Adverse Childhood Experiences
My body is a series of numbers. I weigh 204, I wear a size 16. My waist is eight inches smaller than my hips, my breasts are 38B. I should probably go up to a 4...
He was disheveled and smelled like cooked grease and cigarettes. It was an odor I associated with his being poor and hemmed in. There was so much about our life...
Maybe I should tell her that Daddy drives with his knees while poking triangle holes in beer cans? Or that he once fell out his car door while rounding a corner...
In short order, I went from liar to thief. I took my brother's silver dollar collection. No one spent old silver dollars, so when I tried, the manager of the 7...
As a girl coming-of-age in the late 1980’s, I was told I could go anywhere and be anything I wanted to be, but of course, no one could tell me how to do this, o...
But senior year, Katie’s talent moved from talent to sorcery. She drew what was real and unimaginable. Where did she get these ideas? How did she dare to put th...
A memoir in the finest sense of the genre! An easy read, packed with astonishing events that flow into one another like water, The View From Breast Pocket Mount...
I don’t have a mom who fell in love how I was able to fall in love. My mother is a survivor in a way most Americans won’t ever understand. I am honored to be th...
I am twelve years old and, between fifth grade and seventh grade, I have gone from flat-chested to a Double D cup. Some girls envy me, and gossip, but they don’...
She was frequently absent from my class, sat in the back with another African American student, and never participated. I wrote notes on her papers to come to ...
My voice climbed an invisible staircase until at the top step of my skull it jumped up and down and waved its arms in the air. “Wake up, mom! Wake up!” I said. ...
As I watched this soft-spoken, self-effacing elderly man repeatedly humiliated by his wife, all the venomous rancor I had held for years completely dissipated. ...
On the way home, he took me here, to this place under the Tappan Zee Bridge, on the shore of the Hudson, on the front lawn of an apartment complex where neither...
I am lazy, fat, asinine, stupid. I still feel his red hot anger, the spit on my face, and the insults flying toward me. The feelings and labels remain, despite ...
In presentations for Breaking the Silence NM, a program to teach mental illness and suicide awareness to youth, I wanted to reach young people before suicide be...
I opened my mouth; my entire body becoming a scream that ripped open the night, a scream so heavy it was mercurial, filling every corner of the room with a blue...
Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, an elemental life not “frittered away by detail.” He wrote about the essentials of life, “I do believe in simpli...
An Excerpt from The Memoir Prize 2021 Honorable Mention: Our Family Walks by Nick R. Robinson; unpublished manuscript.
A friend, or a date, or a stranger who spotted him lying in the street, a person brave enough to touch a seizing, unconscious man, would search Eric’s pants for...
There were my mother’s stories, and there were my books. Books were imaginary but some books could be true; Betty’s stories were neither true nor not-true, they...
