Beth Kephart's Blog, page 99

Welcoming the nation's librarians to Philadelphia, and celebrating our own Free Library (and Chronicle Books)

Last evening, I hardly felt the cold as I walked from 30th Street Station to the Warwick Hotel. The nation's librarians have come to my very own city for ALA Midwinter. So has Chronicle Books. And there I was, headed off toward a Chronicle-librarian vortex, with my mother's coat keeping me warm.

I found Chronicle's Ginee Seo, Lara Starr, Sally Kim, and my fabulous editor Tamra Tuller in the ballroom (note: these women are fashionistas!!). I also found Miss Adorable Herself, Lisa Morris-Wilkey, who made sure I would recognize her by the shimmer of that little pin she wears in her hair. The Grand Duke Walter was in the midst, as well as a librarian with a last name infinitely familiar to me—Novotny. It was a grand night as Chronicle's spring list was reviewed. I yearned to take every noted book home with me.

Asked to talk briefly about Going Over, I wanted to talk, most of all about Chronicle Books, which has been so extraordinarily generous to me. They keep placing surprises in my path. They keep thinking past me. I ask for nothing, and yet they appear with gifts. It is an extraordinary team. One example: Last week, a number of bloggers began to write to me, letting me know that Going Over ARCs had been sent their way. Facebook notes went up. Twitter feeds shimmered. And no one had ever said, Beth, we are going to do this for you, or, Beth, look what we did for you. It just got done.

So I am grateful to Chronicle Books, and I am grateful to Tamra Tuller, who brought me there and remains such a good friend, and I am grateful to the librarians who have come through this chilly weather to be in my city. I have written a love letter to a very particular Philadelphia library in this weekend's Inquirer—written my thanks to a program and to an individual, Andy Kahan, who makes sure that Philadelphians get their cultur-ating share of literature. But I hope that all librarians visiting my city today will know the love goes out to them, too.

I'll be back down in the city on Sunday, signing You Are My Only, now released as a paperback, for Egmont USA. Start time is 3 PM. I hope to see you, too.

presenting our new kitchen! (drumrolls, please)

It took a very long time. It isn't done yet. There are lots of little things missing, windows needing replacements, that terribly creaky light/fan soon to vanish, but: We survived. A month in the cold without a kitchen or sink, and we never once got testy.

The proof of a long, good marriage.

We don't know how the oven works, and we are just now filling the dishwasher. But I feel a whole lot better having this part of my life back in working order. It will be the last kitchen renovation, I'm pretty sure of that.

Thanks to all of you who cheered us through!

Now off to the city (in a few hours) to celebrate the librarians who have come to town and to see Tamra Tuller, Lara Starr, Ginee Seo, Sally Kim, and Stephanie Wong at the stellar Chronicle party.

Woot.

Mud Angels, the Florence novel, is copy-editing bound

Sometimes the books come easy. Sometimes the books come hard. It is necessary, in the end, to believe in them.

After 18 months of work on a novel called Mud Angels, I believe. I'm one final read away from relinquishing the book to copy editing. Tamra Tuller, my Chronicle Books editor, had to read this book many times. She had to find ways to tell me to return to the pages, had to wait, had to (I'm sure) hold her breath.

We're breathing now, both of us. Nadia Cara, my heroine, is finally fully alive and real. Her story—of battling a rare neurological disorder while living in a borrowed apartment off of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy—echoes through time, as stories must. Her secrets are rooted.

We don't give up because we can't give up. Because if we do, we will not learn all the lessons challenges set down for us. We will not know if we are big enough. We will not know if we are patient enough. We will not know what might have been. I learned the importance of persevering, again, with Mud Angels.

Chronicle Books will be releasing this novel in the spring of 2015.

I'm about to begin the writing of something new.

A You Are My Only Review—and Signing at Mid-Winter ALA

Through my friend Danielle, I discovered this honest review of You Are My Only, a book recently released in paperback by Egmont USA—and a book that I will be signing this coming Sunday, 3:00 PM, at the Egmont booth at the Mid-Winter American Library Association Meeting.

My work is not for everyone. Strangers have told me, and so have friends. It means an awful lot, therefore, to hear from a reader who struggled to find pleasure in my work, who couldn't figure out why those who fussed, fussed, and who persevered nonetheless.

GoodBooksandGoodWine tells that story in her review.

She begins like this:

When I first read a book by Beth Kephart, I wasn’t too keen on it. I did not get what all the fuss was about. Maybe I just wasn’t ready at the time or maybe it was the person I was back then.

She ends like this:

Here is the thing, You Are My Only is sparse in it’s number of pages. Kephart packs in so much emotion in so few words in such a gorgeous style that the book is almost overwhelming. It staggered me, it really did. There’s something sort of intense about Kephart’s writing style. She puts these images in her book where you are like, yes I know exactly what that is but I never thought of it this way before. I don’t know you guys. Just get your hands on a copy of You Are My Only, it is really good and beautifully written and just full of heart.

She packs this punch in between.

GoodBooksandGoodWine, your timing could not be more perfect. Thank you.

Mid-Winter ALAers.... Perhaps I'll see you in my snowy city Sunday.

Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest/Jen Doll: Reflections

I'm pretty sure you all know how I feel about Jen Doll.

(If, by chance, you've missed out on my Jen Doll love, this post is for you.)

You can imagine then, how happily I have anticipated an early copy of this remarkable young woman's first book, a memoir called Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (Riverhead, May 1). I know how witty wise Jen is, for I read her blogs, reviews, and stories. I know how crackerjack smart; plug into her Twitter channel and find out for yourself. But I also know, because I have met her and corresponded with her, because we have talked at length about memoir by phone, how much she cares about her work, her words, her living. Jen may be hysterical, in many hours of many days. She may be totally plugged into The Now. But she is also intelligent and searching, thoughtful and grammatical, richly in tune with the cosmic wonder of a chaotic universe.

All the radiance of Jen is right here, in her book.

Save the Date, a book described as "a hilarious and insightful examination of the search for love and the meaning of marriage in a time of anxiety, independence, and indecision" is not thwarted by bitterness, not slight in its purpose, not mired in revenge—all the things such a book might have been in the hands of another writer.

It is, instead, a real memoir—the sort of story that pulls the reader up short with memories of her own decisions and indecisions, her own false tunes. We all grow up wondering if we will meet the one. We all pretend, sometimes, to know what we are doing. We are all happy for our friends, though sometimes we feel excluded by their joy, and perhaps we embarrass ourselves and at our best we apologize and because we must, we start again. We need advice. We give advice. We let the wounds heal, we lick the wounds. Maybe we haven't confessed all the sloppy muck of it to others, and maybe we've been less than honest with ourselves. In Save the Date Jen Doll tells the truth. She does that thing that great memoirists do—makes sure we're not alone.

I loved learning, from Save the Date—about the family Jen loves, the humor that shaped her, the nicknames she gave her younger brother. I loved seeing glimpses of her at work, glimpses of her in the mirror in fabulous shoes, glimpses of her working through the many gears of many friendships, glimpses of her at so many weddings. I worried for her sometimes. I rooted for her, always. I was brought in close, by quiet moments such as these:

The decision not to be together forever means, to each other, you become nothing more than a memory, a series of photographs, some stories, and, of course, whatever you've learned and will take with you to the next relationship. Those things are not nothing. Yet there was love there once, and then there's not, I wonder where it goes.

I have a very good feeling about Save the Date. And I have an even deeper affection, now, for Jen.

The Apartment/Greg Baxter: Reflections and Instructions for Writers

When both Stacey D'Erasmo and Adam Langer review a debut novel in The New York Times and urge a reader toward the work, I pay attention. Stacey is one of the smartest critical minds around; I know this for a fact. Moreover, I learned about the art of book reviewing years ago while apprenticing (so to speak) under Adam at Book Magazine. More accurately, I watched him write great reviews while I wrote dozens upon dozens of the just so-so variety.

In any case, I bought Greg Baxter's debut novel The Apartment because it had tugged at both Stacey and Adam. Yesterday afternoon and evening, I read it.

It's the most electrifying bit of sustained stillness and near violence that I have held in my hands.

What happens? An ex-military man goes apartment hunting with a young woman in a blurry, probably European town during a snowy day. The details of the day are highly absorbed and precisely communicated. Here is the snow, here is the cold, here is the girl, here are they, together—not boyfriend and girlfriend, not father and daughter, not anything you might presume—and here is the bus they take, the roads they walk, the things they say. Descriptions with diamond points. Sentences that weather a world:

Here, in this city, intense joy and intense sorrow are extinct. The place is too old for that kind of naivete. Everyone here responds to these extinctions by opening doors for each other, or making room at tables—they are generous and polite. I admire this—to celebrate the extinction of hope with ritual and composure. To place coats on the shoulders of women. There isn't a thought left. There isn't a sentence. There isn't a human being. 

It's intense, surely, but it feels sequential, almost straightforward, except when the unnamed narrator tumbles back into the spaces he has left behind—a dirty war, a possibly selfish existence, unnamed crimes against.... Creatures like thoughts. Thoughts like creatures:

I was spending lots of time in museums, especially art museums, and one of the things I gradually became more and more aware of was a ludicrous but entirely spooky sense, which presumably no one else shared, that human beings are unwanted disturbances, that the various works hanging nakedly on walls, for instance, are desperate to evict the living, because to have to watch us plodding around them is torture, and that day it occurred to me that the same could be said for the Aeneid, doomed for eternity to be read by students, snobs, and imbeciles.

This Greg Baxter—how does he know what he knows? About violins. About the Iraq war. About the way a street light works? About mothers who mourn the death of their daughters? The Apartment is so incredibly grounded in the tactile and the known and so equally fantastical and strange that readers must submit to it; Baxter gives us no other choice. We want to know—desperately—if this man will get his apartment. We want to know if he'll be able to exist with his memories. We want to know if he knows more than we do about what it is to live with the truth.

I was not happy, initially, that no bookstore that I visited had a copy of The Apartment. I only reluctantly downloaded it to my iPad, for I'm still a real-book girl as much as possible. But at the end of my read, I found my e-book reward—a Q and A with the author, which is, my writer friends, as valuable as the novel itself.

Among the gems from that Q and A is this:

If an author resists the temptation to type his or her characters, those characters will usually contradict themselves and become vital. If the characters act consistently, they're useless or they're props. No character should fill space, and no character should have a defined role before they appear in a book—they should not serve a purpose. Janos could have been more or less important. Manuela too. They turned out how they turned out. Importantly, I think, a character is worth putting in a novel only if they are—or could be—worthy of being the main character of another novel. No character should ever be, by nature, minor.

The Answer to the Riddle is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia/David Stuart MacLean: Reflections

It will all begin again at Penn tomorrow. English 135. A crowd of new faces in a small, elegant room. A shared discovery of the power and pitfalls of memoir and narrative nonfiction. I've taught this class several times now, but it's never nearly the same. I look over old notes. I change my mind. I ask new questions. I read new memoirs hungrily, looking for a new angle on treacherous themes.

This weekend, I read David Stuart MacLean's The Answer to the Riddle is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which had been sent to me not long ago by the wonderful editor Lauren Wein. The story of one young man's terrifying descent into not-knowing, hallucinations, and loss, it is also the story of reconstruction—of how one reassembles the fractured and vague-edged self, especially when every discovered hint of the past does not suggest, perhaps, an ideal person.

MacLean is a writer on a Fulbright grant in India when he startles into sudden wakefulness at a train station. He does not know who he is, where he is, what he is doing, and there is nothing in his pockets—not a ticket, not a passport—that offers clues. He was, he writes, "alone, alone with no idea how far I was from anyone who knew me. I was alone and empty and terrified. I wiped my face with both palms. I blacked out."

It will only grow worse. He will (so much luck in this) be led toward help by a tourist police officer. He will be put into one hospital and then another. Friends will be sent his way, or facsimile of friends. His parents will arrive, beleaguered, from Ohio. He will be taken home and he will be helped to understand what can barely be understood: he has had an allergic reaction to a common anti-malaria prescription medication. He has severe amnesia, he is subject to terrible nightmares, he cannot, at times, distinguish between reality and his hallucinations. He may never be the same.

The same, however, as what? As who? Studying photo albums in his parents' house, stroking the head of a dog who recognizes him, spending time with the girl he purportedly loved, he orbits the wreckage of a former life that does not always seem entirely enviable. This MacLean to whom David is trying to return wasn't always the nicest guy and was such a loud goof that many of those who are told about his medical condition assume that it is just another stunt, just David being David—again. Navigating with only pieces of a self, with fought-for moments of lucidity, with breaks of anger and breaks of despair, MacLean struggles to find a purpose. He smokes way too much, drinks even more. He alienates some of those who love him.

It's a brutal story, and MacLean does not hold back—on himself, on the condition. He does not write to be a hero, does not write for sympathy; he writes to make a number of important things clear. He elucidates mosquitoes, malaria, this prescription drug. He issues cautions. He suggests that we might have empathy for those who took the drug and returned radically changed—for those countless military personnel, for example, who were exposed to the drug's dire consequences. He asks us to consider what the self is, and how much control we have over our own behaviors, over the lines we leave behind, over the heartbreaks we generate, over the who we can be.

And on every page he writes brilliantly, scouringly, viscerally. We see it all. We feel it.

Like this:

My mom sat on the edge of my bed and smoothed my hair as the doctor talked quietly with my dad. She pushed her thumb into the space between my eyebrows, and I recognized that gesture, too. It was something she'd done my whole life, wordlessly telling me not to worry so much. I still didn't have my memory, but now I had an outline of myself, like a tin form waiting for batter.

I found Katherine and Anna (of Dangerous Neighbors) at The Barnes Foundation, in a Renoir painting

My husband and I have returned from a magical 24 hours away from construction boxes and dust, from a sinkless and unusable kitchen, from ceilings finally painted and repaired, only to be ruined by the rain that leaked through the roof that we've been waiting (for several months now) to be fixed.

We needed to get away.

And so we went to Philadelphia, stayed at glorious, expansive Loews (seventeenth floor! corner room!), had lunch at the Reading Terminal Market among thousands of soccer coaches, and ate dinner at the magnificent Fork Restaurant (where we had the chance to tell Ellen Yin just had perfect the entire meal had been, and when I say perfect, I mean perfectly perfect, perfectly considered, perfectly surprising and comforting, perfectly served). Between lunch and dinner, in the cold heart of the afternoon, we went to The Barnes Foundation for the first time. Something every Philadelphian should do at least once.

I have never seen so many Renoir paintings in one place. I fell in love, again, Modigliani. I encountered a local watercolorist—Demuth—whose work I had not known before, or, at least, anchored with a name.

And then, at near the end of our tour through those many rooms, I gasped. For there on the wall was this painting by Renoir. Titled La Sortie du conservatoire, it was painted in 1876, the year of my Centennial story, Dangerous Neighbors. It was as if I'd seen this image before, as if I'd worked from it, as if I'd lifted those two girls from this canvas. My Katherine and Anna, the ginger-haired twins that live on the pages of my slender novel, are Renoir's two girls. They look and stand precisely like this—the color of their hair, Anna's vivacious pose, Katherine's steady watchfulness.

We are back home now, with leaking and unfinished things, and with way too much work for the week ahead. But Katherine and Anna are in the house. They are alive again.

Less blogging. More Lumosity. Headed to The Barnes Foundation.

My brain needs a fix.

It plays songs, endless songs, when I try to sleep.

It forgets the words it needs.

It panics at the sight of one more project piled onto way too many projects. Panics and gasps.

It needs to breathe. It wants to read.

I am retraining my brain to think. Playing Lumosity games. Taking it down to the Barnes Foundation this very afternoon, so that it can get lost in all those colors and shapes and, perhaps, begin again to think straight.

Graduates in Wonderland/Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale: Reflections

Common Knowledge: Beth Kephart loves her University of Pennsylvania memoir students, even the ones who drive her a little crazy at first with their wild tales and late assignments. We're working on the truth here, I tell them, eyebrows sternly bent, and eventually they settle down, they stretch their sentences, they find the story of their still unfolding lives.

It was with great pleasure, then, that I read Graduates in Wonderland: True Dispatches from Down the Rabbit Hole (Gotham Books), a book that you'll be able to buy (you'll want to buy) come May. Its authors are Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale, two friends who met at Brown, graduated to adventures in Beijing and Australia (that would be Jessica), Chelsea and Paris (that would be Rachel), and never lost sight of each other. They are wandering and wondering. They are underemployed and richly challenged. They are ashamed, surprised, delighted, hoping, never precisely sure, but then again, perhaps (at last) they are sure—at least of some things. They are growing up, that's what they are. And in Graduates in Wonderland, we watch it happen.

We watch it happen charmed.

Back and forth, the two friends write. Rachel of a bad boss, a demanding shrink, an apartment built for one and inhabited by three, dreams of Paris, dreams in Paris, the study of cinematography and the making of a novel. Jess of her ex-pat life in Beijing, of a magazine she edits, of wrong guys, of a right guy, of a preemptive almost honeymoon in Malaysia, of Australia where she settles (for a short while) to be closer to Mr. Right. Mistakes get made. Questions aren't answered. So much in this life, in this world, is flimsy, but not this friendship.

Rachel and Jess have done an extraordinary job, in the creation of this book, of turning an epistolary life story into something richly tender, and genuinely suspenseful. We read to know them. We also read to find out what happens. The intimacy here, is not just between the writers, but with the readers. There's a blessed absence of unparsable inside jokes. This is no aggressive staging of scenes for dramatic effect. There is zero sense that the living is getting done for the sake of a book sometime later. In Graduates in Wonderland, we find  two smart girls casting wide nets and reporting back from the front. Two smart—and funny—young women who love each other, root for each other, advise each other, miss each other, need each other, wouldn't be who they are without each other.

Here is Jess, writing to Rachel, who is keen to hear back regarding an application to the Sorbonne:

Don't rest all of your life expectations on one outcome. When you have no expectations, you don't lose all that money on wasted ribbons and polo shirts. I flew to Beijing without knowing a thing about what to expect or what to bring. Granted, I also had to live without deodorant and the correct prescription contact lenses for two months, but I survived. And so will you! Even if you don't get into your program, there will always be other ways to get to Paris and other ways to change your life.

I'm an old lady now, and one of my greatest life regrets is that I always lived so responsibly, so attuned to what was expected of me and what I might be able to do for others, what job I might do and how best I might do it, that I forsook adventure. But I've adventured forth now with Jess and Rachel, and I have returned with a warm, good feeling in my heart. I have showered over a toilet (or almost) and had my share of almond croissants and gone to Melbourne, where I mispronounce the city's name. I have had to decide, and I have decided, and I have made it to London, just in time.