November Feature: Memory, pt.1
- Cordelia Shan
- Dec 4
- 7 min read
November is here. I am not sure about your city, but Toronto has its first snow for this winter on November 9th. Days trimmed short by early dusk and its nights edged with the first frost.
In this penultimate chapter of the year, time itself seems to slow and loop back: the air carries the scent of woodsmoke and nostalgia, and fallen leaves crackle like the pages of an old diary, most people would start buying their new journals and planners for the new year now. It is the season of remembrance and introspection. As we settle into warm corners with books in hand, memory becomes our closest companion -- we read not just with our eyes, but with all the chapters of our lives that live inside us.
Reading with Memory, our November series, invites you on a journey through stories that brim with remembrance: tables of past homes and lost mothers, of personal and collective histories, of dreams, ghosts, all the goods we brought online, and voices long unheard. Each book in this month's lineup illuminates a different facet of memory, like light through a prim, casting rich hues of understanding on what it means to remember.
Join us in this reflective literary sojourn, where the turning of each page is as gentle and evocative as November's light of sun and snow.
Memory is a house, each room holds an echo of the past, and each unlocked door reveals a familiar ghost. In Grace Period, Mateus Silva returns to his childhood home after 25 years and finds the bygone world of his youth eerily altered -- the beautiful neighbor who once enchanted him is now a stranger, and "the women he sees now bears little resemblance to the one he remembers," a poignant reminder that "you can't move forward by revisiting the past."
This taut novella is "haunted by... childhood-glimpsed beauty" and "filled with bittersweet melancholy". As Mateus struggles to reconcile memory with reality, Cavalho delivers a spare, bittersweet portrait of a man reckoning with lost time. Grace Period opens the door to a quiet room in the soul - one where old love, regret, and longing sit together in the dust-moted light of late autumn, teaching us that leaving home is easier than returning.
An unseen presence that lingers at the edges of our lives, whispering in moments of solitude. In Motherhood and Its Ghost, Egyptian poet Iman Mersal listens for the spectral echoes of motherhood -- the voices of the silenced, the departed, and the ever-were. This essay collection (part memoir, part lyrical inquiry), emerges as an "achingly tender" project of self-narration.
Rather than offering the usual sentimental tales, Mersal illuminates the "guilt, angst, and conflict" that often haunt motherhood.
She lost her own mother at a young age, and that loss becomes an abiding ghost: at one point Mersal recalls a lullaby from her childhood, only to find "it is a question that at once conflates motherhood, motherland, and mother tongue" -- a conflation of memory and identity. Through fragments of personal diary and reflections on literature and art, Mersal holds a candle to the uncertainties and paradoxes inherent in motherhood and in life.
The result is elegiac and illuminating. Motherhood and Its Ghosts invites us to a midnight vigil with memory, where the act of remembering is as vital and complicated as a mother’s love, and where the absences in our lives speak as loudly as the presences.
Memory is a journey: a long road of transformation, where each step forward is also a step back into the stories that shaped us. In Revathi: A Life in Trans Activism, author A. Revathi retraces her path from a village in Tamil Nadu to the forefront of India’s LGBTQ+ movement, illuminating how personal memory fuels public action. Translated from Tamil by Nandini Murali, Revathi’s memoir charts her remarkable voyage from a childhood of unease in a male-assigned body, through her escape to a Delhi house of hijras (South Asian trans women), and on to her emergence as a courageous activist. Her life story is not told in isolation but “illuminates how the personal intersects with the communal and institutional for trans Indians.”
We see Revathi progress from a humble office assistant to the director of an NGO in Bangalore, then strike out as an independent activist and even a theater collaborator – all the while questioning the ‘safe’ and ‘comfortable’ gender binaries society takes for granted.
What makes this memoir especially powerful is how Revathi opens up beyond herself: in later chapters, she shares the struggles of trans men she calls her sons, interweaving their voices with her own.
Revathi: A Life in Trans Activism is both deeply personal and vividly collective – a journey of becoming that carries an entire community’s memories of marginalization, resilience, and pride. Reading it, we travel with Revathi and discover that memory can be the roadmap to change, guiding us from who we were told to be toward who we truly are.
Reflective and refractive, revealing truth even as it doubles and distorts. In Exposition, French author Nathalie Léger turns the mirror of memory toward art, history, and herself. Translated from French by Amanda DeMarco, this genre-defying book is part biography, part archival inquiry, part personal essay – a kaleidoscopic reflection on a 19th-century countess and the author’s own obsessions. Léger’s subject is the Countess of Castiglione, famed for having once been “the most photographed woman in the world”.
Through the countess’s self-portraits – staged, glamorous, and eerily modern – Léger peers at themes of beauty, vanity, and the female image, while also gazing at her “own life and research – an archivist’s journey into the self, into the lives that history hides from us”. With evocative symmetry, the narrative suggests that when we study someone else’s image, we inevitably glimpse our own: “With mirrors and lenses,” Léger intimates, “we may write and perform the stories of our lives, but our roles have also been written for us, and have already been performed by other women”.
Exposition thus becomes a hall of mirrors in which the author’s quest to understand a forgotten countess reflects her deeper quest to understand herself. Profoundly elegant and intriguingly fragmented, Léger’s work invites us to consider how memory – like an old photograph – is at once a documentation and an illusion, an act of both recovery and self-creation.
Flowing, flooding, and often carrying secrets from the past beneath its surface. In Self-Portrait in Green, celebrated French writer Marie NDiaye leads us on a surreal drift along the Garonne River, where memory merges with imagination in lush, unsettling ways. Translated from French by Jordan Stump, this novella is a mercurial chronicle of encounters with mysterious “women in green” who appear, disappear, and shape-shift through the narrator’s life.
NDiaye immediately sweeps the reader into an atmosphere of unease – the story opens with the narrator watching floodwaters rise in southwest France, the river threatening to overrun its banks
As the days and years swirl together, various green-clad women drift into the narrative like debris carried on the current: a ghostly neighbor only the narrator can see, a childhood schoolmistress with green eyes, an old acquaintance who dies and then intermittently returns to life, even the narrator's own mother transforming in unexpected ways. These encounters, told out of chronological order, feel like half-remembered dreams or fragments of a submerged memory.
Disorientation dominates -- cases of misidentification and "misremembering abound" -- yet the writing is so hypnotic that we follow willingly, as it floating along on NDiaye's prose.
Self-Portrait in Green is brief, just over 100 pages but resonant, offering a "slippery snapshot" of a self in flux. It suggests that identity, like a great river, is never fixed -- it moves and churns, shaped by unseen undercurrents of the past, sometimes overflowing in moments of haunting clarity.
An echo that returns over and over, in different guises, across the landscapes of a lifetime. In this book, which the one I am writing right now, we step into the restless mind of Marguerite Duras, the iconic French novelist and filmmaker, to explore the obsessions and memories that haunted her for decades.
This collection of Dura's nonfiction -- essays, interviews, musings -- spans thirty years, and its serves as a "guidebook to the extraordinary breadth" of her interests. Many pieces in this volume are brought into English for the first time, from the stunning one-page autobiographical sketch "Me" to the 70-page reportage piece "Summer 80."
Throughout, Duras’s voice is by turns fierce, witty, and introspective, always circling back to the themes that compelled her. We find “recurring exploration of her own enduring, fastidious writerly self and the themes that haunted her for her entire life.”
Indeed, whether she’s writing about her mother in Indochina, the Paris student protests of 1968, the craft of translation, or the nature of desire, Duras is constantly engaging in a dialogue with her past and her passions. There is a sense that memory for Duras is not linear recollection but a persistent presence – a ghost that drives her to write and rewrite.
The translators note that Duras’s style can shift wildly from piece to piece, but they “capture the liberty and madness… the very breath of Duras’s thought”, allowing us to experience the full intensity of her internal world. Me & Other Writing feels like a personal conversation with Duras across time. Her memories – of love and loss, of war and art – linger in the mind, reminding us that to remember is sometimes to be continually, productively haunted by what has made us who we are.
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