A monthly memoir circle for men learning how to tell the truth about their lives.
One man's memoir on the table. One theme. Ninety minutes. Twelve chairs, and none of them is for an audience.
Black, Brown, immigrant, first-gen and culturally displaced men navigating ambition, masculinity, family, love, faith, shame, and becoming. Men who are fluent in every room except the one inside their own house.
It is not a support group. Nobody gets fixed here. You read one man's life until it says something true about yours, and then you say it out loud, in a room built to hold it.
You do not read the whole book. A week before, you get the pack. Twenty minutes of reading. The rest is the room.
You don't have to finish the book. You just have to come willing to be honest.
The theme is set. One short monologue. Then it starts.
The man, the memoir, the moment. Where his life touches the theme.
One excerpt, read aloud. Some months the host. Some months one of the twelve.
The room talks. The excerpt is the door; what comes through it is yours.
Everyone writes, privately, to one prompt. A few read theirs out. Nobody has to.
Every man leaves with one sentence that starts: this month, I will.
Becoming a man without a complete map.
What did you inherit from your father that you're still trying to understand?
Code-switching, performance, survival.
Where did you first learn to become different versions of yourself?
Achievement, fear, charm, control.
What part of your success is actually a defence mechanism?
Twenty-six men on the shelf. The Mass takes them one month at a time, in the order the book reads them.
Mass 01 is The Father Wound: Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama. Twelve chairs, £20 each, and when they're gone they're gone. The pack arrives a week before.
Missed the twelve, or want the Masses after this one? Leave an address and you'll hear each time a Mass is called: the date, the room, the memoir, the pack.