Beth Kephart's Blog, page 101

The starred Booklist review of GOING OVER

Yesterday Tamra Tuller called with the first official words on GOING OVER, a starred review from Booklist. I had not had time to get nervous yet—hadn't imagined that there would be a review so early on for an April 1 release. My focus has been placed, entirely, on finishing the Florence novel, a book that has taught me many things about starting over, again and again.

And so the gift was a call from dear Tamra, an utterly unexpected review, and a reviewer who wholly understood what I sought to do with this Berlin book. The gift was that sense of being heard.

I am grateful and relieved.

“A stark reminder of the power of hope, courage, and love.”—Booklist, starred review

In the divided Berlin of the early 1980s, 16-year-old Ada waits for her lover, Stefan, to escape across the wall from East to West. But the odds are against Stefan making it over alive, and against graffiti-rebel Ada evading the notice of the authorities and the brutal punkers hiding in the alleyways. National Book Award Finalist Kephart has recreated the inexorable fear and tension, as well as the difficult living conditions, of Berliners on both sides of the wall, especially those suffering under the ruthless oppression of the dreaded East German Secret police, the Stassi. Ada and Stefan are representative of the families, friends, and lovers separated and destroyed by the wall; their grandmothers serve as poignant reminders of the toll World War II took on the European population. Subplots about the Turks recruited to help rebuild Berlin and the ignored danger to women in all parts of the city add complexity to an already difficult, seldom written about time in the world’s history. Going Over is a stark reminder of the power of hope, courage, and love to overcome the most taxing of human struggles: war, its aftermath, and captivity. 

Celebrating the Launch of Shebooks

Looking for something bright in this new year? A new literary idea that really works?

I have one word for you: Shebooks.

Readers of this blog might remember my post about a certain Shebooks writing contest a few months back.

Today I'm talking about the suite of Shebooks singles already available for downloading. These exquisite "mini" books of some 7,500 words each fit in your hands, can be read in a sitting, and can be downloaded for a mere $2.99 each. That's one thing. The other thing? They're written by writers you already know and love. Marion Winik. Laura Fraser. Hope Edelman. Micah Perkins. Ann Pearlman. Jessica Anya Blau. Faith Adiele. Suzanne Antonetta Paola. Zoe Rosenfeld. And many more to come.

I find the entire concept—the brainchild of Peggy Northrop and Laura Fraser—exhilarating. I've found the Shebooks themselves to be knock out reads—quieting, intriguing, considered, intimate, and intimately addressed to the reader (Want to eat the food of Italy without actually getting on a plane? Read Laura. Want a companion as you consider the lost and found of memory? Marion is your guide. Want to be carried backward in time, to a black and white engagement? Read Ann. Etc.). I feel incredibly lucky to be included in this community, with my own mini-memoir—Nests. Flight. Sky.—due out soon. And I feel especially happy to invite my women writing friends to consider submitting their own work to Shebooks.

For more on Shebooks, read Caroline Leavitt's interview with Laura Fraser, Editorial Director and Cofounder. Look, too, for upcoming essays and interviews on Jennifer Haupt's wonderful Psychology Today blog, One True Thing. And download a book, or two on this snowy day. It'll be the best bit of change you'll ever spend.

Book kindnesses at the end of 2013; looking peacefully toward the year ahead

I send a big surging thank you to Wendy Robards and Serena Agusto-Cox, who generously featured Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir on their Best of the Year lists. These two young women (and they will always be young women, because of the depth of their souls) read books, know books, support books, and all of us out here are made better people by the tireless reading and writing they do.

The link to all their favorite books of the year (worth reading!), on their very wonderful blogs, are here (Wendy at Caribousmom) and here (Serena at Savvy Verse and Wit).

Also, a very big thanks to the blog known as wordchasing, which shared these beautiful thoughts about Small Damages, published this year by Penguin as a paperback.

To all of those who were so kind throughout this year—to Dr. Radway's Sarsparilla Resolvent, to Handling the Truth, to the paperback editions of Small Damages and You Are My Only—thank you. I am looking forward to the release of Going Over (Chronicle Books) in April and to the release of my mini-memoir, Nests. Flight. Sky., by Shebooks in a few weeks. I am at work, this week, on the very final edits of that Florence novel that consumed so much of me this year, and is, thanks to a trusted relationship with Tamra Tuller, rising to its full potential.

My life is easing, in other words. And my mind begins to spin new stories.

Slowly.

I am grateful to all of you who make this writing life possible, and I wish you peace and happiness from the bottom of my heart.

Remembering my mother, bright, on her final day

On December 30, 2006, we lost Lore Kephart, my mother. We remember her vitality, her curiosity, her integrity, her ingenious mind, her long laughter, the things she made, baked, wrote. The brightest flowers in the world are not, in fact, bright enough to honor her, but we leave them near her stone—a semblance of her soul.

I found the photograph above at my father's house a week ago. We startled when we saw it. It's the evening of the Wills Eye Hospital grand opening, an event my father had helped make possible by leading the philanthropic effort. My mother looks just like a movie star. She is listening, truly listening, one of her greatest qualities.

We miss you, Mom.

The Goldfinch/Donna Tartt: Reflections

As the last few days unfolded—through Christmas gifting and hostessing, through cooking and cleaning, through stripping an old kitchen bare in anticipation of remodeling, through the quiet pile up of real work with ticking deadlines—finishing Donna Tartt's 775-page The Goldfinch became a point of pride. I'd never read Tartt before, as I've written here previously, and I'm naturally inclined toward the kind of compact, complex, emotionally engaging, linguistically inventive novels that writers like Alice McDermott, Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann, and my friend Alyson Hagy (among many others) write. But I'd bought The Goldfinch and I wanted to read The Goldfinch. I fought to find the time.

The plot can be boiled down to a few sentences: A boy, Theo, loses his mother in a museum explosion and hurries off, in the numb aftermath, with one of the world's most treasured paintings under his arm. A rich Manhattan family will take Theo in. Next a dear antiques refurbisher/dealer (the book's most wonderful character, in my opinion). Next Theo will move with his wayward, gambling father to Las Vegas, fall in with a wild friend and all manner of drugs and disrepair, then return to Manhattan, the implications of that missing painting escalating through it all. Old characters will turn up in new places. Addiction and dealers, sordid transactions and unenviable mistakes will consume much of Theo's time, and much of the tale.

It's a story Tartt takes her time telling—sometimes with the slow ease of old-fashioned nineteenth century novels, sometimes with the hurry of a caper film, always with great attention to every detail. Tartt knows antiques and paintings, drugs and obliteration, snaggletoothed, double-dealing friends who have just enough "good" in them to redeem their presence in Theo's life, and in the reader's. She can write brilliantly and she is, above all else, patient, never hurrying (to say the least) to complete a scene or to get to the next bout of stolen-painting-induced action.

She writes, with expert atmospherics, like this:

Through the dusty windows I saw Straffordshire dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystal, tarnished silver, antique chairs and settees upholstered in sallow old brocade, an elaborate falence birdcage, miniature marble obelisks atop a marble-topped pedestal table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos. It was just the kind of shop my mother would have liked—packed tightly, a bit dilapidated, with stacks of old books on the floor.

As the novel progressed, I felt, at times, more keenly aware of Tartt's strategies (as a sentence maker, as a storyteller) than I perhaps wanted to feel. I also felt bogged down by the deep seediness of the majority of the characters, save for Hobie and Pippa, the antiques dealer and his young charge, and Theo's absent mother. Theo can barely rescue himself from the tortured person that he is, from all the bad that he reeks and reaps. There are, in all these many pages, few instances of light. At times all the rot began to weigh me down, no matter how immaculately Tartt evoked it:

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.

Still, Tartt rises, symphonically, at the end. Asks the big moral questions about how much control any of us really have about who we are, what we want, how we see the world, how we navigate through it. Indeed, I found the final pages of the book—after the caper elements of the plot had long been put to rest—to be the most thrilling in the book, the mark of all that greatness for which Tartt is justifiably famous.

Black and White. Family Stills. Julia's Photographs

My niece Julia is a photography student at Corcoran.

This past semester she took a photographic series using a film camera that explored the generations of women in her family. As one part of that assignment, Julia and I spent a day at my father's house—time in the attic, time among orchids, time with birds, time with things I've made or loved.

I'm not the best photographic subject in the world. Indeed, I find it utterly unnerving to be in front of a camera—a reality that threatened to make Julia's project more challenging than it already was. Julia respected my discomfort. Deliberately took images that preserved my sense of self—hands, a face in shadows, a tilted chin.

Over Thanksgiving Julia shared a number of the images she had taken for this expansive project, and I thought they were remarkable. Yesterday I received a gift of several black and white images that Julia developed from our time together.

I love all the pictures. I share a few with you.

final meals in an old kitchen

This old kitchen—modest in every way—has served us well during the past twenty years or so. It has held up under first-book launches, client dinners, fundraisers, meals with friends, literary salons (of sorts), spaghetti on the crowded days, elaborations on days when there was time, a surprise birthday party for my father, many meals for my parents and in-laws, countless conversations, and one single crowded Thanksgiving, which I remember with more sadness than joy. My guests were almost always accustomed to more glamorous environments, and more elegant menus, than I could provide. We have done what we could, this kitchen and I. And hoped the conversations compensated for all other shortcomings.

But it is time to go. To replace the wobbly electric oven (on such a slant that the frying eggs run like sprinters to the back of the pan and coagulate there, in a long white/yellow line) with a gas stove. To exchange peeling formica for something that shines. To get a dishwasher that makes the dishes cleaner when they come out, as opposed to encrusted with wrong hues.

Nothing will be bigger, but everything will be sweeter. And so today, following wonderful holiday meals, we begin to prepare this kitchen for its end, and new beginning. My brother-in-law has helped sort and consolidate spices. I've riffled through the tax papers early. We have rid ourselves of the broken ice cream scoop and the chipped green stirring spoon and the spotted salad tongs.

There is something like nostalgia in all of this.

And also anticipation.

The HANDLING gift, in Poets & Writers

We send our books into the world unarmed and hopeful. We are grateful to those who join our workshops, who send kind words, who tell us the story of the story.

We have no idea what we would do without them.

I am grateful this year to those of you who embraced Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir. Who made room for it in busy lives and on crowded shelves. Who set it aside for a friend.

Today I received this issue of Poets and Writers, wrapped in a bow. The ad, which was designed by my husband, was placed by my agent, Amy Rennert, in the January 2014 inspiration issue of the magazine that I read first and always when I was a writer just starting out on my own. Amy has believed in this book from its very inception. She has cheered it along. She said, We need an ad, and she made it happen, wrapped it up in a bow. Gotham Books shared Amy's vision, and so the gift is from them, too.

Faith in a book that was a joy to write.
A million thanks to Amy and Gotham.
 

Our holiday card

Each year, my husband and I assemble a holiday card. The art is his domain. I search for words. This year we turned to clay, something we've both been learning about over the course of this past year.

Bill's work is true art—sculptural, architectural, finished, and (sadly) not pictured here. My work is amateur stuff, but most of the time (most of the time) I'm having fun.

So, a mug from me, a photo from Bill, some secret fires burning, and our best wishes, to all of you, for the season ahead.

(You may have to double-click on the words to read the card.)

bringing the Santas home

The weather isn't right for the day before the day before Christmas, but yesterday, at my father's house, we rescued some Santas from my mother's glorious collection. I took the smaller ones, especially wanting to bring back home the Santas I had given her.

I place them here today, beneath the mantel, in tribute to her, and to all families at Christmas.