Handling the Truth: the cover reveal

Last week, Lauren Marino, my Gotham editor, shared what I think is a most stunning cover for Handling the Truth, which is due out from Gotham (Penguin USA) next August.  To Lauren and to Susan Barnes, who has answered so many questions along the way, my deepest thanks.  To Amy Rennert, who has cared so much about this work, thanks, too.  This cover is sensational—a great blessing on a book that means so very much to me. 

The catalog copy:

In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a critically acclaimed National Book Award finalist shares inspiration and practical advice for writing—and living with—memoir.

Writing memoir is a deeply personal, and consequential, undertaking.  As the acclaimed author of five memoirs spanning significant turning points in her life, Beth Kephart has been both blessed and bruised by the genre. In Handling the Truth, she thinks out loud about the form—on how it gets made, on what it means to make it, on the searing language of truth, on the thin line between remembering and imagining, and, finally, on the rights of memoirists.   Drawing on proven writing lessons and classic examples, on the work of her students and on her own memories of weather, landscape, color, and love, Kephart probes the wrenching and essential questions that lie at the heart of memoir. A beautifully written work in its own right, Handling the Truth opens Kephart’s memoir-making classroom—and thoughts—to all those who read or seek to write the truth.

Kephart is a very gifted and insightful writer.”— USA Today

 “[Kephart] writes eloquently.”—The New York Times Book Review