Humanity, A Memoir by Cassie Mattheis

The first time that I remember reading a memoir, it was summer and I was eight years old. That June, in an attempt to keep a book in my hand and unfinished for longer than a day at a time, my parents had given me something that I desperately wanted; they turned in a permission slip to the local library which would allow me unfettered access to the grown-up books beyond the fortified walls of the children’s room.

With my new ticket to unlimited literary pursuits, I scoured shelves full of topics I had never considered before, bypassing romance novels and westerns for what quickly became my favorite section—biography and memoir.

After my first trip to the library with my grown-up card, I tucked myself into a corner of our front porch in North Carolina with my book: the 1995 My Story, a memoir by country music icon Reba McEntire. I devoured it and then checked it out again and again, amusing my parents and the librarians with my new appetite for celebrity memoirs. I pored over the photos of Reba in her childhood; as a teenager; at the start of her career; as a new mother to her only child. I read about the struggles and uncertainties of this woman whose face and laugh I knew from sitcom television and whose voice poured from my dad’s radio. I loved her like I knew her. I read her book over and over to feel her heartbreaks as my own, and I think that it was because I craved connection on every level, even then.

But my love for memoir did not really begin or end with Reba. In hindsight, I can remember begging my grandparents to re-tell me the stories of their childhoods, even before I could read. I consumed American Girl historical fiction at an alarming rate. And after I was allowed to freely peruse the biography shelves, I would cling to them for years—checking out everything from Chicken Soup for countless and various souls to Elie Wiesel’s Night, which was required reading in high school. I begged to keep my school-issued copy and reread it until I could practically recite passages about horrors I couldn’t fathom.

That chasmic and innate desire to hear the stories of other people followed me into adulthood; into my career; and to the memoir reading team here at Split Lip, where I’ve only begun a journey to understanding exactly what it is about a memoir that speaks to me so deeply and clearly.

Joining the reading team opened up a whole new world of understanding to me, like I was being given access to the adult shelves all over again, years later. I dug into reading submitted pieces with a renewed hunger. I feasted on a kaleidoscopic array of writing that varied by length and topic and voice and style, with every kind of twist and subject matter and form, and with every one I learned a little bit about someone, and a little bit about memoir, and a little bit about myself. I read about the trials and successes and tender moments in the lives of other human beings: the heartbreaks; the soaring joys; grief and loss braided with longing and effervescent happiness.

There is inherent trust in revealing shreds of your own humanity to another person, and to do so in the written word is a particularly vulnerable exercise. It strikes me as I’m reading about a child with cancer; a diagnosis; the painful learning grown out of immense heartbreak—how grateful I am to be reading these words so early in their written existence. The thanks that I offer for the trust I’m given is so big and blooming and remains so small compared to the life that each piece will go on to live. On and on, in myself and in others, these words exist like the humans who pen them—with great bravery, and deep vulnerability.

Split Lip opened the door for me to examine what I knew about memoir, and in turn what I knew about myself as a writer and as a human. Before I even had the vocabulary to understand what I was doing, I built my worldview around the stories we tell. In the endeavor of reading memoirs for Split Lip, I continue to learn what it means. And the thing that continues to strike me every time I unwrap the precious gift of someone’s most personal work is that memoir is even more than the peeks behind the curtain that I craved as a child. The array of pieces that vary so deeply from one to the next is like a perfect rendition of the things that touch us: a diverse, messy, beautiful look into the strings of experience that bind us, one to another; a form of connection; an expression of humanity.

Cassie Mattheis (she/her) (@cassiemattheis) is an essayist, memoirist, and poet from the heart of Appalachia who prides herself on authenticity in her work. She has been featured as the writer of essays on Native American representation in media and aspirational politics in television, and she’s currently exploring new genres in her writing and reading on the Split Lip Magazine memoir team. Her memoir, In the Sunrise Hour, appeared in Split Lip in 2023.