Beth Kephart's Blog, page 351

Lauren Conrad and Jack Vance: Together, but Not

This interesting pairing in today's New York Times Magazine: the page 15 piece featuring Lauren Conrad's Y.A. book L.A. Candy, and the Carlo Rotella profile, on page 20, of "the greatest living writer of science fiction and fantasy," Jack Vance.

Conrad's book, as Virginia Heffernan writes, "chronicles the intriguingly solemn experience of a young provincial who moves to Los Angeles to become an event planner and achieves hollow fame." From the unabashed bestseller Heffernan shares such lines as

Those Casablancas, and my Glads

Literary Pollination (at last)

I was on word 27,503 of the new novel. I was sitting outside and the breeze was fingering back the pages on my torn-from, sat-on, crumpled-into, water-marked Staples pad, and the Casablanca lilies were in full odoriferous bloom.

I had a novel problem I hadn't been able to solve. I was wondering if I could.

That was yesterday.

Looking for Home in Colm Toibin's Brooklyn

I didn't buy Colm Toibin's Brooklyn because it was on the Newsweek list. I didn't buy it because others were speaking of it, though that always helps. I bought it because Toibin can be a transporting writer, and I needed to be taken somewhere.

Brooklyn took me somewhere. Oh, it did. It's a straightforward-seeming story that is anything but—a chronologically clear progression that hardly dawdles for flashbacks, that doesn't go in for psychowonder, that doesn't delight itself with literary pyro

The Main Line Writer

Every now and then, I have the chance to sit down with an emerging writer, and a week or so ago, I had that privilege with a beautiful young woman (and recent Radnor High graduate) named Caroline Goldstein. Caroline and I sat at Chanticleer and talked about books and life, about the blurred lines between fiction and truth, about the power of place in the books I write, and about many other things.

Today, Caroline's story about Nothing but Ghosts and other Main Line endeavors appears in Main Line

Rejuvenated at Amada (and a NBG review/giveaway)

I have been in the kitchen for much of this summer—planning and cooking lunches and dinners, planning again, cooking again, starting again. Somewhere along the way, food lost its luster. Meals had become the thing to figure out, to be on the ready for. I wasn't, frankly, much in the mood, and the truth is: I miss my mother's cooking. No one ever did or will again cook like she did. I miss her simple chicken, her sandwich cookies, her inventions. My mother taught herself to cook. I never

Astounding Quakebuttock

I know that I'm not supposed to notice these things, but I do: Last night I returned to the low glow of my computer following two hours of delicious So You Think You Can Dance (yes, those dancers, those choreographers, that gorgeous-but-never-haughty Cat Deeley make me cry) to discover that my blog had had, shall we say, a swarm of visitors.

What in the world?, I wondered.

It became clear, upon further investigation, that a single term, "quakebuttock," had brought the masses to me. Quakebuttock,

Does Only Nonfiction Count?

My son has begun reading one of my favorite novels of all time, Paul Horgan's The Richard Trilogy. Seeing my son bent over those pages reminds me of a scene from my fourth book, a memoir called Seeing Past Z. It reminds me of a conversation my son and I had some seven years ago, when most of what I wrote was true. That excerpt here:

He works, exclusively now, at the kitchen table, his own vast kingdom. Sometimes after school, sometime late on Saturdays, sometimes early in the morning, sometim

Unwound, Free

One version or the other of my life perpetually here, or near to here, and I can't recall a July like this—air like streamers of silk against the skin, and the high light of dusk, and a dawn that nudges in. The birds sing like they haven't before, and there are more of them, and there is a generosity about the hours; they make room.

Take it, I tell myself. Take it; it is yours.

I hurry through nothing. I sit and I read. I write a sentence, and then I close my eyes and dream. When I wake, the

Finding Muscular Possibility and Radiant Energy at the Gym

It's been about five weeks now since I left my house in the dark one morning and drove to the gym down the road. It wasn't that exercise was new to me; it was that I was used to doing it alone in my house. Dance and ball exercises in the morning. A walk in the afternoon. Enough cleaning each day to count for something.

But at the gym I have, as I have said before, encountered community—women and men who come together for the purpose of pressing up against their own limitations. Together we s