Beth Kephart's Blog, page 132

Where'd You Go, Bernadette: Reflections on Maria Semple's novel and Anxiety Attacks

I downloaded Where'd You Go, Bernadette, a novel by Maria Semple, months ago. Last October, if you want to know the truth, when I thought my life could still make room for books.



Just before we were out the door for our weekend visit with our son, I remembered that the book was idling on my iPad and grabbed the gizmo. iPad books are particularly effective in early morning hours in hotel rooms when you really don't want to wake your husband, but you can't sleep, either. Before the crack of dawn, in a Marriott, I started in on Bernadette.



This is the story of an imploding, MacArthur-winning architect (Bernadette) in a saturated town of too-many five-point intersections (Seattle) who has a TED talk star of a husband employed by Microsoft. It is the story of gossiping neighbors, mud slides, cruel interventions, and a very smart little girl who loses her mother and hopes that the fragments she assembles (email correspondence, letters, documents) will help her right her world.



It's satire. It's funny. It hurts. It is complex and sophisticated. It gets a little crazy and perhaps (for a few pages) self indulgent. And then it rights itself. I call this kind of risk-taking novel heroic. I marvel at the fluidity of the prose, despite Semple's calculated choice to tell her story in spliced segments.



I recommend.



I always quote from books I've liked, to help give the readers of this blog a sense of what they might be in for. Typically I choose passages for their literary spectaculariness. Today I choose the piece below because when I read it, late today, after 36 hours of intense work on no more than 1,600 words (1,600 words!!!), I cried for the precision of these sentences.



This is, indeed, how an anxiety attack feels. I know. Many nights of many weeks, I know for absolute sure. Sometimes the only thing that can save me is the face of my son or the garden outside my door.



Panic, as explicated by Maria Semple:

... Even sleeping makes my heart race! I'm lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It's a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in 2001, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them. For instance, during the day I might have mused, Hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in Bee's lunch. That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes, I'VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN BEE'S LUNCH!!! I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is the energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness.

A Library Journal Star for Handling the Truth

.Kephart, Beth. Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir. Gotham Bks. Aug. 2013. 224p. ISBN 9781592408153. pap.

$16. COMM

National Book Award finalist for A Slant of Sun, one of her several memoirs, Kephart (creative nonfiction, Univ. of Pennsylvania) has composed a gorgeous meditation on memoir. The author has achieved what few do in the crowded field of writing guides: she has created a work of art simply by reflecting on her own art—the writing and teaching of memoir. In four eloquent parts, Kephart introduces readers to the basic principles of memoir construction, suggests many writing prompts for navigating memories, and discusses the issues of describing living relatives and friends and of striving for accuracy. The book’s highest value lies in the author’s long experience with the memoir genre and its students. She writes with the same lyricism found in her own works and offers here passionate encouragement for would-be memoir writers to embrace truth and empathy, mystery and exploration. Drawing from classroom and personal examples, Kephart introduces readers to the delicate balance that creates the most honest and accomplished memoirs. An appendix of suggested memoirs for reading, grouped by category with generous annotations, is included. VERDICT Highly recommended for anyone interested in the anatomy of a successful memoir and for all writers of literary nonfiction.—Stacey Rae Brownlie, Harrisburg Area Community Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA

Looks like I'm going to the BEA: Thanks so much to everyone who voted for Small Damages as the Best Young Adult Novel of 2012, in the Armchair BEA Awards

Truly, truly unbelievable. Truly impossible, without all of you. Thank you!!!!! to those who nominated Small Damages for this first annual award. Thank you to those who nudged it toward the win against two truly special artists, John Green and CJ Redwine. Thank you to those who make the Armchair BEA possible each year. I can't even imagine how much time and effort you Armchair BEA creators and coordinators put into this program. You have full-time jobs and responsibilities. We are lucky to have them in our lives. I am especially lucky.


Looks like I'll be going to the BEA after all, to accept the honor.



Wow.

to my beautiful students on graduation day

You have inspired me, taught me, blessed me. You go into the world as bright lights at a time when the world needs a cure.



You carry my love forward—and my faith in you.



Congratulations and always,



Prof

spending the weekend with my son; and words I once wrote, discovered by another

We arrived just ahead of a massive storm. Ran through thinning rain drops. Settled down, then walked some more, and last night had a meal at a restaurant of his choosing. I took this photograph just as the storm was lifting. That's the Freedom Tower, fast becoming the western hemisphere's tallest building.



Today was glorious—a morning spent walking the quiet streets of SOHO, taking photos at the front doors of places we love, talking.



Children grow up. That's what they do. And when they are happy—when they have built their own lives, when they have made their own choices, when they show us their 'hoods and their homes—we are old and young in the same vast moment.



A happy day to all of you—no matter who you are or where your life has taken you.



And thank you to Melissa Middleman Firman, who discovered my words here alongside the words of truly great people. I often don't know what I'm doing standing in the same room as some of my heroes and heroines. I certainly don't know what to wear to the party. But I'm glad I was invited.

in which Beth makes use of her pottery experiment

and grows ever more determined to do better next time.

my garden was in desperate need of me

All spring long I've looked outside my window despairing as the yellow weeds and the puffy weeds and the violet verticals choked my planned things in. I am a gardener. I love the things that grow. I have not been able to save my private world from the havoc of unwanted things.



Today was long; no need to list. And I still have things to do. Still, after seeing that the tree peony is already blooming without the benefit of contextual care, I literally ran from my car when I got home, threw my purse on the porch, and knelt down to tear away at the weeds.



I'm only a third done. It's ragged out there. But this is a portion of my paradise.



I need to take better care.

My friends, my son, Patricia McCormick, Jan Shaeffer, my brother, Philadelphia: the day that was

Yesterday: Work on a new client project—a wonderful new client project. I needed to be very still, and think. And then the kind surprise of the


From the campus I flew beneath blue-ing skies down Walnut Street to Tavern on the Green, the bar where my son placed his bets on the college basketball tournament several weeks ago. That son, whose actual job involves making very smart decisions about things that can't be entirely predicted, happened to win. Guessed every outcome correctly, earning the prize of $250, three crisp bills that had to be collected in person. Since this boy is now a New Yorker, the collection privilege was all mine. I slipped down the Tavern stairs (breathless and damp). Announced my intention. "I am J's mother," I said—the most important thing I'll ever be, no matter how old he insists on becoming. I was rewarded with an envelope which I will hand deliver this weekend when I see my beautiful child in person for the first time since he moved.



But I digress. For now I was running again, back up Walnut, and north, to a restaurant my friend Jan Shaeffer had recommended, a place called A Kitchen. Jan, I'd said, a really important and wonderful person is coming to town and it's so necessary that we meet at the right place.



(Jan, who leads St. Christopher's Foundation for Children, knows EVERYthing, and I often ask her to tell me more.



Jan, you were right. The meal was perfection. And the company—well, how do I even talk about Patricia McCormick, who is gorgeous inside and out. Greatness is only partially what someone can do, what someone has produced, and anyone who has read this blog, or listened to me talk, or read my Publishing Perspectives interview with Patty, knows that I think Patty's work spells greatness, that I think her work endures. But even if Patty had never written or published a word, her greatness would be transparent. She is breadth and depth. She asks, and she listens. She stands beneath the dark skies, shining. She leaves you slightly off balance.



To the skies that drizzled, then cleared. To rainbows. And to my brother, with whom I spoke by phone while watching the trains glide by ahead of midnight.



This afternoon I'll be honoring another friend, the very important Mike Yasick, whose red pants and enormity of soul I remembered here. We lost Mike far too soon in March, and this evening he is being honored by his former employer (and my client) Shire at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Philadelphia's Winemaker's Dinner. The Mike Yasick Literacy Center at the Shane Victorino Nicetown Boys & Girls Club is being inaugurated this evening. I am bringing every YA book I've ever written, and signing them to Mike.



In perpetuity.

Please Vote: Small Damages named to Best Young Adult in Armchair BEA List!

This is sort of amazing to me (sort of! who am I kidding?) but Small Damages has just been named to the Armchair BEA Central Best of 2012 list, along with The Fault in our Stars and Defiance. I'm pretty darned sure this is the first time my book has ever been mentioned in the same breath as the work of John Green or CJ Redwine, and, well, yes, of course I'm the gonzo underdog here, but...> It would be so cool if you voted. It just would be so cool.



You can vote for this category and many others here. Voting ends May 13. 



I am so, well, grateful! Truly grateful. Is there another word?

I had been waiting for a sign. It came.