Here are three pieces of creative nonfiction I’ve come across in the last little while that I haven’t found a place to post about individually. I like this format of collecting a few of them as I go.

Warning: They’re each pretty grim in their own way, so if you’re having a rough day, maybe skip this post.

Twelve, by Elissa Lash, in (the essential) CRAFT, and nominated for Best of the Net in their creative nonfiction category.

There’s so much in this memoir that I’m thinking about even days after reading it. It’s about growing up and the expectations and limitations of girls in society:

Beware of flying for they will call you a witch and a bitch. They will use the straw from your broom as kindling for the fire they will build to burn you alive.

There once was a girl named Amelia Earhart. They asked her about her favorite recipe, and what dress she was wearing. Then when her plane was lost, they said it proved their point. Her tragedy was consumed like a whipped dessert.

You might snap your neck when you hit the glass between you and the sky, like a bird flying into a window. The world will whisper, I told you so.

Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for My Father by Jude Doyle

The title’s pretty self explanatory, it’s a memoir of grieving a father who had all kinds of problems. It’s devastating:

My father died in a hotel room, having been evicted from every apartment he ever had, and  fired from every job he ever had, and having alienated every single person he might stay with. It took the management a while to realize that he wasn’t coming out of his room, and it took a while for the police to locate anyone who knew him. 

I Appear Missing by Sara McKinney, in Booth

Just read this one today doing the Sara McKinney short fiction post, and it’s a stunner. I’d pegged it for fiction, but on her website she has it tagged as non:

After the pill that wrecks your life, you wake up poisoned on the salt flat of yourself. Your body no longer works the way it should but instead spasms, tears, throbs with the pain of cellular dissolution. There is no blood to wipe off your face, no open wound to tend or bandage.

---