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Writing memoir is a messy business, and no one knows this better than Helen Fremont ’78.

Fremont’s book The Escape Artist serves as a sequel of sorts to her memoir After Long Silence, published in 1999. After Long Silence grapples with the secret Fremont’s parents kept from her and her sister for most of their lives: that they were Jewish Holocaust survivors. Though Fremont and her sister knew their parents had survived World War II, fleeing their Polish hometown, the daughters were raised Catholic. This false religious identity was one their parents assumed to flee Europe, and, to protect those who helped them, it was an identity they kept up until Fremont and her sister were in their 30s. Upon discovery of the truth, Fremont wrote After Long Silence, revealing the secret her parents had kept for over 50 years. “I’d lived my whole life in my parents’ fiction, governed by lies and secrets and half-truths,” writes Fremont in The Escape Artist, about After Long Silence. “I needed to write something that was my own truth.” Truth exposed; case closed.

Keep reading in Wellesley Magazine.

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I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee the other night. This was not unusual. I like to drink tea before bed, and I usually wake up at least once in the night to relieve myself. What was unusual was that before falling asleep, I read a story by Daisy Johnson. I dreamt of deep pools thick with eels, of lips dripping with human blood, of an albatross standing on the kitchen table. This time, when I got up to use the bathroom, I was not fully awake, so heavy pressed the dreams. My shadow seemed to move on its own; the walls of my apartment appeared to be breathing. And when I heard a rustling on the other side of the bedroom door, never did it occur to me that it was just my boyfriend, puttering around the apartment after a late bartending shift. I stared at the door certain that a pack of violent foxes was clawing at the other side. I gasped and screamed and, finally, woke myself from the dreams.

The post Review of Fen by Daisy Johnson appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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I used a prayer card from a wake as my bookmark while reading So Sad Today by Melissa Broder. It happened accidentally—I went to a memorial service for someone I cared about, and, in wanting to keep her close, slid her prayer card into the book I was carrying with me at the time, which happened to be So Sad Today. But it feels fitting.

2016 has been a bad year for people dying. A lot of people whom I love and admire have left this planet, and we are only one-third into the year. It makes me sad, and it makes my heart beat too fast at night as I think about who will go next. I try deep yoga breathing, I try counting backwards from a hundred, I try taking a swig of NyQuil, and, when none of that works, I get up and read So Sad Today. Reading about Broder’s own anxiety and depression makes me feel better and less alone. I’m writing this review in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking too much about death. That also feels fitting.

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A friend posted a picture of me from her wedding, and all I can see is my stomach. I’m with friends, wearing goofy hats for the photo booth, having fun, but I don’t care. Something about the way my body is contorted, or how that slinky polyester is the most unforgiving, or how the waistband of my nylons cut across my middle, but there it is: the bright blue fabric rippling like thick waves over the uneven surface of my bulging gut––an oozing, distorted potato.

Wow, I think. You’re fat.

Mona Awad’s fiction debut 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a novel in thirteen vignettes about the experience of being a woman dealing with body image issues or simply put: The experience of being a woman. At the time I saw that wedding photo of myself, there were probably thousands of women online at the same time, also looking at photos of themselves, also thinking the same thing––no matter what those women actually weigh.

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Save three stray years, I have lived in Massachusetts my entire life. It’s a small state, and running into people I know is rarely a surprise. Sitting on the train in Boston, I’ll hear my name, and a former high school classmate will be four seats down. Walking through Harvard Square, I’ll pass one of my best friends on her way to dinner. Any time I meet someone from Massachusetts, I play that old game: Where did you grow up? Oh, do you know so-and-so? She’s from there too. Where did you go to high school? Oh, what about…

This phenomenon isn’t restricted to New England. Every place has its networks, no matter the size. A place can’t get much larger than Russia, and yet the world that Lyudmila Ulitskaya creates in her novel The Big Green Tent feels as intimate as Cambridge. The characters run in their own circles––the Russian intelligentsia, Moscow artists and musicians and poets, Soviet dissidents, producers of the self-published literature or samizdat, Russian ex-pats living abroad. Everyone is somehow connected, whether they know it or not.

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