Beth Kephart's Blog, page 262

When we are left behind, we cannot leave ourselves behind

In the chill of this morning I drove to church and sat among people whom I consider to be dear and good friends—people whose lives and children I admire, people who make me laugh.  I had been thinking, quietly, about the people who walk away from our lives, who no longer need what we have offered, who have found themselves moving past us toward something bigger, more enticing.  I had been thinking, too, about the work I do for others, and how it can sometimes leave me feeling small, and I was sitting in the pews, my thoughts moving in and out, when Victor Wilson, our minister, began his sermon.



There, within his narrative about trust, were words I'd written years ago for a story in Science and Spirit magazine. He'd mentioned, months ago, that he had found the piece, but I had no firm recollection of it, and so was surprised to sit within this echo of myself—the young me talking to the now me, saying these words:


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It is so primal, this thing called trust.  So basic to our survival.  Without trust could we attach to one another, could we love?  Could we forge societies and build institutions?  Speak and believe that we've been heard?  Would we set up housekeeping?  Trade one thing for another?  Lie in another person's arms?  Dare to procreate?  Freely slip away to conjecture, to be curious, to dream? We'd be at war every day of our lives if we didn't trust.  We'd be anxious, jumpy people.   We'd be on-guard, fenced-in solitaires — withered souls with narrowed eyes.

I don't want to live, I realized again today, without trust.  I don't want the behavior of others to take it from me.  I want, still, to believe in what is good, and I will, still, pursue that good, and if going forward some find me just a bit more guarded, a bit less eager to lavishly help, all it means is that I'm waiting for them to earn my trust.

W.I.P.

"Later, when the rain stopped, she saw, from her window, a spider's web within the branches of a tree—the rapid glisten of its architecture.  She could not fathom why he had let out his thread and bound and dangled and trusted that any bracing would ever hold him."
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When real life intersects with fiction

I had been at work on versions of YOU ARE MY ONLY for several years.  It was, at first, a book that emerged from my fascination with a certain abandoned mental hospital in Philadelphia and the urban explorers who had inhabited that place.  It was, also from the very start, a book about the ramifications of abduction. Long ago, I'd watched a woman leave an infant unattended in a back yard.  That image had always stayed with me; in time, it became fiction.



Yesterday, I was at a client office when, on the TV screen, I saw the muted news about Carlina White, who was 19 days old when she was abducted from a hospital and who, 23 years later, solved her own case.  She reports being moved from home to home, city to city, much as my character, Sophie is.  She speaks of the paranoia of the woman who abducted her, and of the faith her biological family always had that she was still alive.



I had planned to post the cover of YOU ARE MY ONLY yesterday afternoon.  This convergence of real life and fiction is, I find, eerie and haunting.  I am exuberant that Carlina White has found her home.  I am heartbroken that she had been taken from it for 23 long years.

YOU ARE MY ONLY: the cover reveal

I have been waiting—oh, I have been waiting—to post the cover of YOU ARE MY ONLY, which is due out from Laura Geringer Books/Egmont USA this fall.  Neil Swaab, who set me dancing with his DANGEROUS NEIGHBORS cover, was brought on board once again.  This is the magnificent result of his fine eye and heart.



And I am so grateful, too, to editors Greg Ferguson and Laura Geringer, for putting together the description of the book, which I include here.



YOU ARE MY ONLY will appear in bookstores in October of this year.

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A missing child. A devastated teen mom. Two girls—one traumatic event. 

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Emmy Rane is married at nineteen , a mother by twenty. Trapped in a life with a husband she no longer loves, Baby is her only joy. Then one sunny day in September, Emmy takes a few fateful steps away from her baby and returns to find Baby missing. All that is left behind is a yellow sock. Fourteen years later, Sophie, a homeschooled, reclusive teenage girl is forced to move frequently and abruptly from place to place, perpetually running from what her mother calls the "No Good." One afternoon, Sophie breaks the rules, ventures out, and meets Joey and his two aunts. It is this loving family that opens Sophie's eyes, giving her the courage to look into her past. What she discovers changes her world forever. . .

The riveting stories of Emmy and Sophie—alternating narratives of loss, imprisonment, and freedom regained—escalate with breathless suspense toward an unforgettable climax.

View from a morning Amtrak train

A Photo Tour of Egmont USA

I made my way up from a client meeting on Wall Street to Park Avenue yesterday, where the always-wonderful Egmont USA troupe welcomed me in, bling and all.  You throw your arms around these people when you see them.  You talk travels, sun, book jackets, dreams, classes taught and classes taken, Mickey Mouse, impersonations, architecture, radical movie flops, the delicate matter of the comma.  You go home feeling warmed, alive, like books still matter, after all.  That's Lawsy and me, in the final picture, aligning our bedazzling silver trim.

The World Trade Center Site, Yesterday Afternoon

Writing as to where it takes me

Do you know the whole story already, or are you writing it as to where it takes you? a friend reading pages of the new novel asks.



Writing as to where it takes me, I answer. 



And it takes me, and it takes me.

Let's talk about voice

In the midst of ice and snow, one finds an inverted lime, and beneath that lime, we, the students and one teacher of a certain University of Pennsylvania creative nonfiction class, shall bravely and hopefully brightly but of course I mean metaphorically meet, beginning our conversation about (among other things) voice.  Here's what Joyce Carol Oates has to say about that:

Where in life we sometimes (allegedly infrequently) fall in love at first sight, in reading we may fall in love with the special, singular qualities of another's voice; we may become mesmerized, haunted; we may be provoked, shocked, illuminated; we may be galvanized into action; we may be enraged, revulsed, and yet!—drawn irresistibly to experience this voice again, and again. It's a writer's unique employment of language to which we, as readers, are drawn, though we assume we admire the writer primarily for what he or she "has to say."

Moon over mom (and dad) returning their boy to college