Drowning by Natasha Williams
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...
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...
My grandparents raised peas, lettuce, and cantaloupe on a 140-acre seaside ranch since 1915, but they could not buy the land, only lease it. Unlike European imm...
My mother drove a blue Volkswagen bug that sounded like a dying jet engine filled with marbles. My childhood is marked by a long succession of clunker cars that...
How do we treat agricultural workers severed from their families? We crush them together in trucks. Pack them in houses containing twenty men. Fail to supply pr...
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...
Most days, I manage to distract myself from the horror of losing my bearing and blurring the lines in the fog of forgetfulness. I carry the markers for Alzheime...
This is how the Holocaust ended for me, a solitary Polish-Jew liberated by American soldiers from the infamous death camp Mauthausen. I was at the time an emaci...
This is why people do it. This is why they cut.
An Excerpt from The Memoir Prize 2021 Honorable Mention: Our Family Walks by Nick R. Robinson; unpublished manuscript.
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...
Her admission that her diagnosis was terrible news showed a vulnerability in her I had never before witnessed. I had believed that nothing ever weighed on her,...
My father and mother are trapped in this country, waiting for many years for permission to immigrate. Every six months he patiently goes alone to the Soviet Vis...
I am over 50, feeling 70 and used to being semi-invisible in big, sexy Chicago and currently dressed for something as far from clubbing or prostitution as anyon...
My mother pressed her cheek to Leslie’s cold face and cried. She rocked back and forth, holding my sister’s limp body close to hers. And those Congolese women r...
An audio memoir exploring anorexia. Madison is not gaining weight and must be subjected to the tube.
Sometimes a voice stops you in your tracks. For me, such was the case with Etheridge Knight. During the past few years, I have been remixing old footage and aud...
This flex-time rehab had been recommended to me by the same doctor who’d prescribed 100 Vicodin every two weeks for fibromyalgia. After a couple of years under ...
My left leg is stuck out as if I was on the verge of going somewhere. My mother will meet him for the first time three months from now.
I started to think maybe I failed the test, the spilled milk test, that I had answered the analyst’s question wrong and that is why they secured me in a room fo...
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 ...