Still Love in Strange Places: A Memoir

by Beth Kephart

The author of the National Book Award-nominated A Slant of Sun talks about her marriage to her artist husband and her revelations about his war-torn coffee farm home in El Salvador.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

I'm the award-winning writer of more than two-dozen books in multiple genres—memoir, middle grade and young adult fiction, picture books, history, corporate fable, and books on the making of memoir.

I'm also an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and an essayist and critic with work appearing in The New York Times, Life magazine, Ninth Letter, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and elsewhere.

Please visit me at junctureworkshops.com or bethkephartbooks.com.

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was really not good. i was not impressed by the writing style, but i love el sal, so i plowed through it. the author had a nasty attitude about cultural adaptation, and she was a jealous brat when her husband wanted to hang out with his family once a year. she sat in a tree and sulked. she didnt paint a very good picture of herself. read it only if you have any interest in el salvador. dont read it if you like feeling sympathetic at all to the protagonista.

[Cary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Because it was about El Sal, i gave it a chance but it really isn't a great book. The author doesn't understand the culture or its beauty.

[Adobe · Rating 1 out of 5]

When the author (an American raised in northern suburbia) marries her husband (an artist from El Salvador), she experiences difficulties finding her place within his intimidatingly foreign family, language, and country. The best parts of Still Love in Strange Places involves Kephart's examination of how twentieth-century Salvadorean politics are intertwined with her husband's family history. But the memoir is more interested in wielding a vast metaphor (marriage as an act of emigration) than in examining El Salvador itself, and the metaphor is far less interesting than the author's precise impressions of the country. More damningly, the tone is treacly. Still Love in Strange Places is self-effacing and self-validating enough to be fit for Oprah. Worse, the narrative is pre-emptively guilty about the author's natural resentment of her exclusion from her husband's clannish country. I wanted the memoir to either own that anger or to excise it, but its current role (hesitant, agonized acknowledgment) is utterly unsatisfying. Still Love in Strange Places seems to present a portrait of marriage/travel as nervously performed on egg shells.

[Michele · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is certainly some anger, if not hostility towards the Spanish language which is displayed in this book. I can clearly see that Kephart has a frustration towards her husband's language, but it also turns out to be a bit of hostility to her husband's culture. His Spanish vs. Her English. She uses the term exotic in a way that makes you wonder about her own perspective, even when she speaks of her own son, "There was something foreign about Jeremy from the start". There is something about her that doesn't embrace her husband's culture, as a Salvadorian, I can tell you that the best thing she could have done was embrace his culture and learn to not look at the people as exotic or different. By the end of the book I was angry. I'm still angry at the presentation of the Salvadorian people.

[Amy Bremenstuhl · Rating 2 out of 5]

A somewhat annoying read---the author writes about her husband's Salvadoran background---always searching for (what I feel) was the wrong thing---rather than embracing her husband's differences, it felt that she was explaining why she felt that she couldn't "enter" his world. She always seemed to want to be on the outside, rather than trying to learn from a different culture (his family was very accepting of her and even embraced her--but she seemed to want to stay different).

[Maggi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kephart's in-laws, husband, and son are simply not fascinating enough to keep this memoir afloat. Some interesting observations about El Salvador, but her romanticizing of the culture is annoying.

[Victoria Marie Lees · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've just started a new journey with Beth Kephart in her memoir Still Love in Strange Places. I fill my senses with her poetic images and am just as curious as Beth about Don Alberto, her husband's grandfather in El Salvador. In Beth's writing, places become characters.

I finished it!

The culture of an unfamiliar place made real, laid bare, for the reader, the characters living and breathing. A turbulent land, El Salvador. My heart ached for its people, for Don Alberto when he died. A great man; a gentle, caring man. The good news is that he transferred that love to his daughter, the mother of Kephart’s husband, and then to Kephart’s husband.

Like Kephart in Still Love in Strange Places, I had trouble learning a second language as an adult in college at the University of Pennsylvania. Readers can connect on many levels with Kephart’s struggle to fit in to the puzzle of her husband’s family, to the language barrier when she visits his country, to making her immediate family a unified whole. A well-written journey. You won’t be disappointed.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ostensibly a reflection on marriage and an appreciation of the harsh beauty of El Salvador (with an amazing amount of information on the cultivation of coffee thrown in for good measure), the book appealed to me largely for its thoughts about story, memory and language. It is beautifully written.
"Experience is sight, sound, smell, taste, the burn of muscles, the precipitance of words, the rise of passion, the chill of regret...Remembering is about reassembling those connections, and about forgeting strategically forgetting so much that lies between, and he ore we reassemble our memories...the truer they seem to us, the more certain and more bedrock. Our memories tell us who we have been and therefore who we are." (126)

[Cami · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book combined three of my favorite things, culture, coffee and personal stories. While it was interesting, I was hoping for more personal stories and less country history. Overall the book is well-written, though filled with large segments of historical background. These segments left it feeling like there was not much plot.

[Alex Kenny]

what i have learnt so far...

coffee in el salvador was brought from brazil in the 1800's

there were many ancient civilisation tribes in the area moving around, fighting etc.not just the maya and nuhautl.

[Alyssa]

I have always appreciated Beth Kephart's writing style and this autobiographical sketch did not disappoint. She writes with simplicity and is a true wordsmith.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author wrote this book after 15 years of researching her husband childhood & heritage in El Salvador.

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book made me want to go to El Salvador