The Hot Summer Memoirs We're Reading In July and August
A sexy midlife romp in Paris and a representational painter's coming-of-age
This is your quick reference guide to WHAT WE’RE READING IN JULY AND AUGUST, complete with Zoom dates for when Memoiring’s cherished subscribers (you!) are invited to spend a virtual hour with each author!
If you haven’t joined us on Zoom before, it’s less of an author interview than a Q+A where we collectively pepper the author about the content and craft of their memoir. (Fun fact: More than half of the Memoiring community are writers of creative nonfiction, so we go deep on how authors write their books, and much personal wisdom is dispensed.)
Note that Zooms are NOT recorded for maximum off-the-record-ness. So if you miss it, you miss it.
Here are the two incredible memoirs we’re reading together. Get your copy at Bookshop.org or your fave indie bookstore. Dial in from a lawn chair and I’ll see you on Zoom soon. Memoiringly, Melisse
OUR JULY SELECTION
I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris (June 2024), by Glynnis MacNicol. TLDR: It’s a smart and sexy, feminist midlife romp.
After 16 months of pandemic solitude as a single 46 year-old, MacNicol flew to France, renting an apartment for un mois. In Paris, she slows down, she bathes and moisturizes, she dines on fromage and baguette with her French friends, and downloads the expedient French dating-app Fruitz to make, ahem, some new ones.
What follows is a joyous time of friendship, food, and lots of sex. (And a careful balancing of her freelancer bank account.) “I’d been so alone and so untouched,” MacNicol said to Vogue. “I just wanted to be alive.”
This book is not fluffy. It’s a thinking woman’s escape.
“I want to provide one happy story that isn’t tied to finding a partner or a wedding or a baby. Let’s have one that’s like, I’m just being hedonistic and naked and eating whatever I want.” — Glynnis MacNicol, Vogue
MacNicol chases down fulfillment *without* marriage or children, a narrative path that’s held at a great distance for most women. While cycling across the city with a friend (a scene that made me want to jump bare-legged onto my bike), MacNicol unearths the buried lived experience of creative female predecessors, from Simone de Beauvoir and Lee Miller to Collette, who paved the way for a meaningful, art-making, sex-filled life without shame or guilt. As MacNicol writes, “the thing women fantasize about most is freedom.” Why should these stories, this path, be so hard to find?
MacNicol points out that when you’re a woman of a certain age, “you are only promised that everything will get worse. But what if everything you’ve been told is a lie?”
The right to enjoy oneself, to find joy in small moments (yes, even alongside the horrors of the world), is pretty compelling conceit.
Grab a copy of Enjoy and sign ups are now open for our Zoom sesh with Glynnis on August 1 at 6:30pm ET. It’s free for subscribers to this Substack.
OUR AUGUST SELECTION
Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (launching today, July 16) by Hyeseung Song. TLDR book blurb: For readers of Crying in H Mart and Minor Feelings as well as lovers of the film Minari comes a searing coming-of-age memoir about the daughter of ambitious Asian American immigrants and her search for self-worth.
Hyeseung Song, who I interviewed for the Memoiring panel at the Deep Water Literary Festival, is an acclaimed American representational painter and the talented author of this gorgeous debut. Her memoir, which begun in notes and scenes almost 20 years ago, movingly details how Song strove to overcome her Texas childhood “on the wrong side of the tracks of a wealthy white neighborhood.” Her mother was controlling and her father pursued get-rich-quick schemes wanting to be a billionaire. Ultimately, he bankrupted the family.
One of the issues with Asian American memoir is the pressure from our families not to offend or tell the truth about our dynamics because saving face is still somewhat important. My dad’s still alive, and he will not read Docile. I know he loves me, and I know he thinks something great is happening—that is, the publication of the memoir—but I do believe he thinks that it’s at his expense, because Docile is not a press release about our family, but a memoir. — Hyeseung Song, Hawaii Review of Books
Getting excellent grades and into all the right schools helped Song for a while, but at Harvard, the model-minority myth caught up with her, she says, and Song wound up in a hospital for a suicide attempt. Dropping out of graduate school and disappointing her parents allowed her to return to her childhood passion of painting and find the self she’d lost.
Docile is a stunning portrait of an artist told through the hard-won life experience of a Korean American woman. Acknowledging the emotional work it takes to write a memoir, and the decades it took to fully capture hers, Song says, “I was encouraged to write from the scar, not the wound. That’s what I’ve done.”
Get a copy of Docile and save the date for September 5 at 6:30pm ET when Memoiring is in conversation with Hyeseung over Zoom. Sign up in advance here!