January 2025 Recap: Here's what you missed last Tuesday.
Plus the February 11 lineup!
Must Love Memoir is officially back!
We want to sincerely thank all who braved the frozen tundra to join us and support our readers last Tuesday night. It felt so good to be back with this community, finding joy and comfort in each other’s stories. Feeling sorrow together and laughing at the same jokes.
It truly is magical to share our little corner of New York with all of you.
Of course we know that winter can be the hardest time to do anything, especially leave the apartment, and especially when the world remains caught in an endless cycle of terrible news and everything is awful all the time.
Motivation is hard to cobble together when temperatures are hovering in the teens, the wind chill is in the single digits, and general optimism for the world we live in is lower than both combined.
So we understand if you just wanted to stay under the covers last week. And we put together a little recap of our January event, just in case you missed it!
Elizabeth Austin, our first reader of the night (and of the year!), read from her memoir manuscript about her daughter’s years in leukemia treatment. In the section she shared, hospital staff were attempting to insert a feeding tube down her daughter’s throat since she was hardly able to eat or keep food down. In the oncology ward, writes Elizabeth, the currency is “false cheer.”
She described feeling helpless as a mother watching her daughter endure not only pain but painful treatments as well, with the hopes of her getting better. In a gut-wrenching scene, Elizabeth has to hold down her thrashing eight-year old as hospital staff insert a tube down her nose and throat. The only words Elizabeth could say to herself during those awful moments were, “I’m helping her. I’m helping her.”
Following Elizabeth, was our own Krystal Marie Orwig, who took a break from sharing memoir excerpts and instead read us a light-hearted piece called “Notes on Bartending.” In this piece, Krystal reflected on her years as an under-appreciated bartender, but using humor that kept the audience both laughing and nodding along with understanding.
She described the back pain that came from standing at a 45 degree angle for the better part of an eight-hour shift and about meeting her friend Elizabeth, who helped Krystal learn how to navigate New York City. Krystal included a list of things to never say to your bartender, like “Surprise me” when she asks what drink you’d like. She talked about the stress dreams that still sometimes haunt her about being in the weeds; and about the regulars who came to the bar, including the man who became her boyfriend (nine years together now!).
Next up was Katie Bartz, equally excited and nervous to take the mic after not having read her work aloud in years (and we’re thrilled she did it for us!) Katie wrote about a recent terrifying apartment fire that began while she was in the shower. She burned her hands trying to put out the fire, then alerted neighbors in the hall. In the darkness of the smoke, she searched for her missing cat, who luckily had escaped through a window. Katie was asked questions by investigators and in the ambulance, worried she had indeed lost everything.
Later, rooting through the home for anything salvageable, Katie saw for herself the extent of the material losses. But Katie wasn’t just writing about the fire. She skillfully wove in her own experience of borderline personality disorder and how she “loves like a house on fire,” feeling things very deeply. She connected the fire to an unhealthy relationship, bravely sharing the difficulty that BPD can be in relationships, romantic ones or not. Katie, thank you for writing courageously about mental health.
Filling in for one of our readers who was sick and couldn’t make it, was Sarah Sturgis, who read from her memoir in progress about grieving the loss of her mother and all that entailed. She read from the beginning of the manuscript, where, as a young adult, things came to a head, and she experienced a breakdown in the San Francisco airport while trying to get home.
Sarah writes vividly about being in the back of a police car, wanting desperately to talk to the officer in charge, and then being placed onto a gurney and loaded into an ambulance. From there, she takes us back in time to her childhood, when she used to have frozen yogurt dates with her mother every week. She writes about her mother’s disarming, beautiful smile (a “Julia Roberts smile”) and how sometimes now as an adult, people tell Sarah that she has the same smile.
Our next reader was Ann Van Epps who made us all laugh with her humorous reading. Ann, a comedian, read a piece called “The Holiday that Never Was”, taking place when she was a child after her parents divorced. Her dad would cajole Ann and her sister into going with him to his aunt’s house for Christmas Eve dinner by leaving sad voicemails on the phone.
But events at the great aunt’s house always lacked in the food department, and Ann had some of us guffawing at the visual of her hiding in the bathroom scarfing down rolls that her mother had sent with her. Well, that, and she was also hiding to escape having to sing a part in “The 12 Days of Christmas” as a duet with her cousin.
At dinner, Ann asked for three clams in her soup, instead of one or two like everyone else, and the great aunts were shocked. Ann’s great aunts all sounded like real characters, especially when Ann read that one of her great aunts had been adopted “and the other aunts never let her forget it.”
Our final reader of the night was Cami Talbot. In the piece Cami shared, she started off reading about how she filed for divorce from her husband of seven years, took a trip, then came home to find that he had filed a restraining order against her, claiming a flight that never happened. She found that her belongings had been moved to her mother’s and that her dog had been newly registered in her ex’s name, so she couldn’t even attempt to get him back.
Cami also wrote about working 80-hour weeks as a make-up artist on the set of a show, and feeling depleted and unhappy. Comparing her life to a garden, she wrote about tending to herself and living for herself in order to find healing. I (Hope) especially loved the phrase “becoming my own best friend.”
Next Month’s Reading is just Two Weeks away!
We’re meeting again on Tuesday, February 11th at 7:30 pm at the usual spot for another very exciting lineup. You can see the full lineup below and stay tuned for a post full of more information on these amazing authors.
Also, catch Krystal on Tuesday, February 18th co-hosting The Palace Reading Series!
