Jim Morrison lolls on the beach in my mind, and I let go of the day and follow him down to this other world. Do women get to be so free, lounging, writing, owni...
“Have you taken anything or had a drink in the last twenty four hours?” Tim, the intake nurse asked. “We’re going to take a sample, so no need to lie.” I lied a...
Does it start with what damaged him—a father who only survived starvation in a series of Japanese POW camps because he was a natural scientist, a botanist, who ...
Like everyone in our family, I cut Uncle Ben a lot of slack. He’d returned from the Second World War a paraplegic. He would spend the rest of his life on the si...
The practice of medicine is based on the physician’s ability to gather story from the patient. Our story is our human identity and our humanity. It is also the ...
Since childhood sexual abuse is a risk factor for schizophrenia, I’ll always wonder what role Doug played in her plunge into insanity. I didn’t realize that the...
How does one find self-worth standing before the evidence of broken dreams, unrealized potential, and past mistakes? This is what plagued me as I stared at the ...
I’m not sure if my mistake was in joining together reality and fantasy or if I simply was treading someplace where I didn’t belong.
Stories are my past. They bob along a lazy river waiting to be plucked up, cherished, and set back down to drift. But they are images, merely snapshots in free ...
After August 31, the good mornings and goodnights disappeared. In the push/pull of bipolar, as he muddled through the anhedonia, ambivalence, and anxiety, his c...
By episode 20 or 21, I started thinking of cooking in a new, sacred light. I felt a profound need to honor Mom and Grandma by finally learning to cook.
As a gay woman, I have acquired a quick bar banter that cuts men loose before they can get my name. In response to their drunken prattling, I cut to the chase. ...
I have a student who is failing my class. He wants to be writer, but he comes to me and tells me that he can’t write because he is depressed. He is wearing paja...
If I were a religious person, I would say something blessed me that day. But I’m not a religious person. Perhaps some part of me believed, as I still do, in the...
"Did you know some hospitals have an entire department dedicated to rape victims?"
I think these people mean to say, that my mother with Alzheimer’s, behaves differently from the mother I knew without Alzheimer’s.
“Do you want me to shoot myself?” My father asked me, thick metal in his thick hand—loaded, I knew. It was always loaded. After one or two drinks, the gun was d...
“That’s his heart,” they said, needing no answer. It was warm in my hands, the pulsating memory still strong. I had never seen blood so red, not even my own.
Congratulations to everyone who submitted to the 2018 Memoir Magazine #Guns and People Essay contest! We thank those who have submitted their personal stories ...
The Second Amendment doesn’t cross your mind as Girlfriend 2 shakes and cries....
