though with us the final ten days of his father’s life, acrimoniously, disappears from mine.

Dame Antonia Fraser’s memoir, Must You Go, written in diary form in a series of dated entries, is about her divinely happy love affair, then second marriage to the Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter. Dame Fraser is the Catholic mother of six children, married to a member of the House of Lords, a stoic, upright, if unemotional, English gentleman, when she falls hard in love with the avant-garde Jewish playwright, and begins a breathless affair that leads to their cohabitation, then civil marriage and, finally, a Catholic commitment service. (Pinter, an atheist, did not convert, of course.)

The actor, Kika Markham’s memoir Our Time of Day: My Life with Corin Redgrave, includes diary notes made as Corin suffers several heart attacks and ever more severe memory losses. Both were actors from well-known British acting families; their parents were actors together. They lived together for over thirty happy years, had a family and were active in left-wing politics. She is holding onto a love that Corin is forgetting even as he keeps on drinking and she keeps on caring for him. With every heart incident and fall, he remembers their life together less and less.

I met my husband-partner, the downtown New York actor/producer, George Bartenieff, because he was cast by our mutual friend, Judith Malina, in my play, Us. Against my wishes, Judith also cast his estranged wife and producing partner at Theater for the New City, where the play was being staged. She, in fact, demanded to be cast. The two were already involved with other lovers, but they worked together, acrimoniously. George fell in love with my writing before he fell in love with me.

Harold Pinter, Corin Redgrave, and George Bartenieff were left-wing theater men—each dedicated to art as a way to confront the horrors of our time. Each put their significant and unique talents to the denunciation of modern wars, and to giving shape to acts of nonviolent resistance. George had put his acting career on hold before we met, overwhelmed by co-running a theater. When we got together, he returned to full-time acting on, off, and off-off Broadway, and in film and television. During our thirty-five years together, I wrote eleven plays in which he starred. He won Village Voice Obies and Drama Desk awards. Pinter’s early plays are misogynist and dark, but they became tenderer, funnier and more fiercely antiwar after he meets Frazier. Markham, like her husband, did a lot of left wing political organizing off the stage, though as actors, they did not create their own work.

Siri Hustvedt, a novelist and accomplished science writer, published Ghost Stories in 2026. Her husband, the internationally heralded novelist, Paul Auster, died of cancer, and of the side effects of its treatment, in April 2024, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She, too, was already making notes for her book before Auster’s death. As I include George’s diary writings about his early life in Nazi Germany, and his production diaries for several significant plays, Hustvedt includes Auster’s final writings, which are letters to his infant grandson, Miles—who will know his grandfather only through these stories he tells.

This was Hustvedt’s first marriage, and Auster’s second. The child from his marriage to the writer Lydia Davies, becomes a drug addict. His infant daughter is found dead next to him from coming in contact with powerful drugs. While awaiting trial, Auster’s son over doses in a Brooklyn subway stop. Hustvedt refers to these sequential traumas as “the horrible thing.” It casts a shadow over the accomplished daughter, worldly success, and happiness Hustvedt and Auster enjoy. She wonders if the shock and bereavement of his son’s and granddaughter’s deaths might well have caused Auster’s cancer, detected two years after “the horrible thing” took place. (As, I, too, wonder if our eviction from a house we loved for twenty-three years triggered George’s original trauma of being left behind for three years in Nazi Germany, and may have caused his hidden cancer in the bone marrow, multiple myeloma.)

These books of Fraser, Hustvedt, and my own are hymns to forbidden loves—loves that seem unavoidable and fated, which leave some serious wreckage in their wake. Through the writing, we honor Eros and justify our siren selves.

The two best-selling authors, Didion and Brooks, disclose the least about their lives and work with their husbands. They write nothing about the forbidden—nothing in Didion’s case of alcohol or drugs, both of which seem to have figured in her daughter’s life, and alcohol so much in Dunnes’ and her own, that she sees no need to remark on it excesses. Neither Didion nor Brooks leaves a clear picture of their husband’s work or self. Neither writes in intimate detail about the body, or of Eros. Didion feels the least need to memorialize her husband, perhaps because Dunne and she were both so well known. But Didion and Brooks each write to tame their grief, to make their unbearable loss meaningful for themselves by telling the story to others.

Apart from lyric poetry and tragic plays, grief has been seldom fully entered. The five stages of grief, popularized by Kubler Ross are nonsense. These widows’ memoirs break a silence, and create a container for intimate loss that allows its chaos to be experienced by others. As everyone who loves must grieve, these books provide a map that leads readers to an underworld they may not have yet experienced, but most likely will. Or, perhaps, already have, but had no words for. These books are tutorials as much as they are memorials.

There is a compulsive quality to these books. Because they had to be written, and were written in times of great distress and when the boundary between the known and unknown worlds was most permeable, they demand to be read, and are hard to put down. They answer nothing about any afterworld, none is religious in any way (though Didion was Episcopalian, Fraser Catholic, and Hustvedt and I seem to have sightings of our dead ones—she calls her book Ghost Stories, for this reason, and mine is Last Radiance). I cannot pick a favorite among them (leaving mine aside).

In different ways, and for different tastes, each widow’s memoir allows the reader to come face to face with love and death, loss and grief—subjects extremely private, especially in our culture. Death aside, each widow’s memoir also stands as testament to a deeply satisfying, equal, artistic relationship between a professional man and a professional woman. There is no more sexual betrayal, no needlessly inflicted hurt. These are loving lives well lived, and deeply valued, sundered. These are the stories of irreplaceable loves, movingly, often beautifully, written. Memoirs that memorialize the equality in loving relationships between like-minded artists.

Karen Malpede’s widow’s memoir is Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths (Vine Leaves Press, 2025). She is author of 23 published and produced plays. Her Epstein Oratorio or a Modern Hymn to Demeter, starring Kathleen Chalfant, will be performed at La MaMa ETC, in New York, October 1, 2; and published by Tough Poets Review.

Here’s the 235th installment, featuring Emerson Whitney author most recently of O Mother. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Subscribe now

Emerson Whitney is the award winning author of Heaven (McSweeney’s, 2020), Daddy Boy (McSweeney’s, 2023), and the memoir O Mother (McSweeney’s, September 1, 2026), as well as the poetry collection Ghost Box (Timeless Infinite Light, 2014). Daddy Boy received the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Award for Memoir in 2024, and Heaven was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and winner of the Independent Publisher Award for Essay. Their work has appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. More at emersonwhitney.com

—

How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’m 40 and I’ve been writing all my life

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

O Mother, out today, September 1, 2026.

What number book is this for you?

Four.

O Mother is a return to the rural Maine island of my childhood, of sea spray and lobster pots and ship-themed home decor. I moved back in 2020, during quarantine, in order to try and reconnect with peace, reckon with a diagnosis of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, and to live near my mom. But the return did not go as planned.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

Memoir.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

O Mother is a return to the rural Maine island of my childhood, of sea spray and lobster pots and ship-themed home decor. I moved back in 2020, during quarantine, in order to try and reconnect with peace, reckon with a diagnosis of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, and to live near my mom. But the return did not go as planned.

Despite being just a few miles away on the same island, my mom was distant, hard to pin down, and we struggled to connect. She was a hard worker, a housekeeper (she referred to herself as a “maid”) for hotels and large estates on the island. She was also disabled, with all the same diagnoses as me. I was back home working to unpack my own internalized ableism that in many ways, had led me away when I received the devastating news of her suicide. I started to trace her story back, unraveling the hidden forces that conspired to make her life unlivable. What follows is an exploration into disability, diagnosis, and self-acceptance. Written as a letter to my mom, I hope to understand her complicated fate, and I wonder what, if anything, it teaches us about disabled futures.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

I’ve been writing forever, honestly. Super young, I’d make little stapled books with just squiggles and give them to my grandma, which she’s now given to me. I was a horrible illustrator, but the writing was pretty good.

Here’s what happened, my mom killed herself in 2022. I’d moved back home to be near her and I was actually building a house that I’d planned to share with her. She worked on these large estates on the island and hotels. She was exhausted and depleted and just couldn’t keep going. She, in many ways, was my double, and when I was going through her things I came across a Tupperware full of diagnostic paperwork that was asking her questions like how much did she like herself—her answer was zero our of 5—and was a sort of run-down of ADHD symptoms and another one for CPTSD. A stickie note flitted off of a childhood photo of her that I was looking at which said, Do I have autism? Is that what’s going on?

I paused at it for a long time. I’d been diagnosed with all sorts of things as a kid, including many of the same things she had been. I’d been raised in special ed, but as an adult, I’d sort of brushed it all off. I’d been trying to come to terms with how having EDS and AuDHD impacted me as an adult when she died and something switched on in me the moment of discovering her stickie note. I went back through the Tupperware and realized that all those thin sheets of paper were a mix of her and I. I am a mix of she and my dad and my grandparents and all this family. The book takes the form of a letter to my mom. I write to her hoping to understand our relationship to ableism and how internalized ableism impacted mer and me and all of us.

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

I’m so grateful that McSweeney’s continues to be a home for my work. I’ve stopped worrying about the “where” of my writing, which is a huge gift. Mostly, I wanted to do this subject matter and my mom justice. I had to really trust myself here and know that even though this project is doing lots of things, tackling a number of subjects that might not seem to run in tandem, that’s perfect, because this book is about a neurodivergent bodymind. I trust that my reader wants to join me in this.

Here’s what happened, my mom killed herself in 2022. I’d moved back home to be near her and I was actually building a house that I’d planned to share with her. She worked on these large estates on the island and hotels. She was exhausted and depleted and just couldn’t keep going. She, in many ways, was my double…

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

I’m a life writer and so I’ve already written about these family members before and they’ve chosen their alias names (or have at least signed off on the ones I picked) and have given me sort of blanket permission at this point to keep up with what I see as my life long durational project of memoir.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

Barthes’ Mourning Diary

Alexander Baril, Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide

Renee Linklater, Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies

Munoz’, Cruising Utopia

Karen Green’s Bough Down

Solnit’s Hope In The Dark

Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism

Alice Wong, Disability Intimacy

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

I’m truly just excited for more books in the world, so what I mostly want to say is please make your thing! Tell the story! You’re an expert on it and the themes that show up in your life are usually universal questions that other folks share. We want to know what you’ve learned from your experiences and who you are. I find vulnerability in writing to be incredible. I love the poetry of memoir.

What do you love about writing?

Writing is my best friend.

What frustrates you about writing?

Honestly, not much.

What about writing surprises you?

I’m obsessed with this character-based art form. How are we “reading” these squiggles and making mental images into narratives?? It blows my mind. I love that I can dictate what image people have in their mind by adding adjectives, for example, to a noun. I can’t get enough of this process, honestly. It’s fascinating.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

Yes, I’m a morning writer and I like the first three hours of my day to be reserved for that. I wake up before everyone in my household and I usually say hello to sunrise and meditate a bit and then make a tea and get into it.

I’m a life writer and so I’ve already written about these family members before and they’ve chosen their alias names (or have at least signed off on the ones I picked) and have given me sort of blanket permission at this point to keep up with what I see as my life long durational project of memoir.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

Well, writing is reading for me, and it’s also research. I also love to knit and sew and do adventurous things sometimes that become the subject matter for a book. I’m pretty sure all the things I do, even playing Mario Kart with my wife, fold into “writing.” I also love boats and plants and dogs and learning languages, I’m currently a student of Kanien’kéha. I also love to swim in ponds and lakes and oceans.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

I do! I’m working on sort of a sailing project at the moment. My dad passed last May very suddenly from a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. He received the news and then passed within two months. He was 66 and it was a shock.

I inherited a ‘25 foot sailboat from him as the only thing I inherited from him. It just showed up in my driveway one day last fall and I’ve since been learning about historic queer sailors in my area, trying to learn how to sail this boat, as one way to get to know my dad who I didn’t really spend much time with over the course of my life. Similarly to my mom, I’d always been sort of waiting for this veil to lift and for us to really connect. It didn’t get to happen.

In this project I reckon with a jealousy I have for a sailor I’m researching named Swifty. She had a very involved sailor dad who taught her everything. My dad actually was a fan of her father’s and had his book on his boat. I was able to request his letters to his daughter from a library on Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard)—his name is Rodman Swift—and I spent a winter reading them all and preparing to sail this boat. I was so jealous of these letters ! Let me tell ya, so instructive and attentive and caring.

But I started trying to go sailing myself and I realized I’d been asking my grandpa little things, like will this dinghy work, or is this anchor chain long enough, and I got an email from him one day explaining some things that could have been word for word a Rodman Swift letter. I realized I’ve always had what I’ve been looking for and the second half of the book is more so about understanding what it means to be an adult “orphan” and learning how to relish the time I have with my grandparents while I know they’re entering the sunset of their life, and rather than bracing for more loss, loving them. My dad named the boat Altamar. I hope you all like this book.

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, Electric Literature, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. Below is this week’s curation. At the bottom are instructions for submitting. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye, both inspired by Joan Didion’s iconic essay.

   ---

“I read Memoir Land all of the time for free, realized how much I gain from doing so, and wanted to support you and be a more proactive and active part of the community!” , paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Next week’s “Memoir Monday” newsletter will be crowd-sourced, as I’ll be traveling, and too busy to read everything. Get ready to share your favorite personal essays published recently…or ever. (I’m trying to do these crowd-sourced editions monthly now.)

***Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Dolly taught me how to be myself

by

“I am but one of many who sits on the ash heap today. Friends keep calling me to ask if I’m okay. The truth is, I’m not. But I’d be so much worse off if Dolly’s radiance hadn’t reached out to me from the screen when I was 9 years old and changed me forever. Dolly taught me not only about grace, but about grit. She inspired me to be resilient and follow my dreams.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

Gravity

by Diana Anaya

“Poverty is a black hole: cold, massive, invisible to an untrained eye, and almost impossible to escape. If you’re born poor, you will likely continue to be poor, and die poor. It’s almost never a question of working hard – the hands of my mother withered from scrubbing plates and squeezing mop heads, sweeping and cleaning the homes of rich, old couples who hand over envelopes of cash with tight smiles, their disdain palpable; or the slow bend of my father’s back from years of running cables through airless attics, sweating rivers in the heat of Miami summer, testament to this fact. No, escaping poverty is a matter of luck.”

The Rumpus

What I Did For Love #4: Lied to My Son about “Gold Maid”

by

“I don’t want to explain the rules of Old Maid and put it in my son’s head that the big takeaway is that an older woman is the worst card you can be dealt. I tuck the pack under my knee and continue to talk about other games, but my thoughts are elsewhere as the guilt floods in. Although I do have a partner, I had my son late in life. I am an older mother, and at times I feel terrible about it.”

Oldster

The Death Years: "What is better? To die quickly, or to be able to say goodbye? For my son’s sake, I hope I die quickly. For my own sake, I hope I get to say goodbye."

by

“Some days I can hear my son playing upstairs. We live in a small house, and both ends of the short flight of stairs are childproofed with a gate. But sometimes if I am downstairs and my husband or my mother are upstairs with my son, I hear him laugh and make a dash for the stairs. I think, sometimes, of him falling down the stairs, and his neck landing at an angle, hitting the metal gate downstairs, his small body bruised and still. And each time my brain short-circuits, thinking, oh no, oh no, oh no, until I hear the laughing upstairs continue. Ever since I became a mother, I am always in anticipation of something going terribly wrong. And my mother is always telling me, it will be fine, he will be fine, everything is fine.”

Guernica

Essays from Around the Web…

My Mom Called Me Her Memory Girl: It took me years to understand why.

by Claire C. Hall

“Every time I visited, I stood quietly in her doorway, sometimes for as long as five minutes, until she spotted me. I did not want to startle her. But mostly, I waited because I wanted to take in the moment she recognized me. Her bright blue eyes would widen and light up. A wide smile would spread across her face. ‘There’s my Memory Girl!’ she would say.”

Crow's Feet/Medium

Komorebi

by

“My childhood backyard had two large, holy, and cathedral-like maple trees through which sunlight continually puddled on the ground. Dappled light spread near their trunks like loose change. I lay down under the tree’s canopy, watching the changing, spirograph-like shapes of leaking sunlight – komorebi – tattoo my limbs. If I watched those shapes long enough, they danced.”

Taking a Stab

Give Death a Hug Back

by Tijo Gaucher

“In the last year of my grandfather’s life, I called him with a list of questions I’d pulled off the internet. He was ninety-three. You could tell it was coming — he looked pretty good at the family reunion one year, and the next year he didn’t. So I typed the thing into the search bar that nobody wants to type: what are the best questions to ask someone before they pass away?”

Tijo Art

Can I Pee in Peace?

by

"Although I’d visited the Eagle in Atlanta, I had avoided Barcelona’s version. I could come up with any number of excuses: I don’t own any appropriate harness or chaps; my latex is at the cleaners. But really, it was because it frightened me. A quasi-chain of gay leather bars, the Eagle exists on the fringes of nearly every metropolitan mecca. One friend described them in sci-fi terms, some sort of wormhole, all of them connected. Enter one red-lit hallway in Toronto and—poof!—you’d appear on the other side in the exact same musty half-light halfway around the world in Amsterdam. Now, here we were, in the same dingy bar, just 3,000 miles away, where people spoke Spanish and Catalan and German and other foreign babble that mixed together under the thump-thump that sounded like a heartbeat pulsing on the speakers.”

BULL Lit

I Want To Remember How I Feel Right Now About Press Trips

by

“Someone sat in the chair that my weekend bag was tucked under. I lurked awkwardly next to it, repeating in some combination: Hello, I’m a writer. I just came from Canada. No, I don’t live there. I live in New York. And, Yes, I’ve ordered. The thing about press trips is you’re very vulnerable to someone else’s itinerary and planning. Also it’s hard explaining why you’re there to people when you’re not sure exactly yourself. I mean, I know why I was invited but why I’d said yes I was becoming less and less sure.”

Substack

My Son Versus the Machines

by

“Charlie is still afraid that AI will make what he does irrelevant. I don’t know how to promise him it won’t. The machines will get better. They may write cleverer lyrics and more convincing melodies. They may imitate every style of music that’s ever mattered to him. But I saw a sad-looking kid with scars on their legs scream the words to one of Charlie’s songs. I saw their face open into a smile. Not because the song fixed everything, or because Charlie rescued them. But because for three minutes, somebody else said it too.”

Spitz Mix

Richard Nixon and Wild Horses: A Love Story

by

“I pored over the Internet for information about this sweaty, paranoid president, hoping to find what led him to identify with wild horses. Why did he feel kicked around? And that’s how I came across the Rosebud of this president’s story. To my surprise, and then, ultimately not— it's all about a running horse.”

Washington Monthly

🚨Announcements:

📢 New Self-Guided Class: 30 Days, 30 Essay Prompts

Developed by Narratively Chief Submissions Reader Amy Barnes, this fun and inspiring self-guided course is designed to help you break through writer’s block and figure out how to put your unique life experiences into words. Every day of September, you’ll receive a short personal essay or two to read, paired with a prompt to inspire your own writing.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Two Offerings from :

1)What Was Passed Down: Writing Essays From Instinct, Memory, and Lineage with Khalisa Rae September 12-23

Our three-week long generative September workshop, What Was Passed Down: Writing Essays From Instinct, Memory, and Lineage, led by Khalisa Rae, guides writers in shaping essays or short stories from inherited stories, passed-down knowledge, and family memory—even when the details are incomplete or blurred

Three Saturdays, September 12-23 | 10a-12p ET | 15 seats available

Learn More/Sign Up

2)Sentence Club, now in its second month, and

Join Sentence Club - Literary Liberation’s Craft Book Bookclub!

Sentence Club, a craft book bookclub from Literary Liberation, enters its second month on September 1st. Join Sherisa de Groot, Shawna Ayoub and Emma Akpan as we work our way through our first selection over the next three months. We all need to take words more seriously. We also need to play more. Maybe that sounds contradictory, but something that social media has made blatantly clear is we all have a responsibility to learn language. To be meaning makers.

Order the book! Let’s read together, annotate together, and meet a few times live to write and discuss what we’re learning. This is free for all subscribers. Also—join our live community Zoom on September 19th!

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Don’t Call Me Home author : Alex and Nikki’s Retreat October 22nd - 25th at Hilltown Commons in Rensselaerville, NY.

Writing prompts, readings, camaraderie, daily yoga taught by Nikki Vilella, time to work on a project and get feed back on it, great food. $1600 - $2000.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Story Studio Chicago, Memoir in a Year with

“Our Memoir in a Year program will help and support you during the long road from plotting to composition to revision and beyond. It’s a unique opportunity to join a writing cohort, study craft, workshop key scenes, measure your progress, and meet deadlines.

It’s a chance to devote an entire year to your project, giving it the attention and effort your work deserves. Memoir writer Dionne Ford will help you through the drafting process, whether you want to complete a draft, make revisions, or push yourself toward your own page goals.”

Includes: 11 sessions, meeting once per month for 11 months; A 100-page manuscript review with Dionne Ford; Discounts to our Master Class series; A private online chat forum; VIP status at the Studio; A literary community to take well beyond this program. $2,750.

Learn More/Apply

📢 From Story Studio Chicago, Essay Collection in a Year with

“Our Essay Collection in a Year program will support you during the long road from idea generation to composition to revision and beyond. It’s a unique opportunity to join a writing cohort, study craft, workshop key scenes, measure your progress, meet deadlines, and give and get support in the development of long-form literary work.

Includes: 11 sessions, meeting once per month for 11 months; A manuscript review with Megan Stielstra; Various online social gatherings with your cohort; Discount admission passes to our Master Classes; A private online chat forum; VIP status at the Studio; A literary community to take well beyond this program. $2,750.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Rigorous Revision Retreat in Hudson, NY w/ November 1-4 2026

This is a hands on revision retreat. Using The Artful Edit by Susan Bell, we will go through various revision strategies: the font change, the print out, the lay out, the read aloud, the listen back, the cut up, and color coding.

Chloé will share her own process for revision and we will get into some eclectic activities. We will also play with formatting and structure, title page, epigraphs, to make it look like a book. You will leave the retreat with new friends, a support system, and concrete plans of what to do next in terms of more revision or submitting. This is a one of a kind retreat that will not be offered again.

Must have 20k+ words to apply. Pricing ranges from $1,700 to $2,500 depending on room options, with two sliding scale spots at $1,300.

If you have any questions, please email Chloé at cocomonet@gmail.com

Apply

📢 From : Creativity, Community, Sanctuary: A Retreat for Jewish Women Writers, at Zigbone Farm Retreat Center in Sabillasville, Md, Dec. 11-14, 2026

“My writing community is beautifully diverse, and I am so grateful for every single one of you. While most of my work is for everyone, I am hosting a special, intimate retreat this winter.

This particular space is crafted for Jewish women writers of all genres. Our focus is entirely on the craft of writing, not the politics or content. In this space, feedback is supportive, dedicated to structure, voice, and creative execution—free from judgment, criticism, or political commentary.

We are here solely to elevate each other's art, protect our creative energy, and foster creativity. The workshops are designed to elevate your art, not critique your worldview. If this speaks to you, I’d love to have you join us. Space is limited to ten to ensure an intimate experience.”

The weekend is open to all people who identify as Jewish and as women. Writing experience is helpful but not required. Writers at all levels will benefit. Email susan@susanweisbohlen.com to save your space.

📢 Telling Your Story: Memoir with September 21-26

Join New York Times bestselling Care and Feeding author and longtime Anthony Bourdain lieutennant Laurie Woolever for a special writing retreat on a private island in West Cork. Indulge all of your creative senses on this bespoke 5 night writing retreat featuring Laurie Woolever, the author of the memoir Care and Feeding. Our all-inclusive experience includes craft workshops on topics such as recipe writing and the purpose and function of food and travel writing, as well as individual feedback sessions. We’ll meet local artisans and chefs and spend time in nature as we hone our craft.

This takes place on a small private island in the heart of West Cork, Ireland’s food artisan capital, complete with 50 acres of woodland walks, a walled garden, and an indoor pool. $5,000.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From : The Hundred Day Reckoning, a Creative Response to Hard Change.

“The Hundred Day Reckoning is a creative reset designed to transform your relationship to a piece of life drama – a hard change that shook your reality and made you who you are, a.k.a. That Thing.

That Thing might be: Loss, trauma, divorce, change in health or ability, work shock, a big move, family estrangement, addiction/recovery, “empty nest…” or even major success, becoming a parent, or winning the lottery! Some folks wrestle instead with an ongoing pattern (”That Theme”).

You might be: Any human being at a point of transition, looking for a deeper, freer, more connected answer to the question: “what now?”

Details: On Zoom, Sept 7 - Dec 15. Space available Mondays 11-1 ET, or independent/ lightly coached. Wait list for evening session. Class format includes daily prompts, weekly meetings, and individual time with Karen.”

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Submissions Are Open at

is considering essays of up to 1500 words and micro-essays between 500 and 800 words for her excellent magazine, .

“What to send: Sharp, personal narratives with an evocative spin on existential-leaning themes. Stories about the horror and the hilarity of being in the world. The profound and the absurd; the texture, the nuance; a particular way of seeing. How we change, or don’t change; how the world changes, or fails to. How people try. Moments of discovery conflict with the old narrative and challenge a long-held belief. Little things are big. Not everything aligns. Nothing resolves neatly. Make meaning out of chaos, but leave us wondering what happens after it ends.”

Learn More/Submit

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

Here’s the 234th installment, featuring , author of Free Girls, a novel inspired by personal experiences. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Subscribe now

Kristen McCallum received her MA in English from The University at Albany-SUNY. A writer and creative strategist from Mount Vernon, NY, she credits growing up with the adventures of her Jamaican family as the beginning of her fascination with stories and the ways they could be shared. The founder of SafeWordSociety, an initiative that highlighted the depth and beauty of lived experiences in historically-marginalized communities, Kristen has consulted for The Obama Foundation and Peoplmovr, among others. Free Girls is her debut novel.

—

How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’ll be 40 on August 25th!! I’ve been writing casually since I was a teenager, in journals and in places I knew would never see the light of day. Professionally, I’ve dabbled since my twenties, mostly with some nonfiction and media work. My debut is the first long-form fiction project I’ve done aside from my thesis last year.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

It’s Free Girls, and it was published by Flatiron on July 7, 2026

What number book is this for you?

This is my first book, which still feels so wild to say.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

I’d categorize my novel as YA contemporary fiction because it’s set in our modern world and hopes to represent realistic growth and identity issues teens face.

A few years ago I went back and gave a talk to girls at the detention center I was once in, and something about standing in that room caught me off guard. I hadn’t expected it to still feel so close, like I was carrying it with me more than I’d realized. That’s really where the character of Jasmine started. I kept thinking about what it means to leave a place like that behind and then have to build a self on the other side of it. Especially when the people around aren’t asking about what you actually went through. That visit is what helped me understand what this work could really offer.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

Jasmine Cooper is finally back after a year at Guiding Hearts Home for Troubled Girls, and everything’s changed. There’s a new house, a new stepfamily, a new school, and a mom who wants her to put the last year behind her for good. Jasmine starts making a real life for herself. New friends. New romance. Then someone from Guiding Hearts reaches out, and Jas has to decide how long she can keep her past hidden before it catches up with her.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

Free Girls started with a moment versus a concrete idea. A few years ago I went back and gave a talk to girls at the detention center I was once in, and something about standing in that room caught me off guard. I hadn’t expected it to still feel so close, like I was carrying it with me more than I’d realized. That’s really where Jasmine started. I kept thinking about what it means to leave a place like that behind and then have to build a self on the other side of it. Especially when the people around aren’t asking about what you actually went through. That visit is what helped me understand what this work could really offer.

As for how I became a writer, it came out of a kind of restlessness and a need to say things I didn’t feel like I could say to people directly, or that they didn’t care to listen to. Fiction gave me somewhere to put that. I could hand my feelings to someone else and put them in a position to feel things out loud, which was relieving. Then I’d watch what happened from a small distance and work out how I was feeling. There was something in imagining myself as another person and someone who maybe got to want more, or deserved something different that let me finally feel heard in a way I hadn’t found otherwise.

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

Honestly, the writing was the most challenging part for me because it took so much convincing [every time I sat down to do it] that I could see it through. In the early days of drafting, I spent so much time doubting the story would come together that I could barely get words out by my deadlines.

It was really stressful for me until I decided that if I was going to be stressed by something, it should be which publisher to choose! So I committed to getting the pages done and allowing myself to put the worry off until then. It sounds weird now but that’s the truth of it.

I became a writer out of a kind of restlessness and a need to say things I didn’t feel like I could say to people directly, or that they didn’t care to listen to. Fiction gave me somewhere to put that. I could hand my feelings to someone else and put them in a position to feel things out loud, which was relieving. Then I’d watch what happened from a small distance and work out how I was feeling. There was something in imagining myself as another person and someone who maybe got to want more, or deserved something different that let me finally feel heard in a way I hadn’t found otherwise.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

I’ve written a few personal essays over the years and have opted out of framing the narratives in a way that would require me to disclose more than their relationship to me. I have always been a bit uneasy about people being able to identify themselves in my work because I want to write openly but I also am such a private person! That’s probably why I’m always finding my way back to fiction, because I don’t have to make that decision and I can just explore.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

There were quite a few but Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker was one that I kept returning to because it felt like I had permission to give Jasmine true internality on the page. Alice was so good at sharing the nuances of processing her emotions in real time and it was so inspiring to me. I look forward to getting better at it.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

To accept that the process is intimidating and the only thing you can really control is the writing. Commit to getting the words out because you have a deep desire to and just keep seeing what happens next. If this is about money or fame, then this might not be the path to lay your hopes on. Find people who truly believe in your work and are willing to put in the work alongside you to achieve your goal. Also, find a really good therapist if you can.

What do you love about writing?

I love that there’s basically nothing writing won’t let me touch. I can build entire worlds and just disappear into them for a while. Sometimes I put characters through things just to see how they’d hold up. Other times I’m pushing at an idea I can’t stop thinking about and figuring out why someone would make a choice I wouldn’t. It’s one of the freest spaces I have.

What frustrates you about writing?

Honestly, it’s what happens after the work is created. Writing to publish as a Black woman has felt really demeaning at some points, like I was begging to have my experiences validated. I had to constantly remind myself that my words and stories matter no matter who pretends it doesn’t and just keep going. And not because I expect anything from it. I can hope, and will, but that’s all.

What about writing surprises you?

That sometimes the story tells you how it wants to be written!

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

I’m not really a routine writer because I’m always doing a million things so I have to write when I can. I do have preferences though! I like to have at least a cold drink and a hot one wherever I’m writing. I tend to like writing alone in a quiet place so cafes and writing groups don’t really work for me. I also love what it feels like to write at 4-5 am but it’s too hard to actually get up for that when I’m also writing at night, haha. I hope that answers the question!

I have always been a bit uneasy about people being able to identify themselves in my work because I want to write openly but I also am such a private person! That’s probably why I’m always finding my way back to fiction, because I don’t have to make that decision and I can just explore.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

I’m learning to consider living as a big part of my process since my material comes from what that living has left with me. I work full time as a Director of Operations and that helps me stretch the Virgo “organizational” muscle I thrive in. I read, I want to get back to painting, I listen to lots of music – I live. I’m less stretched thin when I live my life like a story will come from wherever it wants to as long as I’m living the fullest life I can. At almost 40, I’m finally learning to allow myself to consider a “creative life” , the one where I pursue whatever my heart desires and learn some things from it, or not.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

I’m still really enjoying seeing what readers think of FREE GIRLS and getting to talk about it. I have some events in the upcoming months including the NYS Writer’s Institute in November – which is wild. As an alum of UAlbany (and your former student!!) I could never imagine this loop. I’m enjoying every moment. And yes, I’m currently working on a character-driven thriller! I wasn’t sure it would be the next thing but it has a very firm hold on me and so I’m leaning into that. Fingers crossed it lands somewhere wonderful and I can share that with readers when it’s time.

Editor’s note: Kristen McCallum was my journalism student at SUNY Albany in 2011! - SB

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Readers,

During my eight years as the editorial director of a wonderful storytelling non-profit called TMI Project, I often had to come up with writing prompts for workshops I led. I had a knack for consistently coming up with a varied assortment that jogged people’s brains, eliciting productive writing (something I’d first developed as a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs), and leading the executive director to nickname me “The Prompt-O-Matic.” I thought I’d repurpose that knack over here, in The Lit Lab, offering weekly prompts for paid subscribers. This is the 133rd installment.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Your mind can latch onto a prompt very literally, or lead you toward something altogether different from the suggestion at hand. I’ve also found there are some writers for whom, no matter how they’re prompted, the same story emerges—a story that stubbornly won’t go away until it gets dumped onto the page. Sometimes it’s the story you need to write; other times, it’s the story you need to get out of your way before anything else can come through. Either way, being prompted helps move the writer forward.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Writing prompts can also help dissolve writers’ block, especially when you respond to them while racing against a timer. I know from experience; when I started at TMI Project, I myself had been blocked for some time. To encourage workshop participants, I figured I’d “take the workshop with them,” doing twenty-minute free-writes alongside them, using my own prompts. It instantly unblocked me, freeing me to write story after story.

Below the paywall is the 133rd prompt in this series. Use it however you’d like to spark new writing, ***but please don’t share it with anyone else. I hope to someday publish a book of these. And I use them in my teaching.

My writing prompts are offered as a perk for those who pay to support my work. Thank you for your support! 🙏

Subscribe now

I invite those taking part in this to leave, in the comments, up to a paragraph of the writing the prompt has generated.

Here goes…

Read more

The story of my newest book, What Are You Waiting For? An Anthology, and the tale of how I became a writer are linked. They hold hands in my mind’s eye though that bond may not be easy to see outside of this writer’s imagination. But they are there, I promise.

I am reminded of those connect-the-dots coloring books. I am reminded of finders keepers.

Subscribe now

This story, the “How My Book Came To Be” story, is one of finding. And keeping. With a little gathering in between.

***

About a year after my first book, Not for Nothing: Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood, was published, and once the book events, interviews, and author talks were over, I discovered something new. It was there all along in between the lines and pages of that book’s vignettes. But it was something I hadn’t seen before. A theme, a constant, a thread.

Waiting. I found waiting.

How could I have not seen it, though? I’d spent twelve years working on that first book. How had I not led with that “main idea” in all those talks and presentations I’d given? All those workshop discussions and critiques? How come “waiting” did not slide off my tongue with clarity and confidence when people asked about the book’s theme, its throughline?

If I knew then what I know now, the answer to the proverbial reader-to-author question, “So what is your book about?” could have been available and accessible in ways I’ve still not experienced as a writer. I’m a pauser. And a thinker. And a non-one-word-answerer.

Things kept showing up and pointing me to the questions: What am I waiting for? What are you waiting for? I was compelled to explore and expand using a fresh new lens. And I began, only to myself at first, think of this lens as something that might become what I called, my next book project.

During the writing of the book, what I recognized, what I saw and even felt at home with, as a focus of the memoir, was plenty, but it was not “waiting.” Instead, I located themes of Italian American family life and the influence of addiction, infidelity, the ocean, and tenacious attachments on the life of young girl who had questions and wanted more.

Me.

These topics were all alive and thriving on the pages of that book, a coming-of-age memoir, each chapter a specific episode from my girlhood set in the 70s and 80s on the Jersey Shore. They were ideas that stemmed from memories I finally felt ready to work with as a writer.

And yet.

Four of the fifty “glimpses” in that book have waiting in the title: “Waiting by Windows I”, “Waiting by Windows II”, “Waiting for the Song to End” and “Waiting by Windows III.”

But I still didn’t see it. Until I did.

A big portion of the years I wrote about in the memoir were years spent waiting. I guess I saw it when it became visible to me. Not all, but much of the time that I waited as a girl, it was for the men and boys in my life.

To behave better. To get well. To arrive. To leave. To listen.

My memoir covers my life from about age 5 to 19. It was during those years, probably at around 8 or 9, when I began writing in a diary.

Questions. Desires. A blank page.

A connected dot! I did something in all that waiting time. I learned to put feelings into words and give them space on a page.

***

But there was more. More finding and keeping of memories, noticings, and the grounding of new understandings. More things kept showing up and pointing me to the questions: What am I waiting for? What are you waiting for? I was compelled to explore and expand using a fresh new lens. And I began, only to myself at first, think of this lens as something that might become what I called, my next book project.

More finding and hopefully more knowing. And keeping.

One:

My mother’s death twenty-eight years ago busted into pieces all I knew to be real and true. In a recent interview with Deborah Kalb, I shared this: “My mother’s death was sudden. She was in my home when she suffered a massive aneurysm. I found her on the floor, close to the unconscious state she eventually slipped into and never came out of. Her heart stopped nine days later. Mine shattered. It was 1998. I was 31.”

In an instant, and in the heaviest package I had ever picked up and tried to hold in my life, I was carrying guilt, my natural impulse to protect her and my shock. The heft of that led me to believe if I just waited, she’d come back. What made sense was out the window. Real and true were untouchable for me at that time.

Two:

Speaking of mothers, mothering. In my case, I am the mother of four human beings who teach me every day about letting go, longing and loving. Being the daughter of my deceased mother still teaches me about those things, too. All of this involves waiting. But I also believe this applies to all sorts of mothering individuals may practice. The mothering of pets and projects. Of gardens and communities. People, places, things. Natural nurturing.

Three:

And then there was Covid. Do you remember hearing the stories of people who wrote whole books during Covid? That was not me. I walked all over my town, sometimes once in the morning and once at dusk. I cooked three hot meals a day. I wrote a ton of letters. A few times, I delivered masks to people’s doorsteps and mailboxes. But books I didn’t write.

Notes, lists, and musings did find their way to napkins, scratch pads and notebooks that were half filled. I scribbled and rambled on about all the waiting we were doing. About all the uncertainty around us and all the patience exercised. I kept the notes and went back to them when the waiting prompted more and more wonder.

Four:

Finally, community. I knew I wanted this collection to be one. I didn’t want it to be only my voice, my perspective. I wanted many voices, many forms. I wanted writing, poetry, visual art. In some capacity, I wanted music! It was also important to hear a range of voices—a spectrum of experience, personal histories and styles.

Maybe this goes back to those little girl tendencies.

Questions. Wants.

And what happens when you add to that pairing the loneliness that is perpetuated by our current cultural trend, the one the celebrates screens meant to connect but, in many cases, achieve the opposite.

I knew I wanted this collection to be a community. I didn’t want it to be only my voice, my perspective. I wanted many voices, many forms. I wanted writing, poetry, visual art. In some capacity, I wanted music! It was also important to hear a range of voices—a spectrum of experience, personal histories and styles.

I put it all together or maybe it got put together for me. A finding inside a book I had already written. The ongoing grief and guilt. The mothering I was doing and watching others do. That C-word, the one that made the phrase “unprecedented time” hit in ways we never knew two words could. And, finally, a hunger to know more from others and not just through a comment or caption. I wanted coffee and conversation. I wanted community.

So, in early 2023 I sent an email to writers and artists whose work I admired. At that time, I didn’t have a crisp, clear plan, a substantial platform or a publisher. But I did have a project, if only in that mind’s eye again.

Here’s an excerpt from this book’s introduction, the one I wrote in letter for to the reader:

For several years now, I’ve felt a little marble of an idea slide back and forth the confines of my head. Heart, too. I’m finally ready to show other writers and artists its colors, its shine, its depth. In fact, I need others for the idea to come alive, to really become something. And I’d love for you to be one of those people.

The topic/question (potential title) is: What are you waiting for?

The idea, an anthology.

***

Could it be that this collection of twenty-nine interpretations of “waiting” is my grown-up version of connect the dots? My modern-day finders keepers?

Much was discovered in the process of helping this book become. Seeing it “come to be.” Joining with the writers and artists who contributed and sharing the volume with readers is igniting a range of emotions. And ideas.

I am reminded: Communing with others around art feels natural and working as a collective ignites power, for not only the group but the individual, too. I am reminded: Much of what is natural involves waiting. I am reminded: Maybe this book is a community garden, one I started planting when I was a little girl.

Kathy Curto is a writing professor, the author of Not for Nothing-Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood (Bordighera Press, 2018) and the editor of the multi-genre collection, What Are You Waiting For? An Anthology (Motina Books, July 2026.) She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and can be found in her front yard, on most mornings, replenishing her Little Free Library with donated books. This practice has become one of her daily delights. Please visit: www.kathycurto.com or on Instagram @kathy.curto.

Check out the whole “How My Book Came to Be” series.

Here’s the 233rd installment, featuring , author most recently of Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Subscribe now

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Personal Days, the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis, the memoir Three Tenses: A Transmission From the Nineties, and The Repairer of Reputation, a work of weird horror. He is a founding editor of The Believer and currently teaches writing at Princeton University.

—

How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

56. I’ve been writing a long time—let’s say high school.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

Freakishly, I have two books out this year: Three Tenses: A Transmission From the Nineties (published August 11th by Random House) and The Repairer of Reputations (Soho/Hell’s Hundred).

What number book is this for you?

Five and six.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

Three Tenses is essentially a memoir, albeit an unusual one. It’s made up of hundreds of brief entries—mostly true (observations, quotations, memories), with a small number that shade into fiction.

In some ways, this book—written when I was 28, in 1998—is the Parkian ur-text. I had previously written two ambitious novels that had failed to find a publisher, and I was in a sort of crisis. I had just published my first short story (“A Note to My Translator,” which would appear in last year’s An Oral History of Atlantis), but was puzzling over what my next novel might look like. More anxiously: Was it worth writing when my chances of being read seemed so slim?

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

Three Tenses is an addictive, lyrical river of impressions, artfully juxtaposed. There is no chronology, but themes and revelations emerge organically. Each entry begins with the word “In.” I wrote it in 1998, then lost it for 22 years. It’s a time capsule.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

In some ways, this book—written when I was 28, in 1998—is the Parkian ur-text. I had previously written two ambitious novels that had failed to find a publisher, and I was in a sort of crisis. I had just published my first short story (“A Note to My Translator,” which would appear in last year’s An Oral History of Atlantis), but was puzzling over what my next novel might look like. More anxiously: Was it worth writing when my chances of being read seemed so slim?

I wrote Three Tenses before I knew I was writing a book—a series of short, clear, lyrical entries (I call them “tiles” in the preface, but “capsules” might be better). Hundreds of memories and workplace observations, reflections, quotations—most of them just a sentence long, although a handful stretch to paragraph length. Once the idea clicked into place, it was as pleasurable a creative experience as I’ve ever had.

The novels that I had doggedly written and failed to publish might be dubbed “postmodern.” They were complex, even byzantine, with all sorts of narrative strategies that perhaps only I understood. (To give you an idea of the literary climate: My first book was completed months after Infinite Jest came out in 1996; 1997 would see the publication of DeLillo’s Underworld and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.) I wasn’t thinking about the reader as much as I should have.

With Three Tenses, I just wanted to write something readable. And before I knew it, the pages kept piling up. There was no chronological order to the entries, but the whole thing seemed to move. That’s the only excuse a book needs: that each sentence pulls you forward, eager for the next.

When I was finished, I didn’t know what to do with it—on the surface it was weirder than my other books. I printed it out and put it away. It stayed inside an envelope for 22 years, moving with me from apartment to office to apartment, until the early months of the pandemic, when I found it by chance. I retyped it, since I had no digital copy. (I had saved it to a floppy disc back then, but even if I could locate it, I no longer had the hardware to read it.) Typing my own words was a revelation. It evoked the writer and person I was, with all my dreams and obstacles, my humor and cynicism; the language was intense and (I thought) supremely elegant at times—a kind of prose I lived for, still live for, but perhaps can no longer write. It was a resurrection.

Sometime after publishing my novel Same Bed Different Dreams in 2023, I was invited to write an essay by an editor at The Baffler, JW McCormack, around the theme of “waiting”—he thought perhaps I could write a piece about “unfinished, unwritten, or lost books.” I said, in effect: Hold my beer. I wrote about my recovery of Three Tenses. It’s one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written—an essay that is only possible because of the passage of time. There was interest, later, in the manuscript itself, and I was fortunate to publish once again with Random House.

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

Once I realized I was writing a book—when I’d accumulated a couple dozen pages of sentences all beginning with “In,” that seemed to lead somewhere—it was a very freeing experience. As I said before, I didn’t expect to publish it at all. Into the drawer it went.

The book stayed inside an envelope for 22 years, moving with me from apartment to office to apartment, until the early months of the pandemic, when I found it by chance. I retyped it, since I had no digital copy. (I had saved it to a floppy disc back then, but even if I could locate it, I no longer had the hardware to read it.) Typing my own words was a revelation. It evoked the writer and person I was, with all my dreams and obstacles, my humor and cynicism; the language was intense and (I thought) supremely elegant at times—a kind of prose I lived for, still live for, but perhaps can no longer write. It was a resurrection.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

As I wrote, I was turning names of real people into initials—D., J., S., etc. I did this for friends and for historical figures alike, blurring the lines. It added to the aura of the manuscript; it also made the actual people unidentifiable, unless you happened to know some of the famous people. (The outsider artist Henry Darger, whose work and life fascinated me, appears as “H.” a couple times.) There was this idea that, in the space of the book, the famous and the anonymous were of equal value. I was mythologizing everyone and everything, including myself.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

I had in the back of my mind the fragmented fictions of David Markson (Reader’s Block), Peter Handke’s journals from 1975–77 (The Weight of the World). ’s “Résumé” (1997, later in 1998’s The Factory of Facts) stunned me: Each paragraph starts out with the same 16 words (“I was born in 1954, in Verviers, Belgium, the only child of Lucien and Denise Sante”) before going in different directions, some of them clearly fictional. I am pretty sure I read “Résumé” in ’97. In 1998, it was published in The Factory of Facts—a memoir, but now a memoir with lies (as mine would be). I also see traces of Carole Maso’s method (AVA, The Art Lover). Both Sante and Maso were teachers of mine in grad school, and gave me radical ideas of what a book could be.

Side note: I had read about Joe Brainard’s brief book I Remember (in which each entry begins with the title’s words), though I hadn’t read it—I couldn’t get my hands on it. (Indeed,I still haven’t read it in its entirety.) Still, the idea of fruitful repetition was appealing to me.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

Keep everything you write—the unpublished, the unpublishable. Preferably where you can find it.

What do you love about writing?

It’s very satisfying. Sometimes it’s like the gratification you get from solving a puzzle, only more intense, because part of you has built the puzzle and challenged the other part to figure it out.

What frustrates you about writing?

How grindingly slow it can be. Often I’m reading the same pages over and over for months, knowing that something’s not working—but I’m not complaining. Part of me now understands that it takes time to figure out what to do. It’s also kind of interesting to let what you’re working on be with you for months and years, never too far from your thoughts. And sometimes time itself becomes a component of the richness of a work. (On the other hand, occasionally I can finish a piece blazingly fast—some of my short stories are this way, written in an hour or so—and thus it all balances out.)

What about writing surprises you?

When you turn a corner and everything falls into place. When a vague idea about a topic—a general artistic impulse about how one might render a scene or a speech, say—crystallizes into something different, better. How it actually takes over your life and even your dreams. The aforementioned story-written-in-an-hour.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

Mostly in the mornings. For a lot of my current project (a novel in progress), I began by working on a typewriter (about three years ago), with a record playing in the background (preferably baroque music). Flipping the LP at intervals provided an excuse to get up from the chair.

Keep everything you write—the unpublished, the unpublishable. Preferably where you can find it.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

Not really. I used to draw more (I had a comic strip in college), and played guitar a lot—indeed, when writing Personal Days, I would lock the guitar in its case, then tuck the key away somewhere hard to reach, so that I wouldn’t waste time playing.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

Working on another novel! I also periodically look at some of my nonfiction pieces, written for various publications over the years, and fantasize that they could form the basis of a collection. I draw up possible tables of contents. The title would be A Portrait of the Artist as a Droll Slacker. But that’s just a pipe dream while I toil away in the mines of fiction.

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, Electric Literature, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. Below is this week’s curation. At the bottom are instructions for submitting. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye, both inspired by Joan Didion’s iconic essay.

   ---

“I read Memoir Land all of the time for free, realized how much I gain from doing so, and wanted to support you and be a more proactive and active part of the community!” , paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

***Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

After my wife’s death, I learned that love takes many forms — sometimes where and when you least expect it

by

“Grief is unpredictable and everlasting. It shows up in mysterious ways and in places and times when and where you least expect. You grieve while making dinner at home, brushing your teeth at bedtime — even while listening to a high school senior talk about her plans to attend the University of Michigan in the fall. It surrounds you while you try to find joy and purpose in your life. But my grief was no match for the collective hearts of 70 wise-beyond-their-years young women, who unknowingly helped me rebuild my life.They didn’t know that their energy, curiosity, kindness and love stitched the parts of me that had unraveled back together. They didn’t know that behind every story I wrote about them, was also a story about my own slow return to the world.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

I Tried Selling My Body for Money—I Was Surprised By What I Found

by

“After moving to Spain the summer of 2003 — during one of the deadliest heat waves in Europe’s history — I noticed the advertisements in the magazines for ‘American Boys.’ ‘Maybe I should audition,’ I said to Patricio one day, showing him the black-and-white advert in the gay rag. I’d failed at being an English tutor to the children of rich Catalans, and this could be a way to make some cash. ‘I mean, I’m American and I’m a boy,’ I said, ‘so I seem to have the basic qualifications. Think I’d get the part?’”

Narratively

A Literary Haunting: What the Ghost of Sylvia Plath Taught Me About Grief

by Abigail Rose-Marie

“Before the ghost of Sylvia Plath haunted the yellow house on the bluff in my novel White Rabbit, she haunted me. I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student plagued by the loss of my father’s second wife, a woman who had been a maternal figure for much of my childhood. As I walked the university campus, I felt the ghost of this grief as something tangible—something I could see, something that followed me.”

LitHub

Aftermath of an Intervention, Part II (of a three-part series)

by

“Noah and I got married on August 25, 2001. My stepmother’s immediate family was in a gruesome car crash on the way to my wedding. We found out seconds after we said our vows, and from there the wedding became a kind of nightmare that still brings with it, when I dare remember any details, a tidal wave of shame. Mahnaz, my stepmother’s wry, generous, beautiful sister, sank into a coma, then became brain dead in the week following the wedding. She was taken off life support, and there was a three-day-long funeral, in the tradition of their family’s religion.”

Electric Literature

Ways of Treeing

by

“When I see the branches of different species, it is as if I can see their birth certificates. It is as if the shapes of the branches are a consequence of a negotiation, not only between the tree and the wind, but also between the tree second-guessing the behavior of the wind generally as well as the particularity of the wind in its home. What I see before me, then, is the shape of the creative process—the arrival of an idea in a leaf’s unfurling, followed by the acknowledgement of life’s exigencies and pauses in the influences of wind, water, and light.”

Orion Magazine

The Dream Has Ended in Death

by

“In my lifetime I’ve dealt with the sudden deaths of friends, my granny’s boyfriend Joe and, in 1999, a long-term girlfriend; truthfully, it never gets easier. It’s as though someone has played a nasty cosmic joke and disappeared the person you were just talking to yesterday or the week before.”

Oldster

Essays from Around the Web…

Student of Desire: Do Men Want Smart Women?

by

“I was envious. Not of her, but of him. He could be attracted to and, it seemed, happy with a woman regardless of whether he found her interesting. This was not an option for me. The thought of sleeping with a man I didn’t enjoy talking to, regardless of how good-looking he was, made me feel so lonely I could cry. But that was only part of what bothered me. Seeing my ex enamored of this woman forced me to consider a question that was for me deeply charged: What if men didn’t care much about the kind of intellectual connection I valued?”

The Point

Please Go Away

by

“Sometimes I didn’t understand how time worked (but I didn’t understand that at the time) and I miscalculated how long I was taking in the kitchen. When I went back to my spot at the table my smoke had smoked itself — all the way down to the filter, which now laid to rest on an ant hill of its own ash and dust, and the only sign of its former life was a black hole burned into the leather table.”

How I Learned

The Lamentation of Natasha Stagg

by

“‘If I had money, I wouldn’t need it. I could write all the time, about anything other than this life, the life I’ve spent trying to get by. If I was offered a large sum and asked to make promotional content in exchange, I know I’d do it without a second thought, but only because what I already do is just as demeaning. Lowering one’s standards means more opportunities and, usually, a chance to lower them even further.”

Volume 0

How I Met Your Father…and Other Stories I’m Reluctant to Tell My Kids

by

"…of course, there’s stuff that we aren’t like, dying for them to know. We were two people who didn’t actually think we might have kids one day. That is to say: dirtbags. Additionally, I wrote (a lot. A lot, a lot) about sex; he worked for a couple tabloids and the kinds of men’s magazines that had cover lines like ‘What’s More Bitchin’: Bacon or Boobies? We Finally Make the Call.’”

The Minimizer

Swimming Through Grief

by Claire Perry

“We meaning-making creatures want to make sense of everything, and maybe especially the hard things. How and why: so that I can prevent bad things from happening to the people I love, the animals, the things, the planet: all these things that I see as mine, and want to protect.”

Substack

Losing My Dad while the Knicks Win

by

“This year on Mother’s Day, when I called him during game three of the second round to tell him our car had broken down on the highway about an hour south of Philly, he’d comforted me first with the Knicks score and then noted that train tickets home might be expensive because of all the Knicks fans coming home that evening. He offered to come get me instead. Two days later, he went into the ICU.”

Ten Stories Up

My Abrupt Childhood Plunge Into Rural Life: The Untold Resentment

by

“Back in the ’70s, my parents made a decision that would forever change the trajectory of my life. We’d been living on a tree-lined street in the Chicago suburbs, with a short driveway leading straight into traffic that slowed to a crawl on Sunday mornings with cars en route to the racetrack. Born in Chicago, they were ready for a quieter setting. Somewhere we’d be less likely to get run over—like the kid across the street whose leg was broken while playing too close to traffic. Destination: Harvard, Illinois. Milk Capital of the World.”

Writing {unfiltered}

Bikram: A Complicated Love Story

by

“Around the time Choudhury fell from grace, I remember confiding to a friend, a physical therapist, about some terrible boyfriend, ‘I know he’s bad for me, but I can’t leave.’ ‘That’s not how knowing works,” she said. ‘If you really knew, you wouldn’t be able to stay.’”

Dispatches from the Road

I’ll Say Grace

by

“Bless our separate griefs. My mother and I have never had an easy way with one another. She doesn’t like to stir up bad memories or talk about her feelings with me, even when our feelings match as precisely as these china settings in front of us. Over the years, we both found it easier to talk to my father. I once harbored hope that, in the wake of his death, she and I would find a deeper bond. Instead, our clasped hands are where two lonely lines of a former triangle touch. Our connecting piece is gone. Every passing day seems to stretch our paths further apart.”

Cleaver Magazine

Big Sur Synchronicity

by

“Nine-and-a-half years later, my husband and I—along with our two kids—returned to Big Sur, to the same campground, for a friend’s wedding. I was certain our visit would feel remarkable and anticipated some kind of emotional awakening or burst of inspiration. I pictured telling my daughter, ‘This is where you wanted to enter the world.’ I was completely unprepared for what actually happened.”

Eternally Emerging

The Paris Underground

by

“It was either fitting—or bad planning—that our final tour of a five-day stay in Paris was for 4:00 at the ‘empire of the dead,’ as the sign warns when you enter the Catacombs. We had just finished our life-affirming, other-worldly lunch on the Eiffel Tower where our anatomical systems were functioning at their heights: digesting foie gras, having our breath taken away by the architecture, metabolizing wine, and secreting hormones while swooning at the handsome young waiters (and my companion), high above the City of Light. There was none of that going on in the Arrondissement of Death below. Only one internal system remained of those nearly six million formerly organic Parisians: dem bones. Particularly dem femurs, dem tibiae, and dem crania.”

History Rhymes with Lee

This Story Isn’t About the Priest Who Abused Me. It’s About My Mother

by

“Despite everything, I loved her. I needed to believe that she had not forsaken me. Years later, after my mother’s death, I was left with the questions that had followed me for decades: What could she have said that would have made things better? Could I have forgiven her if she had asked? Could she ever have been my mother again?”

The Guardian

🚨Announcements:

📢 ONLY ONE SPOT LEFT! // From and : Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30

Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.

• Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026

• Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY

• Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)

• Rooms: All private rooms

• Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions

• Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot).

  Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Story Studio Chicago, Memoir in a Year with

“Our Memoir in a Year program will help and support you during the long road from plotting to composition to revision and beyond. It’s a unique opportunity to join a writing cohort, study craft, workshop key scenes, measure your progress, and meet deadlines.

It’s a chance to devote an entire year to your project, giving it the attention and effort your work deserves. Memoir writer Dionne Ford will help you through the drafting process, whether you want to complete a draft, make revisions, or push yourself toward your own page goals.”

Includes: 11 sessions, meeting once per month for 11 months; A 100-page manuscript review with Dionne Ford; Discounts to our Master Class series; A private online chat forum; VIP status at the Studio; A literary community to take well beyond this program. $2,750.

Learn More/Apply

📢 From Story Studio Chicago, Essay Collection in a Year with

“Our Essay Collection in a Year program will support you during the long road from idea generation to composition to revision and beyond. It’s a unique opportunity to join a writing cohort, study craft, workshop key scenes, measure your progress, meet deadlines, and give and get support in the development of long-form literary work.

Includes: 11 sessions, meeting once per month for 11 months; A manuscript review with Megan Stielstra; Various online social gatherings with your cohort; Discount admission passes to our Master Classes; A private online chat forum; VIP status at the Studio; A literary community to take well beyond this program. $2,750.

Learn More/Apply

📢 Rigorous Revision Retreat in Hudson, NY w/ November 1-4 2026

This is a hands on revision retreat. Using The Artful Edit by Susan Bell, we will go through various revision strategies: the font change, the print out, the lay out, the read aloud, the listen back, the cut up, and color coding.

Chloé will share her own process for revision and we will get into some eclectic activities. We will also play with formatting and structure, title page, epigraphs, to make it look like a book. You will leave the retreat with new friends, a support system, and concrete plans of what to do next in terms of more revision or submitting. This is a one of a kind retreat that will not be offered again.

Must have 20k+ words to apply. Pricing ranges from $1,700 to $2,500 depending on room options, with two sliding scale spots at $1,300.

If you have any questions, please email Chloé at cocomonet@gmail.com

Apply

📢 From : Creativity, Community, Sanctuary: A Retreat for Jewish Women Writers, at Zigbone Farm Retreat Center in Sabillasville, Md, Dec. 11-14, 2026

“My writing community is beautifully diverse, and I am so grateful for every single one of you. While most of my work is for everyone, I am hosting a special, intimate retreat this winter.

This particular space is crafted for Jewish women writers of all genres. Our focus is entirely on the craft of writing, not the politics or content. In this space, feedback is supportive, dedicated to structure, voice, and creative execution—free from judgment, criticism, or political commentary.

We are here solely to elevate each other's art, protect our creative energy, and foster creativity. The workshops are designed to elevate your art, not critique your worldview. If this speaks to you, I’d love to have you join us. Space is limited to ten to ensure an intimate experience.”

The weekend is open to all people who identify as Jewish and as women. Writing experience is helpful but not required. Writers at all levels will benefit. Email susan@susanweisbohlen.com to save your space.

📢 Telling Your Story: Memoir with September 21-26

Join New York Times bestselling Care and Feeding author and longtime Anthony Bourdain lieutennant Laurie Woolever for a special writing retreat on a private island in West Cork. Indulge all of your creative senses on this bespoke 5 night writing retreat featuring Laurie Woolever, the author of the memoir Care and Feeding. Our all-inclusive experience includes craft workshops on topics such as recipe writing and the purpose and function of food and travel writing, as well as individual feedback sessions. We’ll meet local artisans and chefs and spend time in nature as we hone our craft.

This takes place on a small private island in the heart of West Cork, Ireland’s food artisan capital, complete with 50 acres of woodland walks, a walled garden, and an indoor pool. $5,000.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From : Sentence Club

Sentence Club, a craft book bookclub from Literary Liberation, starts August 1st! Join , , and as we work our way through our first selection over the next three months. We all need to take words more seriously. We also need to play more. Maybe that sounds contradictory, but something that social media has made blatantly clear is we all have a responsibility to learn language. To be meaning makers.

Order the book! We’ll read together, annotate together, and meet a few times live to write and discuss what we’re learning. This is free for all subscribers.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From : The Hundred Day Reckoning, a Creative Response to Hard Change.

“The Hundred Day Reckoning is a creative reset designed to transform your relationship to a piece of life drama – a hard change that shook your reality and made you who you are, a.k.a. That Thing.

That Thing might be: Loss, trauma, divorce, change in health or ability, work shock, a big move, family estrangement, addiction/recovery, “empty nest…” or even major success, becoming a parent, or winning the lottery! Some folks wrestle instead with an ongoing pattern (”That Theme”).

You might be: Any human being at a point of transition, looking for a deeper, freer, more connected answer to the question: “what now?”

Details: On Zoom, Sept 7 - Dec 15. Space available Mondays 11-1 ET, or independent/ lightly coached. Wait list for evening session. Class format includes daily prompts, weekly meetings, and individual time with Karen.”

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Submissions Are Open at

is considering essays of up to 1500 words and micro-essays between 500 and 800 words for her excellent magazine, .

“What to send: Sharp, personal narratives with an evocative spin on existential-leaning themes. Stories about the horror and the hilarity of being in the world. The profound and the absurd; the texture, the nuance; a particular way of seeing. How we change, or don’t change; how the world changes, or fails to. How people try. Moments of discovery conflict with the old narrative and challenge a long-held belief. Little things are big. Not everything aligns. Nothing resolves neatly. Make meaning out of chaos, but leave us wondering what happens after it ends.”

Learn More/Submit

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

Here’s the 232nd installment, featuring , author most recently of Life Expectancy: A Memoir. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Subscribe now

Rachael Maddux is the author of a memoir, Life Expectancy, and two short essay collections, The Void and Third Person. Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, Garden & Gun, and elsewhere. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her family. Find her online at rachaelmaddux.com and instagram.com/rachaelmaddux, and subscribe to her newsletter at vanitas.me.

--

How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’m 41, and for as long as I can remember.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

Life Expectancy, and it came out March 24, 2026.

What number book is this for you?

It’s number one if you just count regular-sized books, number three if you count the two short essay collections I released last year to teach myself how to self-publish, and number who-knows-what if you count my various childhood opuses about a girl named Kayla whose mom married a man who drove a yellow limousine with thirty-two windows.

Life Expectancy is a coming-of-age memoir about growing up mortal in the American South at the turn of the twenty-first century, preoccupied with the question of how to live when you know you’re going to die—think Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking meets Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. (But that’s kind of a clunker to unload at, like, daycare drop-off. So sometimes I just say it’s a book about growing up and being afraid of death.)

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

I’ve only ever thought of it as a straight-up memoir. Obviously there’s no universal objective definition to any of these modes, but memoir is the one that gave me the permission I needed to keep the story’s scope really tight, really personal.

I deliberately avoided pulling in outside research or cultural texts or too many other peoples’ voices; my own memories and perceptions (or, my memories of my memories and perceptions) were what I wanted to engage with. But I tried to carefully calibrate my own POV, too, only sparingly and tactically rising out of the narrative to analyze or intellectualize or offer hindsight-informed context.

If I’d approached it as an essay collection or a memoir-in-essays I would’ve felt a different responsibility to the world outside my head, I think, and the result would’ve been a totally different book—perhaps more sellable (oops) but not the one I wanted to write.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

Life Expectancy is a coming-of-age memoir about growing up mortal in the American South at the turn of the twenty-first century, preoccupied with the question of how to live when you know you’re going to die—think Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking meets Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. (But that’s kind of a clunker to unload at, like, daycare drop-off. So sometimes I just say it’s a book about growing up and being afraid of death.)

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

In Life Expectancy, I write about how I can’t remember when I first learned about death—the idea of it seems to have just always been in my head. The same is true for writing. It’s not that I always knew I would become a writer, it’s more like I always knew I already was one.

I was working as an editor at a music magazine in my 20s when I started to feel like, okay, it’s time for me to write a book. I was poking around for a subject when I was out with some friends one night—this was late summer 2012—and one of them made an offhand remark about how she’d been feeling anxious about death lately. I was like, lately? Until then it had literally never occurred to me that not everyone was as preoccupied with death as I had always been. My acute awareness of mortality was a load-bearing element of my existence; without it, my life would have taken a very different shape.

So what was the shape it had taken? Who had I become because of this powerful repulsion/attraction I’d always felt? What did I know, or what did I think I knew? What else had I taken for granted? These were the questions that started buzzing in my head that night. To answer them, I maybe should have put myself into therapy. Instead I started writing, and in time I realized I’d found my book.

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

I think I began writing the book before I was really ready, but also I don’t know how I would have become ready without writing the book. Back then, I was deeply averse to drafting—a bad habit picked up in school, when my first-pass edits were reliably A+ material. But early in the writing process I realized that, if I really wanted to do this, if I wanted the book to be good and true and anything that anyone else might ever want to read, I was going to have to get over my former-gifted-kid bullshit and embrace this cycle of sucking-and-improving I’d always eschewed.

I started mucking around in a Google Doc called “big scrappy” in late 2012 and finally had something resembling a first draft in 2015. By then I was working full-time doing internal communications at a tech company, and freelancing a lot on the side, so the going was slow. I wrote a few more drafts before querying and signing with my agent in 2017, and then a few more after that with input from her and my beloved writing group. It was the ninth draft, I think, that my agent and I finally decided was ready to go out on submission to editors.

That was late spring 2021. The world was flush with COVID mRNA and optimism. Outwardly, our expectations were respectably calibrated; inwardly, I was like, Hot vax summer?! More like hot bidding war summer, baybee!!! And then… crickets. We got a few quick passes early on, but otherwise, as far as I know, it was just thudding silence all around. My agent assured me that some books just take a while to get picked up—six months, a year, even more. We just needed to be patient. So I was patient. Very patient. I was very patient for three years, until the summer of 2024 when we decided to officially pull it from submission, though it was less a matter of “pulling” than accepting its indefinite residence in the void.

In three years, so much had changed: I’d had a baby, quit my job, and managed my family’s move from Atlanta, where my husband and I had lived for many years, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, our hometown. But I still loved what I’d written, and my agent still loved it, my trusted readers still loved it. I hated the idea of shelving it just because it failed to please the notoriously fickle publishing marketplace at one particular point in time.

So—and this is majorly smoothing over so much angst and shame and ego-death—I decided to do it myself. I revised the manuscript for the tenth (!) time, hired a copyeditor, taught myself the ins and outs of self-publishing, and released Life Expectancy through my own imprint, Vanitas Books, earlier this year.

I was working as an editor at a music magazine in my 20s when I started to feel like, okay, it’s time for me to write a book. I was poking around for a subject when I was out with some friends one night—this was late summer 2012—and one of them made an offhand remark about how she’d been feeling anxious about death lately. I was like, lately? Until then it had literally never occurred to me that not everyone was as preoccupied with death as I had always been. My acute awareness of mortality was a load-bearing element of my existence; without it, my life would have taken a very different shape.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

My baseline assumption is that it’s always at least a little bit strange to be confronted with someone else’s perception of you, even if it’s positive and suffused with love. I kept all names intact until the very last minute and then changed a few, mostly tertiary characters who seemed unlikely to be recognized but certainly didn’t ask to have my fuzzy adolescent perceptions of them published for all the world to see.

I shared the manuscript with my immediate family once it reached its nearly-final form, flagging the chapters I thought might be the hardest/weirdest for my parents to read (“skip if you don’t want to read a vague mention of your adult daughter having sex!”). I have a really solid relationship with my family and this was still the most nerve-wracking part of the whole process.

Only my dad suggested edits; most were minor fact-checks, though he disputed my memory of which of his college friends’ wives babysat me when I opted out of my grandfather’s funeral. I might’ve considered revising that passage except for the fact that one of those families had a Sega Genesis and the other had a Super Nintendo and I specifically remember feeling very sad while playing Super Mario World that day, so I chose to trust my tween-self.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

I probably stole a little bit from everything I read over the decade-plus it took me to write and rewrite the book. In particular, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood and Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of my Youth gave me permission to go small—to focus on details, especially the textures of ordinary life, but also to take the memories of my younger selves seriously, to dig into and elevate the wavery recollections of my childhood as something perhaps even more vital than my adult understanding of the world. And when it came to putting out the book on my own, I was especially buoyed by the self-published nonfiction projects of Molly Young, Ann Friedman, and Eva Holland.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

In the very early days of figuring out the book, I emailed my pal Amanda Petrusich in an absolute tizzy and she sent back a characteristically wise, reassuring, and “dude”-filled message that included a quote from a letter John Steinbeck wrote to his teenaged son—advice about falling in love that’s also perfect for the terrifying first flush of a huge creative endeavor: “And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” I wrote the words on a Post-It note and stuck it above every desk I worked at for the next decade. So “don’t worry about losing” would be my main advice, but also: it’s a long road, don’t go alone. Be vulnerable, be generous, find yourself a mantra.

What do you love about writing?

The endlessness of it.

What frustrates you about writing?

The endlessness of it!

What about writing surprises you?

Sometimes I’ll write whole sentences, whole paragraphs, even whole drafts, then read them back and realize, wait—it didn’t happen that way at all! I don’t believe that! I never thought that! I haven’t written fiction since high school (and it was wretched) but whenever my brain starts farting out these weird confabulations I wonder if I should give it another go.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

Whenever I was really locked in on writing the book, I would record either my daily word count or my writing session start/stop times on a janky little calendar in my notebook. For various reasons, including having a baby-now-a-toddler, over the last few years my writing practice hasn’t been much of a “practice,” but maybe one day. I’m tempted to get one of those old-school time clocks so I can literally clock in and out with a big ka-thunk. Seems very centering.

Only my dad suggested edits; most were minor fact-checks, though he disputed my memory of which of his college friends’ wives babysat me when I opted out of my grandfather’s funeral. I might’ve considered revising that passage except for the fact that one of those families had a Sega Genesis and the other had a Super Nintendo and I specifically remember feeling very sad while playing Super Mario World that day, so I chose to trust my tween-self.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

Lately it’s a lot of reading and parenting and reading while parenting, and it’s all very informative. My daughter’s literary hyperfixations have given me a whole new appreciation for the subtleties of prosody. (I will never, ever forgive Llama Llama Meets the Babysitter—which at one point I was reading at least five times a day for days on end—for attempting to rhyme “samples” with “pineapple.”)

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

I’m maybe almost about to be in the process of starting to try and figure that out. The main thing is not to hurry, okay sure, but I really hope it doesn’t take another fourteen years.

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Readers,

During my eight years as the editorial director of a wonderful storytelling non-profit called TMI Project, I often had to come up with writing prompts for workshops I led. I had a knack for consistently coming up with a varied assortment that jogged people’s brains, eliciting productive writing (something I’d first developed as a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs), and leading the executive director to nickname me “The Prompt-O-Matic.” I thought I’d repurpose that knack over here, in The Lit Lab, offering weekly prompts for paid subscribers. This is the 132nd installment.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Your mind can latch onto a prompt very literally, or lead you toward something altogether different from the suggestion at hand. I’ve also found there are some writers for whom, no matter how they’re prompted, the same story emerges—a story that stubbornly won’t go away until it gets dumped onto the page. Sometimes it’s the story you need to write; other times, it’s the story you need to get out of your way before anything else can come through. Either way, being prompted helps move the writer forward.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Writing prompts can also help dissolve writers’ block, especially when you respond to them while racing against a timer. I know from experience; when I started at TMI Project, I myself had been blocked for some time. To encourage workshop participants, I figured I’d “take the workshop with them,” doing twenty-minute free-writes alongside them, using my own prompts. It instantly unblocked me, freeing me to write story after story.

Below the paywall is the 132nd prompt in this series. Use it however you’d like to spark new writing, ***but please don’t share it with anyone else. I hope to someday publish a book of these. And I use them in my teaching.

My writing prompts are offered as a perk for those who pay to support my work. Thank you for your support! 🙏

Subscribe now

I invite those taking part in this to leave, in the comments, up to a paragraph of the writing the prompt has generated.

Here goes…

Read more

I’ve tried to tell the story of Kristin a thousand times and a thousand times I’ve failed. She’s been a dream, she’s been a poem, she’s been a sigh after a breakdown of long tears, she’s been a smile after a brief moment of joy, she’s been a rumor to others before I met her, she’s a legend to those I’ve met after. “She’s been a leather jacket on the back of a motorcycle,” my husband once said. “You are mistaking her with someone else.” And yet now she’s that too.

Here’s attempt #1001 –

November 1999. I’m home from college for the weekend. We are driving to the home of our friend’s new girlfriend. “We” as in me and the three white boys I had been rolling with for the past few months—my friend Eric, my boyfriend Erik. and Marcus, the one with the new girlfriend. I had known these boys since grade school but we weren’t really close until the prior summer. That’s when we became good friends, the type that wear each other’s t-shirts and know the smells of each other’s homes.

We had been spending so much time together since the summer that Marcus pulled me aside one day.

“Listen Nina, we have to talk.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“This is getting too hard. We have to give the Eric/ks different names.”
“You’re right,” I said.

And with that it was decided. My friend Eric, Eric Levitt, became “Leviticus,” and my boyfriend, Erik Vaughn, would become “Evonnegut.” Marcus and I decided to keep our names, with neither Leviticus or Evonnegut protesting. Marcus’ girlfriend had a name too, Kristin, but for a while, we simply called her The Older Woman.

“Did you hear that Marcus is dating an older woman? Have you met the Older Woman?”

Everyone had been talking about her—The Older Woman, older as in we were 20 and she was 26.

I sat passenger side as my guy, Evonnegut, steered my Jeep Cherokee—the car my parents had bought for me, that was at the epicenter of so many of our adventures. We were traveling from my suburb, Edison, N.J., to Kristin’s Scotch Plains. Our final destination was Northern Jersey, Continental Airlines Arena, to see Phil and Friends, Phil being Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia had died four years before. Phil shows were Dead shows when you couldn’t see the Dead.

As we made our way to Kristin’s house, the suburban homes grew closer, more compact. “It’s this one,” Marcus said, and he jumped out. The Jeep idled in front of a narrow two-story home with beige aluminum siding, identical to house next to it save for a bright yellow Volkswagen bus parked out front. Grateful Dead stickers were plastered all over it. A large banner sprawled across the windshield, the band name emblazoned in giant all-caps gothic font. A rose nested between the words “Grateful” and “Dead.”

The Jeep was dark and all I remember was a rumble from the backseat, this woman placing stickers on our winter hats, each placement accompanied by a high-pitched squeal of glee. She’s the older woman? I remember thinking with every squeal. Now I wasn’t the only woman. Now the group was changing. She was a white woman, an older white woman of 26. I was a brown girl, a somewhat younger brown girl. of almost-20, my birthday coming up in a few weeks.

“How many Dead shows have you been to?” Marcus asked her as she settled in. “She’s been to over 90,” he said before she could speak.

And even after this introduction, I didn’t really hear many complete sentences from her, just more squeals—squeals of excitement about the music to come, and wishes for the set list: “I am hoping for a killer Magnolia!” and squeals about her dogs, Winter and Sativa, two majestic rescues now at home with her mother’s nervous lapdog, Murphy: “Smurfeeee!”

In the face of all that excitement, I felt old. I couldn’t match that enthusiasm if I ever tried.

I remember the show being long. Dead Shows are so long and so white, I’d think but never say. I just focused on the long part. “Bathroom,” I said to Evonnegut. And as I stepped out, I felt a wave of secret relief to be momentarily away from the wilds of “Space” into “Dark Star” and in the stark neon of the halls. I must have gotten a look at Kristin sometime during that interminable evening, but I don’t remember exactly when. She’s forever a blur.

I was a 20-year-old brown girl doing her best impersonation of a white hippie. I don’t know if I thought past 20. I could only barely look at this older woman of 26. I could barely look at myself. And I saw any age except ours, mine and the boys’, and anything beyond what we were doing—tooling around in the Jeep Cherokee, attending Dead Shows and going to college in between—as extremely terrifying.

Long black hair done up in white-girl dreadlocks, bouncing with her quick step. Their heft was a counterforce on a petite body, a narrow face with sharp features and wide eyes. And then there were the dogs, not there at the show that night but with her all the days after, jumping up and down and all over her. She was always dressed as if she was ready to walk them. A hoodie, jeans, a couple leashes off the belt loop, a joint or blown-glass bowl buttoned up in some stealth pocket, tinkling as she walked. I remember her always in motion. But I can’t tell you when I first really saw her—not the night of the show, not any other.

Maybe I never wanted to look at her, to look getting older in the face.

***

I was a 20-year-old brown girl doing her best impersonation of a white hippie. I don’t know if I thought past 20. I could only barely look at this older woman of 26. I could barely look at myself. And I saw any age except ours, mine and the boys’, and anything beyond what we were doing—tooling around in the Jeep Cherokee, attending Dead Shows and going to college in between—as extremely terrifying. I was a shy girl and found what felt like unlikely community in these friends, and then found a greater community in Deadhead culture, people like Kristin, whose ultimate joy was to come together, be kind and generous and love this band.

***

Dropping Kristin and Marcus back to her house after the concert, I felt a

difference in the Jeep, a different kind of quiet than when it was just me and the boys, a restless quiet maybe. I was supposed to love that there was another woman now. Now I could be with someone more like me, someone who would make me feel less alone with these dudes, someone who would get me in the way they didn’t. But hearing this girl, The Older Woman, express so much squealing glee, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I was bothered that if she could be that enthusiastic, what did that mean for me? I didn’t want to be that enthusiastic.

Do people like that exist? I wondered. People who seem to delight in cacophonous squeals of joy? Is this a way to grow old? I laughed, too, with the boys and with my college friends, but Kristin’s laughs felt different. Stupid, dumb, an insistence on joy for joy’s sake. Our laughs, mine and the boys’, were a shared snicker from years together, years we went to the same private school and hated it, and lived in the same town and hated it, and loved and hated the same bands, movies, you name it. Her laughter was from a life beyond all that, a life we didn’t know, a life I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

I just wanted her gone. I didn’t feel alone. I felt the only.

“I only knew her for a year,” I say now if Kristin ever comes up in conversation.

I always put this at the end of a sentence, at the end of a list of three:

“I have a friend who was murdered.”
“A random act by a serial killer.”
“I only knew her for a year.”

I want to call this the story’s button, a last line that buttons-up the whole thing: “I only knew her for a year.”

***

Kristen was dead at 27. In November, 20 years after we first met, I’ll be 40.

-January, 2020

A version of this essay was originally published in Entropy Magazine on February 13, 2021.

Here’s the 231st installment, featuring , author most recently of Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Subscribe now

Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-Canadian author and a Canada Scholar. His memoir Crooked Teeth was nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the BC and Yukon Book Prize, and the City of Vancouver Book Award. He is also the author of the novels The Foghorn Echoes and The Clothesline Swing, along with the award-winning Salma children’s series. His books have won the Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle Award, and the Independent Publisher Book Award, and they’ve been translated into multiple languages. Since arriving in Canada, Danny has raised over $300,000 to support queer and trans refugees. When not writing, he can be found playing video games.

—

How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I am 42 years old. I published my first collection of short stories when I was 19 with an Egyptian publishing house, after winning a competition I was too young to join. Luckily, by the time the book was printed, I was old enough to tour with it.

I grew up poor and creative, so my only cheap artistic outlet was writing; all you need is a pen and paper.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir, which came out in Canada two years ago, and is being published by Soft Skull in the U.S. today, August 18th.

What number book is this for you?

Depends on who you ask: if you’re looking at my overall publishing history, including my Arabic-language books, then it’s my tenth book. If you’re only focused on my English-language work, then it’s the eighth. If you were to exclude my children’s writing, then it’s my third.

There is a concrete assumption in the North American collective viewpoint that refugees as a source of pity. Sympathy is rained upon us. I don’t know if I want sympathy. I don’t see myself as worthy of pity. Refugees are peaceful warriors who managed to accomplish the impossible of leaving much of their lives behind and coming to North America reborn new. Still, parts of my story call for sympathy.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

I would say that Crooked Teeth balances itself between memoir and creative non-fiction. The memoir portion comes from the retelling of my lived experience through a narrative-forward framing device. The creative non-fiction comes out in the parts where I regard the reader, pulling them in into a conversation style writing, and interrogate their role in the process of creating, and consuming, the memoir genre.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

Crooked Teeth is a chill afternoon conversation between an author retelling his lived experience as a queer Syrian refugee, and a reader trusted as a friend.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

As I mentioned, writing has been my outlet and escape since a very young age. If we had glee clubs in Syria, I would probably be singing my heart out in a Broadway musical right about now. I don’t know if you can describe this as an origin story. It’s more like a response to creative scarcity.

As for this book, I struggled with the idea of writing a memoir. It felt quite daunting to me. I am a fiction writer: it pains me to write non-fiction, especially on matters related to my own personal experiences. I also am a former journalist (recovering journalist?) so the integrity of my non-fiction writing is paramount. I’m also a very private person (despite my instagram indicating otherwise).

Finding a balance between these three poles was a game of push and pull. The process itself became intriguing. Slowly, bringing a meta element to the memoir by using second-person narrative as a framing device allowed me to give respect to all three of my sides.

I would say that Crooked Teeth balances itself between memoir and creative non-fiction. The memoir portion comes from the retelling of my lived experience through a narrative-forward framing device. The creative non-fiction comes out in the parts where I regard the reader, pulling them in into a conversation style writing, and interrogate their role in the process of creating, and consuming, the memoir genre.

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

There is a concrete assumption in the North American collective viewpoint that refugees as a source of pity. Sympathy is rained upon us. I don’t know if I want sympathy. I don’t see myself as worthy of pity. Refugees are peaceful warriors who managed to accomplish the impossible of leaving much of their lives behind and coming to North America reborn new.

Still, parts of my story call for sympathy. My relationship with my parents, my relocation across multiple countries in the Middle East, and my time in a Syrian jail.

The hardest part, I believe, in writing this book was finding a way to tell these more traumatic experiences while demanding respect and joy instead of pity and sympathy.

… then accept that the book will be living on the shelves of so many people for years to come.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

I’m a firm believer that authors require no permission to publish stories about real people in their non-fiction narratives. The nuance of that is simple: No author out there claims that their writing is the absolute truth, it’s the truth according to their perspective.

So, if you don’t like my truth, feel free to write your own book about what went on.

I did however choose to change some names and identifying details. I did so mainly to protect the identities of other queer and trans people in my life.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House was absolutely the key I needed to write this book. Reading her writing felt like the permission I needed to engage with the writing form fully and with a much deeper sense of trust.

Also, a huge shout out to Alia Malek’s The Home that was Our Country which is a tour de force in writing complicated narratives about ourselves and the homes we connect to.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

We tend to look at our projects as a mammoth of work. How would I write this novel I want to write? It feels massive and unpredictable and somehow impossible. Also, what choices do I make about writing? Which way will my characters go? What drives them? This analysis paralysis is a creative killer. Don’t fall for the trap of this impossible perfection.

Instead, just write. It can be the most terrible writing you’d ever witness, but it’s writing, nonetheless. When you write, you have something that you can improve; something you can add upon. You’re the only person who will see it now. Don’t judge it. Accept it as the raw material you need to accomplish the goal you hope for.

What do you love about writing?

Writing silences the world around you. You escape the mundane and the overwhelming, and you become one with the work. It genuinely feels like a meditative out of body experience. The world comes to a hush; and the only god alive is you, creating new worlds.

What frustrates you about writing?

Writing in English as an additional language can be frustrating sometimes. The word is on the tip of your tongue, and you just can’t find it. Then, suddenly the Arabic jumps to mind, and it feels like another train pumping your writing off its tracks.

What about writing surprises you?

After a decent engagement with your characters, they suddenly take a life of their own, and start making their own decisions. A cliché, I know, but it’s truthfully a representation of how a well-design character can come up with its own path in the story as you write them.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

I’m a lone writer: I write like a banished wolf. I write mostly in the wee hours of the night, or the very early morning. I prefer silence and solitude over writing in cafes.

I’m also a planner: every idea must find its place on my writing board, before it is distilled into my outline, which in turn becomes my first draft. I cannot go into the writing mode until I have a clear outline of where I’m going.

I’m a firm believer that authors require no permission to publish stories about real people in their non-fiction narratives. The nuance of that is simple: No author out there claims that their writing is the absolute truth, it’s the truth according to their perspective. So, if you don’t like my truth, feel free to write your own book about what went on. I did however choose to change some names and identifying details.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

I’m a big traveler that enjoys finding little corners of the world to hide in (I’m writing this from a hippie island called Koh Lipe in Thailand). I’m also a video gamer with a love for narrative driven games. Hopefully, one day I will write for video games. I would love that very much.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

My next novel, A Saltwater Requiem (working title) comes out in April 2027 from Counterpoint in the US and Penguin Random House in Canada. It’s my first attempt at historical fiction: a multi-point-of-view family epic journey from the village of Saidnaya in Syria to Marseilles, London and across the Atlantic on the doomed maiden voyage of the Titanic, blending folklore, communal memory, and intergenerational trauma. I hope you’d pick it up!

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, Electric Literature, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. Below is this week’s curation. At the bottom are instructions for submitting. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye, both inspired by Joan Didion’s iconic essay.

   ---

“I teach memoir, and am a writer of personal narrative.” - (!!!), paid subscriber. (You should take a workshop with Joyce!!)

Subscribe now

***Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Aftermath of an Intervention, Part I (of a three-part series)

by

“Elliott got up and hugged me and explained that an intervention was underway and that he would soon be checked into a facility in Arizona. He did not seem to be suffering over the pain he had caused others. Misery was missing. From his raised eyebrows and the scornful twist in his voice, he made it clear to me that he was disappointed in his friends for staging an intervention.”

Electric Literature

AI helps me remember what my brain forgets

by

“The dangers of cognitive outsourcing are real, and we should take them seriously. But the escalating public backlash against AI risks losing the nuance necessary to make judgments about its best uses. A critical distinction exists between using AI to compensate for memories that have been impacted by cognitive dysfunction, and employing AI that prevents memory formation. An adult with dementia using MemPal to remember to turn off the stove is different from a healthy student using ChatGPT to write an essay. The first compensates for a damaged capacity, while the second erodes the capacity itself.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

What Forced My Father to Buy Our First TV?

by Ghulam Mohammad Khan

“For the first few days, nobody touched it. Except for a neighbor who owned a TV himself and thus qualified as our resident expert. It took nearly a week just to prepare for the first image. The toughest part was the antenna, a ladder-like contraption that had to be mounted high above the roof. We fixed it to the end of a long wooden lance, then tied that lance to the sturdiest pillar holding up our sloping roof. Then began the ritual. Someone would stay inside, watching the screen. Someone else would climb to the attic and slowly, painfully rotate the lance. ‘Left a bit.’ ‘No, back.’ ‘More.’ ‘STOP.’"

The Rumpus

When the Waiting is Over

by

“When I think about that time in the mid-90s, I wonder how I bore such silence. No signals came toward me from the world, no news, no chatter. These days, I can’t sit five minutes on a bus without checking my phone. How did my brain work? That person is a stranger to me now.”

Oldster

Essays from Around the Web…

BTS: Modern Love Pub Day: How to turn a dream-come-true into a nightmare

by

“‘What are you doing?’ I demanded. ‘Is my site up? It’s six in the morning! People are reading my story! They’re going to my website! It cannot be down! What is happening?’ Every ounce of nervous energy that had been dancing through my veins all week threatened to explode. I could not contain myself. ‘This is the biggest day of my career! Do you not understand that?’”

Sorry That Happened

Form and Feeling, or How to Write What Needs to Be Written

by

"The video ends, and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show says, ‘Con-fab-u-la-tion! Folks, it’s a real phenomenon. People are so traumatized by an event that they create a false memory to replace the real one, which is too painful. Now, I know you didn’t get to see the whole video, but Angela explains she didn’t want to fail her daughter in the same way her father failed her by not being able to afford her college education, so she created that false memory of her daughter failing trigonometry three times so she could absolve herself from the same crime her father had committed. The crime of false promises to your children. The crime of perpetuating generational trauma. The crime of disappointing yourself and others for poor planning, or in Angela’s case, for just being poor.’"

Academy of the Heart and Mind

Just a Big Cat

by

“The judge admonished us to not discuss the trial with family and friends, nor to research it in the media. ‘No newspapers, no internet,’ he said, looking at us from under dark eyebrows. He didn’t tell us what the crime was.”

Creative Nonfiction

I’ve discovered the joys of postcard-writing in middle age

by

“I found that dabbling in the US Mail this way was meaningful and fun and also was a habit that works very comfortably alongside my mild iPhone addiction. I don’t think we have to choose between technophobia or being extremely online; postcards are a tiny, and very human and necessary and beautiful, flourish in digital contemporary life.”

The Guardian

The Not Telling

by

“Hard truths are painful, but without honesty, relationships are like a tree that dies from the inside out. Left standing is a brittle skeleton that some may call a tree but is in fact hollow and dead, cracking at the first gust of wind. I am lucky that my parents valued truth and their child more than societal norms. Their courage enabled our family to grow like those San Antonio live oaks, full of twisted branches but capable of flexing in strong winds.”

Sneaker Wave Magazine

Let’s Not Lie to Ourselves

by

“My ‘midlife transformation’ looks nothing like the before-and-after images on social media. It looks more like a house in the middle of demolition: drywall exposed, naked wires dangling, decaying appliances lingering awkwardly in the side yard. The neighbors are over it and so am I, but the contractors are sketchy and the job may never be complete. It’s uncomfortable for everyone.”

Geezer

Moon Parties

by

“Years passed before I understood that Sardines was a teenager’s dream. Off in the woods, under a bright summer moon, sweaty with anticipation and teenage heat, the night pressing in all hot and close, a whole new world could open up. One day I’d know. I’d find out about kisses in the moonlight. But not then, not on those summer nights. I was thinking about teenagers and the moon, and I was wondering where to hide.”

Salvation South

What I Lost When I Lost My Best Friend

by Adam Lax

“I always avoided politics with him. Especially his core cause: Israel. I knew we would inevitably clash. And I didn’t want it to hurt our friendship. But then the Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023 happened. And the subsequent genocide in Gaza. After that, I committed an unpardonable sin in his eyes: I re-shared a post on Linkedin critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. He never confronted me about it. No texts, no calls, nothing. Just radio silence.”

Mindful Prose

I've Now Officially Outlived My Mother. That's Why I Won't Fight Aging

by

“The bottle of Oil of Olay lotion sat on my dresser for months. My mom had given it to me when I was just 8 years old, saying it was a free sample she didn’t want. From a young age, I got used to my mom gifting me belongings she no longer needed or never cared for in the first place — free makeup samples, old costume jewelry, time-worn purses. I usually loved playing dress-up with these hand-me-downs, but I was afraid of the lotion.”

HuffPost Personal

It Took Moving to an Ashram to Understand I was Jewish

by

“When I first moved into this once-Jewish-resort-turned-Hindu-mystic ashram in 1993, I wasn’t thinking about being Jewish at all. I was fantasizing about becoming a monk. But after living at the ashram for a year—chanting and meditating daily, performing selfless service as an office admin and workshop leader, and discovering who I was—that shifted.”

Judith Magazine

The People Who Grow Up and Away From Us

by

“There is a particular kind of empty that comes when everyone you built your life around for years is suddenly somewhere else, living a life you are no longer written into. At the end of it all, what is a human life if not the sum of its memories? The sweet ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that make you laugh and the ones that still sting a little when they resurface. Matthew McConaughey once said life moves forward no matter what, but it only ever makes sense when you look back at it. I think that is exactly what this film understands.”

Substack

Everything Will Be Fine

by

“Inside the tense silence of the bank, heart beating on the back of my tongue, I project as much calm as I can muster, and I assure the startled teller I’m not there to harm him or anyone else. I remember to say Please and Thank you, because I’m not rude, just desperate.”

Craft Literary

On Feeling Like Captain Ahab: Getting older, EMDR, and letting go of your whales

by

“I’m 54! Last week I dropped my only kid off at college. I’m so excited for her and a bit confused about myself. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I miss her terribly. I am also determined to give her the space my parents did not or were not able to give me.”

Substack

🚨Announcements:

📢 ONLY ONE SPOT LEFT! // From and : Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30

Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.

• Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026

• Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY

• Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)

• Rooms: All private rooms

• Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions

• Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot).

  Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From Story Studio Chicago, Essay Collection in a Year with

“Our Essay Collection in a Year program will support you during the long road from idea generation to composition to revision and beyond. It’s a unique opportunity to join a writing cohort, study craft, workshop key scenes, measure your progress, meet deadlines, and give and get support in the development of long-form literary work.

Includes: 11 sessions, meeting once per month for 11 months; A manuscript review with Megan Stielstra; Various online social gatherings with your cohort; Discount admission passes to our Master Classes; A private online chat forum; VIP status at the Studio; A literary community to take well beyond this program. $2,750

Learn More/Apply

📢 From : Creativity, Community, Sanctuary: A Retreat for Jewish Women Writers, at Zigbone Farm Retreat Center in Sabillasville, Md, Dec. 11-14, 2026

“My writing community is beautifully diverse, and I am so grateful for every single one of you. While most of my work is for everyone, I am hosting a special, intimate retreat this winter.

This particular space is crafted for Jewish women writers of all genres. Our focus is entirely on the craft of writing, not the politics or content. In this space, feedback is supportive, dedicated to structure, voice, and creative execution—free from judgment, criticism, or political commentary.

We are here solely to elevate each other's art, protect our creative energy, and foster creativity. The workshops are designed to elevate your art, not critique your worldview. If this speaks to you, I’d love to have you join us. Space is limited to ten to ensure an intimate experience.”

The weekend is open to all people who identify as Jewish and as women. Writing experience is helpful but not required. Writers at all levels will benefit. Email susan@susanweisbohlen.com to save your space.

📢 Telling Your Story: Memoir with September 21-26

Join New York Times bestselling Care and Feeding author and longtime Anthony Bourdain lieutennant Laurie Woolever for a special writing retreat on a private island in West Cork. Indulge all of your creative senses on this bespoke 5 night writing retreat featuring Laurie Woolever, the author of the memoir Care and Feeding. Our all-inclusive experience includes craft workshops on topics such as recipe writing and the purpose and function of food and travel writing, as well as individual feedback sessions. We’ll meet local artisans and chefs and spend time in nature as we hone our craft.

This takes place on a small private island in the heart of West Cork, Ireland’s food artisan capital, complete with 50 acres of woodland walks, a walled garden, and an indoor pool. $5,000.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From : Sentence Club

Sentence Club, a craft book bookclub from Literary Liberation, starts August 1st! Join , , and as we work our way through our first selection over the next three months. We all need to take words more seriously. We also need to play more. Maybe that sounds contradictory, but something that social media has made blatantly clear is we all have a responsibility to learn language. To be meaning makers.

Order the book! We’ll read together, annotate together, and meet a few times live to write and discuss what we’re learning. This is free for all subscribers.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 From : The Hundred Day Reckoning, a Creative Response to Hard Change.

“The Hundred Day Reckoning is a creative reset designed to transform your relationship to a piece of life drama – a hard change that shook your reality and made you who you are, a.k.a. That Thing.

That Thing might be: Loss, trauma, divorce, change in health or ability, work shock, a big move, family estrangement, addiction/recovery, “empty nest…” or even major success, becoming a parent, or winning the lottery! Some folks wrestle instead with an ongoing pattern (”That Theme”).

You might be: Any human being at a point of transition, looking for a deeper, freer, more connected answer to the question: “what now?”

Details: On Zoom, Sept 7 - Dec 15. Space available Mondays 11-1 ET, or independent/ lightly coached. Wait list for evening session. Class format includes daily prompts, weekly meetings, and individual time with Karen.”

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Submissions Are Open at

is considering essays of up to 1500 words and micro-essays between 500 and 800 words for her excellent magazine, .

“What to send: Sharp, personal narratives with an evocative spin on existential-leaning themes. Stories about the horror and the hilarity of being in the world. The profound and the absurd; the texture, the nuance; a particular way of seeing. How we change, or don’t change; how the world changes, or fails to. How people try. Moments of discovery conflict with the old narrative and challenge a long-held belief. Little things are big. Not everything aligns. Nothing resolves neatly. Make meaning out of chaos, but leave us wondering what happens after it ends.”

Learn More/Submit

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch

Here’s the 230th installment, featuring Julia Cohen, author most recently of Freak Lip. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Subscribe now

Julia Cohen is the author of I Was Not Born (Noemi Press, 2014), a collection of lyric essays, which was translated into German and released by Literaturverlag Droschl. She’s also written two books of poetry, Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (BLP, 2011). Her newest essay collection, Freak Lip, is out on August 15, 2026 from TRP.

—

How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’m about to turn 45, and I’ve been writing creatively since I was in sixth grade. I remember drafting my first poem on the family desktop, then printing it out once it was done and not knowing what to do with it afterward. I threw it out! Luckily, my mom happened to open the crumpled piece of paper in the trash and ask me about it. Upon learning I wrote the poem myself, she flattened it out and put it on the fridge.

My mother encouraged me to keep writing and helped me send out poems to journals, so I was published in places like Hanging Loose and The Louisville Review by the time I was in high school. She always took my writing seriously, which allowed me to take myself seriously, too, at an age when intellectual/creative validation can really shape one’s identity. I took nonfiction and poetry classes in high school and college and was even able to write my first manuscript as a senior thesis project with the guidance of the miraculous poet, Elizabeth Willis. Elizabeth Willis treated me like a fellow poet, not a student, so I truly feel like I’ve not only been writing for most of my life but considered myself a writer since I was a teen.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

My newest memoir, Freak Lip, is releasing this August from Texas Review Press. It’s the latest release in their Innovative Prose Series. I’ve been working on this collection of essays for over a decade so I couldn’t be more excited (and terrified) to see it exist as a book and not just a manuscript.

The book moves chronologically from age 13 to around 35, each chapter focusing on an unspoken sentence wrapped around one of the many firsts we encounter: first period, first serious medical diagnosis, first time having sex, first betrayal.

What number book is this for you?

This will be my fourth full-length book. Two of my previous books, Triggermoon, Triggermoon (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), were poetry collections, and my last one, I Was Not Born (Noemi Press, 2014), was a hybrid of lyric essays and prose poems. This will be my first book that is fully in the memoir camp, and your next question does make me consider the nitty gritty of categories!

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

I’d consider Freak Lip to be a memoir-in-essays. The book moves chronologically from age 13 to around 35, each chapter focusing on an unspoken sentence wrapped around one of the many firsts we encounter: first period, first serious medical diagnosis, first time having sex, first betrayal. Each piece investigates why we withhold certain significant aspects of ourselves that could actually help us be understood at pivotal moments in our lives. I would call the chapters “essays” in terms of both their lyric attention to language and the researched meditations on secrecy, atheism, shame, and the body that bring writers like Gertrude Stein and Louise Gluck into the conversation.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

Freak Lip reminds us that the secrets that feel impossible to say aloud are often the most important ones to share. Like noxious mold, shame grows most profusely in the dark. How can you trust others with your body if you don’t trust it yourself? How do you tell a terminally ill partner that you accept their impending death and are choosing to live through it with them? Through sharing decades of internalized secret sentences, this memoir illuminates a path toward intimacy.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

I don’t really feel like I had a choice about becoming a writer. Translating my feelings as well as my surrounding landscape into new phrases and constellations of images was truly how I processed my life. My earliest journals date back to second grade, where I am complaining about my younger brother and documenting mundane childhood experiences. One entire entry just states, “I tried a new kind of melon today.” I really wish I had recorded what kind of melon it was! But soon those journals turned into notepads for nonfiction and poem ideas, spaces for jotting down words throughout the day that I wanted to organize later into something more meaningful.

Originally, I gravitated toward poetry because there was something freeing about capturing feelings in inventive ways, outside of standard plot structures. Feelings have their own trajectories and I liked experimenting with how to follow them. Then, in grad school, I had an amazing fiction professor, Selah Saterstrom. At the beginning of the term, I told her that there was zero chance I could write fiction, but that I’d like to take her workshop and focus on writing nonfiction instead. She graciously let me into the class. I wanted to use it as an opportunity to write full sentences and put myself more visibly in them. I grew up with a chronic illness that didn’t dissipate until I was in my mid-twenties, and I realized that the only way I could capture that experience was to write about it more directly. It felt scary at first—the “I” was clearly me! But it was also gratifying to capture an important chapter in my life in a way that was vulnerable and more accessible to readers.

My third book, I Was Not Born, gave me the courage to tackle the essays in Freak Lip. I Was Not Born contains two long lyric essays that trace the failed suicide attempt of my former partner and how our lives were changed by this incident and their recovery. How does your love reach someone who is not able to love themselves? I wanted to wade through that devastation from the position of a supporting character.

The concept behind Freak Lip started with its very first essay, about hiding my period for months before telling my parents. I have visceral memories of wanting to tell my mom but physically not being able to say those words out loud: “I got my period.” I wanted to explore this particular kind of sentence that feels trapped within us, and examine the fallout, because there is always fallout. What do you do with your bloody underwear? Hiding begets more hiding.

As I wrote this essay, I had a horrifying realization: many significant experiences in my life and aspects of my identity were shaped by these sentences that felt impossible to say. I decided to map out the most important ones and trace the themes that ran through them.

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

Well, I started writing this book when I thought it would end completely differently! I envisioned the memoir ending with me having a child with one of its main characters, Oscar, who is living with a terminal heart condition. Because Freak Lip explores ideas of what faith means as an atheist, and of what being Jewish means as an atheist, I had hoped it would come full circle to close with me raising another Jewish atheist. I’d thought that the unsaid sentences would be my own, about having to face the fact that our family would outlive Oscar. I had already written the first two chapters before I discovered he cheated on me.

So, the last chapter and epilogue I wrote in real-time as my life was crumbling around me, as I lost the family I had believed in. It was horrible. I finished the book while dealing with the aftermath of the breakup, but I had to take a few years respite before revising. I knew I needed to give myself time, to allow for the intellectual distance necessary to balance out the rawness. I was too embedded in unraveling Oscar’s own unsaid sentences, like a private detective.

The timing of this book’s publication was also emotionally challenging in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. After years of distance from Oscar, we were finally able to reconnect as friends. Then, six months before Freak Lip, which had his blessing, went to the printer, he died from complications following his heart transplant. I’d say the characters in this book have been in my mind more than I’d anticipated.

Logistically, I think I faced the challenges that many authors who gravitate toward indie and university presses do: they only publish a few books a year and often through open reading periods/contests! My manuscript was a finalist/semi-finalist at a number of presses, but of course only the winner is published. Very “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” feeling. There were stretches when I felt a bit hopeless that what I thought was my strongest book to date wasn’t finding a home. I was beyond thrilled when Texas Review Press extended an offer to me. I love the other books in their Innovative Prose series!

Like noxious mold, shame grows most profusely in the dark. How can you trust others with your body if you don’t trust it yourself? How do you tell a terminally ill partner that you accept their impending death and are choosing to live through it with them? Through sharing decades of internalized secret sentences, this memoir illuminates a path toward intimacy.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

This has been a real source of anxiety, actually! I did change everyone’s names. I changed locations in a close-to-final draft because I thought it might help further obscure identities, but ultimately changed the locations back because that adjustment felt too unnatural. For the most part, I left identifying details in because names were altered, but I did have one friend who asked me to revise some of her own backstory. I reached out to most of the major characters but for more minor figures in the book, I didn’t bother. I’m going to take a leap of faith that my circle of friends in high school won’t mind being loosely referenced and might even appreciate the nod to that era. One of my college friends, portrayed as Louie in the book, chose not to read the manuscript because he said he trusted my writing, which I really appreciated. I’m looking forward to sending him a finished copy as soon as it publishes.

When I sent the manuscript to Oscar, I was afraid he’d be concerned he comes across villainously. However, he was incredibly kind and didn’t ask me to change anything. I think he was able to see that I was illuminating the love I’d had for him within my exploration of why our relationship fell apart. I hope I captured on the page how complicated he was, or maybe more precisely, made it less about him and more about studying how shame can make it almost impossible to be honest (because it’s hard to believe someone else can fully accept what we ourselves are ashamed about).

Because this book spans a number of decades, I didn’t want to introduce too many characters early on who would simply disappear in later decades. I have a few close friends that all supported me in very similar ways: with funny text messages, thoughtful emails, and meaningful visits. I chose to consolidate them into a singular archetypical character to streamline the narrative and make it easier for the reader. I think nonfiction authors have to grapple in these ways with how to maintain certain elements honestly while also foregrounding the integrity of the plot—and holding the reader’s attention!

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

This book examines many ideas and sentences by Gertrude Stein. I think she’s a really misunderstood writer. She’s often interpreted as being serious and purposefully obscure. I find her to be quite funny and open. But specifically, I wanted to take some of her concepts and definitions of “identity” and “genius” and explore how they hold up in my own lived experience. How can we be fully known as people and yet keep producing inventive writing? A lot of the chapters in Freak Lip bring me to different conclusions than the ones Gertrude Stein had, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to be in conversation with her through my memoir.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

My advice is to remind yourself that you’re not alone. Maybe you wrote your book in an isolated environment, but you’re not alone now. More established writers love to support younger or newer writers, so reach out! Ask for advice by email, in Reddit forums, on Facebook groups. Don’t be shy trying to get your questions answered.

My second piece of advice is to find the presses that are truly publishing the books that are kindred spirits with your own manuscript. Don’t waste your time (or money) sending your manuscript out to presses that publish work dissimilar to yours and don’t waste your time querying agents that represent work that isn’t adjacent to your own. You need to find that alignment and then pursue those presses.

What do you love about writing?

I’m busy juggling so many different responsibilities daily that my own thoughts are very fragmented or incomplete. I have ideas but then I don’t have the time to see them through, to develop them. Writing is where I hold myself responsible. The time where I get to push myself to cultivate my ideas, to think something through to its end point. It’s where I find joy in being inventive. The exhilaration I experience going on a hike in Colorado is the same feeling I have clambering around in the wilderness of my mind. I’ll never invent a new gadget, but I do love the thrill of capturing a sentiment in an entirely new way. Having the opportunity to share that with readers is an honor.

What frustrates you about writing?

I guess needing to be in the right mindset to write, which usually entails carving out a chunk of time to hunker down into the process. With a fulltime job and two kids with a big age gap and wildly different needs (a 4-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old stepson), I don’t have a lot of free time. When I go for longer periods without writing, I do feel like I’m missing a brighter part of myself that I can only access through the writing process.

What about writing surprises you?

When I’m reading any genre, I am constantly delighted by inventive similes and metaphors and have great admiration for authors who can sustain them in longer bodies of work. When writing nonfiction, I usually know the beginning and end of a piece but am surprised by the twists and turns the middle takes to connect the two.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

My partner likes to get up at 5 am and write in the bathtub! I am probably the opposite—no routine—I just need to find a block of time that’s uninterrupted. Once I am working on an essay, I have a strong internal desire to finish it—like a mystery that needs to be solved. I’ll wheedle out the time. It’s much harder for me to find the time to start a new piece.

The concept behind Freak Lip started with its very first essay, about hiding my period for months before telling my parents. I have visceral memories of wanting to tell my mom but physically not being able to say those words out loud: “I got my period.” I wanted to explore this particular kind of sentence that feels trapped within us, and examine the fallout, because there is always fallout. What do you do with your bloody underwear? Hiding begets more hiding.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

When I can, I try to take ceramics classes. My dad was a ceramicist and as a child, I was as encouraged to make sculptural pieces as I was to write. I love the texture of clay, and the sense that almost no mistake is permanent while the clay is wet. It frees me up to experiment.

I also love to garden now that I live in Colorado. I actually do think it supports the writing process because it takes about one and a half hours to water my garden, and I use that time to think through writing ideas.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

My first priority is supporting Freak Lip as it enters the world! I have a handful of essays I’ve completed since finishing Freak Lip, though, and plan to dive back into them and see if they fit together in any way that could shape a new book. I’m currently writing an essay, “Breastfeeding in the Dark,” about the loneliness of breastfeeding in American culture. I’m also trying to wrap up an essay about secrecy versus privacy. During the pandemic, I made a series of rapid choices that led to feeling like I had secretly relocated across the country, bought a house, started a family, and got married. All in the matter of a year or two! I’m trying to explore this accidental secrecy that is an extension of pandemic isolation.

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Readers,

During my eight years as the editorial director of a wonderful storytelling non-profit called TMI Project, I often had to come up with writing prompts for workshops I led. I had a knack for consistently coming up with a varied assortment that jogged people’s brains, eliciting productive writing (something I’d first developed as a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs), and leading the executive director to nickname me “The Prompt-O-Matic.” I thought I’d repurpose that knack over here, in The Lit Lab, offering weekly prompts for paid subscribers. This is the 131st installment.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Your mind can latch onto a prompt very literally, or lead you toward something altogether different from the suggestion at hand. I’ve also found there are some writers for whom, no matter how they’re prompted, the same story emerges—a story that stubbornly won’t go away until it gets dumped onto the page. Sometimes it’s the story you need to write; other times, it’s the story you need to get out of your way before anything else can come through. Either way, being prompted helps move the writer forward.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Writing prompts can also help dissolve writers’ block, especially when you respond to them while racing against a timer. I know from experience; when I started at TMI Project, I myself had been blocked for some time. To encourage workshop participants, I figured I’d “take the workshop with them,” doing twenty-minute free-writes alongside them, using my own prompts. It instantly unblocked me, freeing me to write story after story.

Below the paywall is the 131st prompt in this series. Use it however you’d like to spark new writing, ***but please don’t share it with anyone else. I hope to someday publish a book of these. And I use them in my teaching.

My writing prompts are offered as a perk for those who pay to support my work. Thank you for your support! 🙏

Subscribe now

I invite those taking part in this to leave, in the comments, up to a paragraph of the writing the prompt has generated.

Here goes…

Read more

I wrote my first novel the summer after college. Finished it on my twenty-first birthday. It was predictably enough about a young man in college, and it was strewn with quotes from Bob Dylan songs. Entitled Notify My Next of Kin. Fair to say, the genre was ‘insufficiently digested autobiographical material.’ But someone at a white-shoe agency took a shine to it, tried to sell it. It didn’t sell.

So I wrote another novel. More ambitious, literary, pretentious. Called Static. The agent didn’t like it. With hindsight, I think she wanted me to be, in Lena Dunham’s fine phrase, “a voice of a generation,” not a 22-year-old litterateur.

With the inability to imagine what else I might do, I wrote a third novel, Destiny Express — this one set in Berlin, 1933, among the prewar filmmaking community facing the onrush of fascism, with particular attention to the filmmakers Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. It garnered me a new agent who tried to place it but to no avail. Who was it who said, when you’ve lost sight of your goal, redouble your effort?

I was in my late twenties with four unpublished novels and a large freight of shame. People would ask me, what do you do, and I would say, I’m a writer, and they would say, anything I might have read? It became too painful. I decided to try a different tack. When I was asked what I did I replied, I’m a defensive linebacker with the Green Bay organization. They didn’t believe me, but it shut them the fuck up.

So I wrote a fourth novel, Downtown, a Highsmith-like thriller about a stolen electric guitar set in lower Manhattan. Which the new agent declined to represent. I did not, to be candid, have the courage to write another book. I was in my late twenties with four unpublished novels and a large freight of shame. People would ask me, what do you do, and I would say, I’m a writer, and they would say, anything I might have read? It became too painful. I decided to try a different tack. When I was asked what I did I replied, I’m a defensive linebacker with the Green Bay organization. They didn’t believe me, but it shut them the fuck up.

It was the era of “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” New York’s near-bankruptcy and my own manifold failures converged beautifully. It was also the time in which, if you lived in lower Manhattan and were a painter, a photographer, a writer, you were also in a band or two. Post-punk. If you didn’t know how to play your instrument, you had that much less to unlearn.

The band Arsenal was a quartet: the singer Charlie Nash, the guitarist Rhys Chatham, the bassist Dione King, the drummer Dave King. Rhys left, they needed a guitarist, my first band had just imploded, I stepped in. We played the Kitchen, CBGB’s, Hurrah’s, opening for the Gang of Four. I played with passion and sensibility unencumbered by expertise. Onstage — as opposed to at the typewriter — one couldn’t retrieve one’s errors. It was a fine and brutal lesson. I believe that the experience made my writing far less precious.

I was especially fond of Dave, a wildly talented artist. He also designed Christmas cards for MoMA, the Crass logo, and the iconic Danceteria logo as well. (I was, briefly, a doorman at Danceteria, but that is another story for another night.). When Arsenal ended — as most of the bands of that era seemed to do, sooner or later — Dione and Dave remained my mates. One of the wild and enduring benefits of a time in life when I had nothing to lose.

Things changed, likely because I had lost the courage to stay on course. I transitioned from writing unpublishable novels to writing unproduceable screenplays. After some years I began to get paid to write screenplays — first by the director Chantal Akerman, who saw something in me I did not yet fully see in myself, then by motion picture studios.

A French film producer took a liking to my work, but said — as many had before him — that none of my scripts was really makable. He asked if I had anything else. I reached into a cardboard banker’s box and pulled out the typescripts to the four novels. He read them, and liked one of them (number three, Destiny Express). He said that it would be easier for him to mount a film from a published novel than a manuscript, and would I allow him to take it to publishers in Paris. I said yes. One of the houses there, Editions Lieu Commun, took it. So there I was — albeit in translation — at last a published novelist. I was thirty-nine years old.

Among the people I called in relief and celebration was Dave King, who’d read the manuscript a decade previous. And soon after he gifted me with three proposed pieces of cover art. Which I loved beyond measure, because they understood my sensibility, because they captured the spirit of the book, and because they were made by Dave. The American publisher, Atheneum, had, of course, its own in-house art department, and Dave’s designs were rejected in favor of something more generic.

Armed with the French book and the English-language manuscript I again pursued representation. A wonderful literary agent in New York read it, liked it, but asked to see my contract with the French publisher, and every single rejection slip the manuscript had accumulated. I sent her the thin contract and the thick stack of rejections, thinking that would be the last of it. A week later she called and said that she didn’t like the contract I’d made with the French publisher, it gave away too many of the non-French European rights, but never mind, she’d gotten an offer on the book from a reputable American publisher, and she suggested that I take that offer. I did. The decision was not difficult, nor did it take long to make.

Among the people I called in relief and celebration was Dave King, who’d read the manuscript a decade previous. And soon after he gifted me with three proposed pieces of cover art. Which I loved beyond measure, because they understood my sensibility, because they captured the spirit of the book, and because they were made by Dave.

The American publisher, Atheneum, had, of course, its own in-house art department, and Dave’s designs were rejected in favor of something more generic. But — hola! — there was a book, between hard covers, in the language in which it was written, and out in the world. It received blurbs from Samuel Fuller, Harlan Ellison, and Thomas Pynchon (which is also another story for another day).

I now have a new (and forever) agent. Due in large part to her persistence, late last year a consortium of Los Angeles independent presses — Rare Bird Books and Unnamed Press — decided to reissue Destiny Express. They felt that a novel about artists confronting the onrush of fascism might be timely in its own grievous way. And more: they committed to re-issue, in parallel, The Great Eastern — my fifth-written/second-published novel, a sprawling lavish literary nineteenth-century anticolonial adventure, first released in 2019, in which two of the great fictional antiheroes — Captain Nemo and Captain Ahab — are pitted against each other. A pair of novels, rescued from the dustbin, soon to be back in print. Hard to imagine much of anything that would be more gratifying.

As things progressed the new publishers showed me some proposed cover art, which I did not love, but felt that secondary to the fact that the books would have a new life. I did not linger on the disappointment.

I now have a new (and forever) agent. Due in large part to her persistence, late last year a consortium of Los Angeles independent presses — Rare Bird Books and Unnamed Press — decided to reissue Destiny Express. They felt that a novel about artists confronting the onrush of fascism might be timely in its own grievous way…I showed Dave’s work to the Los Angeles publishers, who were as enchanted as I was. Dione and the King estate generously gave their permission to use Dave’s images.

A confession: I am very good at acquiring books, not so good at deaccessioning them. I have rented storage lockers, something I do not recommend. (Do as I say, not as I do.) My son was preparing a move from Los Angeles to New York and so we made the pilgrimage to Coldwater Storage to place some of his possessions, and perhaps to find some pieces to take with him. In the course of a long day rummaging through the locker — picture the Western Manhattan Warehouse in the final sequence of Citizen Kane — we came upon Dave’s cover art. Which, in the intervening years, I’d entirely forgotten about. The discovery, the surprise, occasioned great joy. And also, if I may, brought real tears: Dave, extraordinary man and extraordinary artist, had left us seven years before.

There is, as you may have intuited, a happy ending afoot. I showed Dave’s work to the Los Angeles publishers, who were as enchanted as I was. Dione and the King estate generously gave their permission to use Dave’s images. And so I can tell you with gratitude and pride that a book written in 1979, and its cover made in 1989, now meet officially and triumphantly in 2026.

I mourn the loss of those not here to see the day, and celebrate with those who are. The arc of history is long but — if you live long enough and have a place to stand — you can see it bend. Or you can bend it. To quote a title card from Godard’s Masculin/Féminin: human labor resurrects things from the dead. In these times, that’s a powerful thing to remember.

Here’s the 229th installment, featuring comedian, actor, podcaster, musician, and TV writer Eliot Glazer, author of The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay. - Sari Botton

P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

Subscribe now

Eliot Glazer is a comedian, actor, podcaster, musician, and writer for beloved TV shows including New Girl, Younger, and Broad City, on which he played “Eliot” in his most challenging role to date. He lives in Los Angeles. His first memoir in comic essays THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD GAY is now available wherever books are sold.

—

How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’m 42, and I’ve been writing professionally for about 20 years, although this is technically my first book of original work.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay, out today, 8/11/26, from Simon & Schuster.

What number book is this for you?

Although I’ve edited an anthology of essays, this is my very first memoir-style book.

When it comes to being part of the LGBTQ+ community, Eliot just can’t seem to find his shade of the rainbow. Through laugh-out-loud yet quietly heartbreaking stories, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay chronicles the glory, chaos, and contradictions of queer modern life by a comedian who always seems to “do gay wrong.”

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

It’s a collection of funny essays, so I guess that would technically be a memoir? But “memoir” sounds really heavy in relation to a book with a lot of talk about boners.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

Poppers make him dizzy. Parties make him panicked. The term “guncle” makes him queasy (what’s so wrong with good old uncle)? When it comes to being part of the LGBTQ+ community, Eliot just can’t seem to find his shade of the rainbow. And in a culture built around the idea of “chosen family,” he can’t even seem to get adopted. Through laugh-out-loud yet quietly heartbreaking stories, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay chronicles the glory, chaos, and contradictions of queer modern life by a comedian who always seems to “do gay wrong.”

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

I first worked as a blogger before transitioning into screenwriting, where I worked on shows like Younger, New Girl, and Broad City. But when the writer’s strike happened in 2023, my book agent—a friend who had seen me often pull my hair out over stuff like casual racism on Grindr and Pride parades being way too hot—was able to finally pin me down and get the proposal done. Once that was locked, we started getting bites almost immediately. That, in and of itself, felt like a type of cognitive dissonance, considering that being courted by publishers is very different from the process of selling a TV show, praying that just one executive will take a chance on you and settle your financial worries for 6-8 months. This was the opposite, and it took me a minute to actually get used to it.

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

The process of writing wasn’t necessarily hard since I’m pretty disciplined at the practice. The hardest part was excavating my own life for material, living in my own head ALL THE TIME. I needed a break from my own interior monologue because he became A LOT. Although it was really when my editor James astutely insisted I replace punchlines with actual vulnerability that it became more intellectually challenging and fulfilling. It’s no secret to me that vulnerability always elicits authenticity in art, but I needed reminding.

It was really when my editor James astutely insisted I replace punchlines with actual vulnerability that it became more intellectually challenging and fulfilling. It’s no secret to me that vulnerability always elicits authenticity in art, but I needed reminding.

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

I changed the names of real people but only ran passages by my family to give them early vetoing rights. It was a pretty nerve-wracking part of the process since I tend to be a “no drama” kind of girlie. But anonymity was a gift in the process, so outside of name-checking my nuclear family, everyone else’s name has been changed to protect the innocent. And the guilty. Mostly the guilty.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

Samantha Irby, Ryan O’Connell, Mike Albo, David Sedaris, Michael Arceneaux… Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz had me legitimately guffawing, and I’d never guffawed in my life! Her ability to marry a burgeoning queer identity with an almost academic approach to millennial nostalgia opened my mind to the possibility of merely attempting to write something in proximity to her book.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

It is scary. It is intimidating. That’s a good thing.

What do you love about writing?

Editing. Pouring over the language to get it just right. Fortunately, it brings out my intense perfectionism.

What frustrates you about writing?

Editing. Pouring over the language to get it just right. Unfortunately, it brings out my intense perfectionism.

What about writing surprises you?

The copy editors, who aren’t technically in the same role as an editor, but whose intrinsic connection to working with my essays and going leaps and bounds beyond grammar policing was the most delightful, unexpected part of the process. I found my literary guardian angels in the margins!

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?

Not any particular routine other than attempting to sit and work for around 4-6 hours without interruption. But as a visual learner, every creative pursuit of mine begins with free handed pencil sketching in my beloved, unlined Shorthand notebook. I’m a visual learner, so before I ingest, digest and synthesize anything creative, it has to start in pencil, pens and colors, even if it’s just highlighters.

I changed the names of real people but only ran passages by my family to give them early vetoing rights. It was a pretty nerve-wracking part of the process since I tend to be a “no drama” kind of girlie. But anonymity was a gift in the process, so outside of name-checking my nuclear family, everyone else’s name has been changed to protect the innocent. And the guilty. Mostly the guilty.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

I’m always hustling: developing, pitching, and selling projects. But I have a band now! We’re called DON HUR, and we describe our sound as dark R&B, like if Thundercat and Randy Newman had a weird little baby.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

I would love to do a follow-up of essays, but I’m also eager to write a book for kids. Reading with my 5-year-old niece reminds me that children’s books are, at their best, life-affirming in the ways in which they can gently introduce young minds to the simplest yet most revolutionary ideas in humanity: empathy, curiosity, individuality, and the reminder that there are, in fact, many different ways to belong in the world. It’s nice to be reminded of that, and I’d love to find a way to contribute to that canon.

In terms of hard comedy, my next project is a YouTube podcast called So U Think U Can Sports in which I ask world class athletes like Charles Barkley about the thing I know least: balls. Because, really, what is the deal with sports, and why are there so many balls?

Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.

1. Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus,  Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, Electric Literature, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. Below is this week’s curation. At the bottom are instructions for submitting. ⬇️

2. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays.

3. The Lit Lab, featuring interviews—The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire—and essays on craft and publishing. There are also weekly writing prompts and other exercises from, ahem, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs (that’s me) exclusively for paid subscribers.

4. Goodbye to All That, where I continue to explore my fascination with the most wonderful and terrible city in the world, something I began doing with two NYC-centric anthologies, Goodbye to All That, and Never Can Say Goodbye, both inspired by Joan Didion’s iconic essay.

   ---

   “"I love memoir. It's my favorite thing to write and to read. So how could I NOT subscribe! Keep up the good work.” - , paid subscriber.

   Subscribe now

***Click here to get more out of this post by reading it online rather than in your inbox.

Essays from Partner Publications…

Finding My Place in NYC’s Black Punk Scene

by

“In smaller towns and cities, like the one I came from, counting all the Black members of the alternative scene only requires a finger or two. A lot of those kids eventually move to big cities to find their people. Pool Bar became a meeting spot for Black alternative kids, as the venue regularly booked Black rock acts. The bands on this bill drew us together. Mixed with the other people of color in the room, for once, the white kids were in the minority.”

LitHub

Face-to-face encounters impose a moral responsibility

by Sasha Chanoff

“With the Congo at war, the odds of getting people out were slim…As we were about to leave, a humanitarian aid worker urged us to see a group of new arrivals in a nearby tent. I said our list was closed — we couldn’t meet or take anyone else. But my colleague Sheikha insisted on taking a look, and I followed. Inside were 32 widows and orphans — traumatized and emaciated. Sheikha leaned down to a young boy holding what looked like a doll and asked its name. Suddenly, the doll’s eyes opened. It was a tiny infant, barely alive.”

WBUR/Cognoscenti

Leaving My Fiancé, Losing My Faith, and Finding Freedom

by Emilee Hackney

“Despite a lifetime of church, I’d only ever had an abstract understanding of God. And now, after everything that had happened, after weeks of pain and fury and unanswered questions and prayers, I was completely unsure of who he was, what his role was in my life or anyone else’s. The cool lake air filled my lungs. It was fishy and salty, sweet and biting. There was another smell, too, fainter—weed and old carpet, engine oil and cherry air freshener. The scent of Jeremy’s car and clothes. It was oddly soothing. I wanted to bottle it up. Take it home. Maybe even wear it myself. I scooted an inch closer to Jeremy and breathed in deeply once more."

Electric Literature

Letter to my Younger Self #9: I Thought Becoming a Mom Would Make My Life Perfect

by

“If I could go back, I’d tell you to think a little more clearly about what you’d want your day-to-day life as a mom to look and feel like. Many people idealize their wedding day and don’t think about what marriage will be like afterward; you did that with motherhood. At 50, I now have the deep privilege of being able to choose how I spend my days, for the most part, when I’m not caring for my daughter. You thought that would be idyllic; I find myself feeling guilty for not finding it as utopian.”

Oldster

Essays from Around the Web…

A Fish Without a Bicycle

by

“We’d no sooner chosen my shiny blue bike than the salesman proposed training wheels. My father looked dismayed; my mother bought the pitch. It wasn’t like her to spend extra money. She’d drive out of her way to save a few cents on canned tuna. But she couldn’t say no to training wheels. ‘Dear, you know how timid Rona is. They’ll build her confidence.’”

Amazement Seeker

What Greek Laiko Music Meant to Me

by

"Antonia taught me the concept of καψουρικά – lovesick infatuation, the ache of wanting someone you can't have. I can't think of a better example than Mitropanos's ‘Δυο Νύχτες’ (Two Nights) – an ominous synthesizer drone, a driving bouzouki and his sorrowful voice punctuated by long drawn-out Ahs. Unlike Marinella's earlier song of the same name, Mitropanos's version seems also about the night within: despair at the unfairness of the world."

The Quietus

No More Sex, Flirting, Scrolling or Swiping

by

“I had become so fluent in abandoning myself that I offered tenderness before ever acknowledging my own injuries. It’s possible to be loved and still not feel safe. What was missing was something I didn’t yet have a name for, something I kept asking the wrong people to provide. I was giving every man who loved me an impossible job: Be solid so I feel solid. Protect me so I feel protected.

NYT Style/Modern Love

The Society for Loose Livestock and Preservation of Wild Abandonment

by

“It was in that moment that the two boys founded The Society for Loose Livestock and the Preservation of Wild Abandonment. Their mission: to bring freedom to all creatures, human and otherwise. The height of its membership was two, himself and Larry. Mostly, Timmy sought to preserve his own wild abandonment, so his emancipation from the duties of school might extend beyond the summer months. However, he also fervently believed in the liberation of all beings, including the livestock on the surrounding farms.”

Looking for the Night Dispatcher

The Big Hot House

by

“Only five guys showed up for the class. Each had a ratty washcloth wrapped around his neck. They were meant to serve as personal cooling devices. But any coolness the cloth once held had long since given way to the building’s oppressive heat. When it’s hot outdoors, it’s even hotter inside prison. “Don’t take it personal,” M told me, as his chin indicated the empty chairs in the room. Class attendance is always sparse during the summer, he told me. The guys don’t relish walking up the hill to the school building. Many languish in their cells, too hot to move. If there’s any sort of breeze, they head to the yard.”

Dorothy Parker's Ashes

What If Your Wedding Day Doesn’t Feel Like the Best Day of Your Life?

by

“The social media forums I’ve visited describe someone who goes from fiancée to wife as having “graduated,” so maybe the experience is academic. A semester abroad in the land of brides, where one is to indulge in the beautiful and the feminine, but must remain disciplined over all else. You’re encouraged to spend your life savings on a single night, but that doesn’t free you to enjoy the night. There are rules, traditions—dance with your father, feed your partner cake. Buy a loud, expensive dress, but make sure it’s in a color you will almost certainly stain. Sit in hair and makeup for two hours, and then stand in front of every meaningful presence in your life, bare your soul, and try not to cry your false eyelashes off. The bride who’s still standing (in heels) by the end of the night gets an A.”

Cosmopolitan

My Madonna-Byrd Complex: One Fought Time. One Didn’t.

by

“While I’m used to the shock and awe that comes from more than 40 years of watching Madonna reinvent and preserve herself, I wasn’t expecting to feel shock when I saw Robin Byrd after not seeing her for decades. It took me a few moments to reconcile the woman I remember with the one on the screen. Her signature blond locks have been replaced by a gray top knot. Once known for her self-proclaimed ‘bangin’ body,’ she has gained weight. Although Byrd, as a minor New York celebrity, never had Madonna’s pressures to keep up with industry standards, she’s still done something radical. As a former adult performer, Byrd hasn’t preserved the image of her heyday; she’s allowed herself to look 70. While I would never say she’s let herself go, she has let her former self go, and it’s inspiring.”

Provoked Magazine

A Twenty-Three-Year-Old I Never Met Told Me I Was Wasting My Fifties

by

“I walked into the ICU expecting to support my friend. Instead, I accidentally met myself. Not in a spiritual woo woo way, ‘the universe sent me a message’ vibes. More in the annoying way life occasionally grabs you by the shoulders and says, ‘Sweetie Dahling... we've been trying to reach you about your own existence.’”

Substack

Let it Soften You

by

“While I was at Duke my sorority volunteered at the Ronald McDonald House once a month. We cooked dinner in the communal kitchens — usually grilled cheese and tomato soup — for the families and hospitalized children staying there. I never looked around, never thought much of it then. I had walled off that part of myself, intending to always keep it locked away.”

The Intangibles

The Good, The Bad, The Ones That Walk You Home

by

“Turns out I didn’t really know my route home, and I was a block or two into my walk when I began to strongly regret my decision. No one was approaching me, but things seemed very off and I felt very unsafe. I was in art school at the time, so I was most likely carrying a portfolio and art supplies. Ready to drop them and run if I needed to. And just as I’m thinking Oh fuck, get me out of here, a man appeared at my side.”

Substack

The Dharamshala Sun

by

“When I read about Levy renting a shed from a friend in order to write, the shed to which she bicycles each day and where she writes all her books, I thought of my mother sitting on the bar of the cycle, escaping to my aunt’s home. Both Levy and my mother learned to unlearn what it means to live life as a woman bound by other people’s expectations. The quiet battles they fought in a different era, the way they separated the wheat from the chaff, gave me hope.”

Street Haunting

Crissa Swam in The English Channel

by

“I’ve been trained to think of success in only one direction–forward. There is so much shame in not finishing your swim, not finishing your book, not publishing your manuscript. Open water swimming keeps teaching me there are other directions, like sideways and even backwards, that can ultimately bring a deeper success: resilience.”

Words & Water

A Lucky House

by

“On the day of our visit everything had been removed. Except a stuffed owl up in the cupola, still guarding Grandpa’s attic from an aerial assault by bats. Much like the horseshoes, pointed up for luck, that he hung above doors to guard the house from other dangers. The power was already off as we roamed through the empty shell taking pictures without a flash in dim light coming through dirty windowpanes.”

The Argyle

🚨Announcements:

📢 From Story Studio Chicago, Essay Collection in a Year with

“Our Essay Collection in a Year program will support you during the long road from idea generation to composition to revision and beyond. It’s a unique opportunity to join a writing cohort, study craft, workshop key scenes, measure your progress, meet deadlines, and give and get support in the development of long-form literary work.

Includes: 11 sessions, meeting once per month for 11 months; A manuscript review with Megan Stielstra; Various online social gatherings with your cohort; Discount admission passes to our Master Classes; A private online chat forum; VIP status at the Studio; A literary community to take well beyond this program. $2,750

Learn More/Apply

📢 From : Master Class: Writing Your Memoir with

Award-winning author, journalist and screenwriter, Jerry Stahl is the author of twelve books, including three memoirs -- Permanent Midnight, made into a movie starring Ben Stiller; O.G. Dad: Weird Shit Happens When You Don’t Die Young, and Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tourof the Holocaust, which was included in Kirkus Reviews 100 Best Books of the Year and optioned by Robert Downey Jr.

In this masterclass, he shares the techniques and ingredients you need to turn your life into a compelling book. This session is geared for writers who believe their personal journey is one worth sharing. But before they do, they’ll need a structure and blueprint to get them going.

Saturday, August 15 1:00-3:00pm ET; $150.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Telling Your Story: Memoir with September 21-26

Join New York Times bestselling Care and Feeding author and longtime Anthony Bourdain lieutennant Laurie Woolever for a special writing retreat on a private island in West Cork. Indulge all of your creative senses on this bespoke 5 night writing retreat featuring Laurie Woolever, the author of the memoir Care and Feeding. Our all-inclusive experience includes craft workshops on topics such as recipe writing and the purpose and function of food and travel writing, as well as individual feedback sessions. We’ll meet local artisans and chefs and spend time in nature as we hone our craft.

This takes place on a small private island in the heart of West Cork, Ireland’s food artisan capital, complete with 50 acres of woodland walks, a walled garden, and an indoor pool. $5,000.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Two New Offerings from : Sentence Club and Eating Our Poems: Writing About Food with Karen Zheng

Sentence Club, a craft book bookclub from Literary Liberation, starts August 1st! Join , , and as we work our way through our first selection over the next three months. We all need to take words more seriously. We also need to play more. Maybe that sounds contradictory, but something that social media has made blatantly clear is we all have a responsibility to learn language. To be meaning makers.

Order the book! We’ll read together, annotate together, and meet a few times live to write and discuss what we’re learning. This is free for all subscribers.

Learn More/Sign Up

Eating Our Poems: Writing About Food, led by Karen Zheng, will explore the works of poets like Jane Wong, Nikki Giovanni, and Kemi Alabi to discover how contemporary poets “eat” within their poems. Learn tactics for cooking food into poetry and discover the metaphorical depth of food as a love language, economics, scarcity, and doubt.

Details: Sunday, August 16 | 11a-2p ET | 15 seats available.

Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Submissions Are Open at

is considering essays of up to 1500 words and micro-essays between 500 and 800 words for her excellent magazine, .

“What to send: Sharp, personal narratives with an evocative spin on existential-leaning themes. Stories about the horror and the hilarity of being in the world. The profound and the absurd; the texture, the nuance; a particular way of seeing. How we change, or don’t change; how the world changes, or fails to. How people try. Moments of discovery conflict with the old narrative and challenge a long-held belief. Little things are big. Not everything aligns. Nothing resolves neatly. Make meaning out of chaos, but leave us wondering what happens after it ends.”

Learn More/Submit

📢 ONLY TWO SPOTS LEFT! // From and : Beyond the Noise—A Yoga + Writing Retreat in the Hudson Valley August 27-30

Four days of yoga + guided writing in an intentionally intimate group. You’ll return to what’s true for you and leave with real momentum on the page and in your life. Peel away from the demands of day-to-day life and chart your own unique path forward in the Catskill Mountains. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to pause and reconnect with yourself and your creative purpose.

• Dates: Aug 27–30, 2026

• Where: Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY

• Group size: Only 7 guests (intimate by design)

• Rooms: All private rooms

• Includes: Lodging + all meals + daily yoga + daily writing sessions

• Investment: $3,000 (includes $500 deposit to secure your spot).

  Learn More/Sign Up

📢 Attention Publications and writers interested in having published essays considered for inclusion in our weekly curation:

By Thursday of each week, please send to memoirmonday@gmail.com:

1. The title of the essay and a link to it.

2. Your name and Substack profile link, if you have one, so I can tag you in the post.

3. A paragraph or a few lines from the piece that will most entice readers.

   Please be advised that we cannot accept all submissions, nor respond to the overwhelming number of emails received. Also, please note that we don’t accept author submissions from our partner publications.

   Subscribe now

   ---

Notebooks! Shirts! Mugs! Get Your Memoir Land Merch!

Memoir Land Merch