White Elephants/Katie Haegele: Reflections

My Uncle Danny was a Cape May, NJ, antiques man—and the author of a book called Flea Market Finds. His eccentricity was a beautiful thing, and so was his love for us. I'll find his bazaar-bizarre gifts in this small house of mine. I'll find his loopy handwriting on a card, and it will take me back to his seaside taffy, his movie-star shades, his rolled trousers on the beach, his Victorian scrapbooks, his enchanted miniature easter eggs, his velvet scalloped Christmas balls. My uncle appears from time to time in the books I write—sometimes as who he is and sometimes as a close fiction. He never met my son, and my son never met him, and this is one of the great sadnesses in my life.

I was thinking a lot about my Uncle Danny as I read Katie Haegele's charming micro book this afternoon, White Elephants: On Yard Sales, Relationships, & Finding What Was Missing. I was thinking about the odd things my uncle had perched around his house, and the stories he told about his flea market finds, and how he always knew enviously more than anybody else because he had never busied himself with either envy or the ordinary. While much of the world was out there studying the news or world history, the quotable classics, the contemporary hooks, my uncle was sifting through other people's convertible stuff. Convertible to another desk, another library, another closet. Sacrificed, or relinquished.

Katie's smart like this, too—smart about the insides of people's lives and the retro-contemporary nostalgia of bygones and medleys I've never heard of. White Elephants is about the trips Katie takes with her widowed mom to yard sales and the things they buy—things like weird wicker belts, working typewriters, grandmother quality dresses, foldable purses, vintage stationery (the good, the bad, and the ugly), fashion plates. It's about how her own apartment absorbs the after stuff of others, and how it defines her, in many ways, and releases her from the thing she will never, through all the digging, find: her dad, who died of cancer when Katie was still a college student.

White Elephants is also about a boy named Joe, who loves what Katie loves, and about a power outage after a storm in Nova Scotia, and about swimming in your underwear, and about getting past the migraine. It's earthy and near in its language, a conversation Katie has, a book so small and lovingly made that you can hold it in the palm of your hand.

I quote from an early page, a paragraph nearing perfection. Katie Haegele. Retro wise. Adorable and generous, zine queen, good daughter:

Nostalgia is a kind of maligned concept, but when I talk about it I mean something existential—not a retro diner with doo-wop on the jukebox or old people talking about how much better things used to be, but the sad longing of hireath and saudade, the loneliness and melancholy that run underneath everything in life, the feelings that are always there, humming like power lines. I think it's something we all carry around with us, even if some of us seem to feel it more intensely than others. Maybe you deal with your saudade, when it rises up, by listening to a certain song or going for a long drive. I address mine in the basements of old churches, handling jewelry and dresses and little figurines that someone else once saw and bought, and used and loved. These things vibrate with the lives they've been a part of, and I fill my home with them because I like the company.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer review of Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: Dazed and Grateful

The day began early, as they do, and I was out when the emails started to come in about a Philadelphia Inquirer review of Dr. Radways's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. Email after email.

Congratulations!

But it wasn't until just now that I had the time to find the story myself, and I am floored. Floored.

I never knew if anyone would read this book when I wrote it, rewrote it, rewrote it. I never knew if it would find a publishing home. I just knew how much I loved William and his Philadelphia, and so I carried on.

Katie Haegele, how do I thank you for words like these?

The bare bones of Beth Kephart's new story sound modern, but this bright, burning novel—intended for a young adult audience but powerful enough to engage any adult—is set in the Philadelphia of 1870. Using surprising period details and a gorgeous turn of phrase, Kephart has called forth an interesting time in our city's history and made it live again for just a moment.

And later:

The language is what does it. These people feel real, and we have no trouble imagining them living out their dramas just as painfully and joyously as we do ours, 100 or more years before we were born.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer Review of Nothing but Ghosts

I have to admit that I did not see this coming. There I was at the gym, at Teresa's Body Pump, aching (and I mean aching) between the shoulder rotation and abs, wondering how in the world that Teresa can sing—sing!—while we're all lifting that bar again and again, while we are all shaking and trembling, when I saw my phone blinking. It was a note from my friend Lynn Levin, congratulating me for a review of Nothing but Ghosts, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

I pretty much figured that the work-out had gotten to me, that I was seeing things.

But no. In fact, Katie Haegele, who writes such tremendous reviews of young adult books, had included Ghosts in her fall YA round up, along with titles like I Can't Keep My Own Secrets, Murder at Midnight, and Pop.

This is what she says. This is why I am so happy right now, while I type up this post. I can't help it. Ghosts, which like all my books celebrates this community in which I live, has been noticed in my own hometown. It has been seen.

Nothing But Ghosts
By Beth Kephart

Harper Teen. 288 pp. $17.99

Well, this is a treat. Beth Kephart, whose memoir A Slant of Sun was a National Book Award finalist, has written another one of her beautiful YA novels - this one set locally, with references to the Devon Horse Show and little kids in Phillies T-shirts. And ghosts. Katie lives with her father, an eccentric art restorer, in a big and otherwise empty house; her mother has just died, and Katie, only 16, throws herself into busyness to cope. She takes a summer job working with the grounds crew on an unusual building project at the estate of a reclusive heiress whom no one in town has laid eyes on for years, and soon finds herself preoccupied with the woman's secrets. The lovely things in these characters' lives - pebble gardens and groves of apple trees, an old painting of "a metropolis" that her father restores (or, as he says, "resolves") late at night in his studio-shed, an honest-to-goodness riddle-filled mystery - are like something from a dream, but Kephart's writing isn't what you'd call dreamy, poetic as it is. It's solid and serviceable, beautiful in its well-madeness like an antique chair.

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