Memory is more than perhaps. Thoughts on researching memoir, in Book Country

Readers of this blog know that I spent part of this past Saturday with my niece, reviewing old things in envelopes, old things stored away for countless years in my father's attic.

Funnily enough, I came home from that adventure with Julia and sat down to meet a deadline from Book Country, which had asked me to write about how memoirs can be researched.

It was a coincidence. I took advantage of it. I wrote the piece that begins like this below and can be found in its entirety here.

Earlier today my niece, Julia, and I opened the door to my father’s attic, where a single box among many boxes bears my name. I had agreed to help Julia with a school photography project—to search, with her, for elements from my past that would somehow explain who I am.

Letters were there—old boyfriends, a marriage proposal, a key-sized envelope containing the dust of some prom flowers. A postcard upon which each hand-inked letter was no larger than a sugar ant. Names: Tanya, Steven, Pierre, Rob. An evaluation from the library where I’d worked as a University of Pennsylvania student; the supervisor noted, in square boxes, that I’d been “excellent” in all things. I also read, however: Although Beth chats to her friends at the checkout desk for long periods of time, she seems to be able to continue working and be accurate.

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at Hooray for Books, with Debbie Levy, family, friends

We may all have niches of incapability, but I suspect that I have more than most. Making perfect corners on a bed is on that list. So is watching blood-soaked horror films. So is driving alone in high traffic for several hours.

Yesterday, however, I overcame Incapability Number Three and drove alone to Alexandria, VA, to spend time at Hooray for Books. Jessica Shoffel of Penguin had already told me what a great place this was. Ellen, the proprietor, had mentioned the chance to share the afternoon with Debbie Levy. And I have family in those parts—my sister and her three children.

So I was there, I drove, I conquered. And I will be forever glad that I did. Hooray for Books is a beautiful enterprise, right there on King Street, in a town that is ripe with interesting shops and cupcake nooks. Debbie Levy—whose new book, Imperfect Spiral, I will be writing of here soon—is a one-hundred-percent class act. So talented, so well-prepared, so interesting, so thoughtful, so professional that I had to stop my feather-earringed self from standing up and shouting "yes!" as she spoke. What a conversation we had about truth, fiction, and the line in between. What unexpected side trips we took as we explored form and economy. And when we proposed to our gathering that they join us in a mini writing workshop, the room was game. We heard from writers of all ages, and we heard fine tales. We had so much fun that we decided to take our show on the road. We may still need a booking agent. But we've already got our drummer—Patrick, who works at Hooray for Books—who blew us away with his charm and words.

But look at the first photo here. That is my family. My father, who was in Alexandria to spend time with his grandchildren, my sister (just back from San Diego), and her two younger children, Claire and Daniel; Julia, her eldest, a photographer, joined us later. I am used to trekking out on book talk missions alone; it was incredible to have family near. I had made them many promises about the goodness of Debbie Levy, and Debbie lived up to every inch of them.

Great thanks to Serena, who joined us with her family, and to Deborah and Will, gracious hosts. And thank you to the wonderful guests who contributed so much to the day. I signed my first in-store copies of Handling the Truth yesterday, signing copy number 1 to a fourteen-year-old girl who had arrived with her parents and who expressed such interest in reading and writing that it will fuel me for a very long time. And I signed my first paperback copies of Small Damages. That, too, was a fine, fine thing.

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Small Damages Paperback: the gorgeous stepback

Sometimes you write books and love those books and they disappear. Sometimes they're never published. Sometimes the person who doesn't love your book is precisely who you thought you were writing your book for.

And sometimes you get so hugely lucky. You find an editor (and friend) like Tamra Tuller and a house like Philomel, a publicist like Jessica Shoffel and a friend like Michael Green. And then (you can't believe your continuing luck) you get a paperback team like Eileen Kreit and Krista Asadorian, who package the book with great grace.

Small Damages will be released by Penguin as a paperback on July 11th, and include this gorgeous stepback page. I am so grateful. I'll be launching the paperback in Old Town Alexandria, VA, and would love to see you there.

New News: Small Damages has been named a 2013 Carolyn W. Field Honor Book by the Pennsylvania Library Association.

July 27, 2013, 3:30 - 5:00 PM
Launching Small Damages paperback/Memoir Workshop
with Debbie Levy
Hooray for Books
Old Town Alexandria, VA 

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Small Damages: the Dutch translation arrives

Callenbach has produced this beautiful Dutch translation of Small Damages.

I am ever-grateful to Tamra Tuller, Kiffin Steurer, and the Philomel team for taking such good care of this book.

And so grateful to Callenbach for having faith.

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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

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The Rules of the Tunnel/Ned Zeman: Reflections

I have, as many of you know, been on a hunt for extraordinary memoirs. The equally inventive and true kind of memoir.  The it's-not-really-just-all-about-me.  This weekend alone I went through several would-be memoir contestants.  I emerged holding just one high above my head.

(Victory.)

It's called The Rules of the Tunnel:  My Brief Period of Madness.  It's by Ned Zeman, whose work you might have seen in Vanity Fair or GQ or Outside.  He's a reporter—witty and smart—but he's also dogged by the demons of depression.  Anxiety gnarls at him, too, worries that escalate over time.  And as therapy of the medicinal as well as the talking kind fail to relieve him of a paralyzingly dark stupor, Zeman turns, with hope, to electroconvulsive therapy.

The madness doesn't quell; it escalates.  Mania ensues.  Zeman will barely remember a bit of it, for amnesia has swept in, too.

Told in a fantastic, sometimes bawdy, reliably funny (yes, funny), deeply intelligent second person, The Rules of the Tunnel is not just a reconstructed life.  It's a book that looks out for others along the way—defining, cautioning, placating—all while offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the doings of Vanity Fair, the collective care of friends, and the investigative tools that must be brought to bear on the telling of a life that is not, in large swaths, remembered.  I am head-over-heels for the final lines in this book, but it wouldn't be fair to quote them.  So I will give you the equally fantastic first bit of a book that is just this good in its entirety:

Not so long ago, in the heyday of your idiocy, you made yourself a promise.  That you can no longer remember making the promise, nor anything about it—aside from a yellow sticky-note reading "Remember Promise!"—fills you with the warm glow of achievement.  You lived, if only briefly, among The Great Amnesiacs.  And you did live well.  Reportedly.

The Rules of the Tunnel is, I will add here, a Gotham publication, acquired by Lauren Marino.  I always sensed that I, with Handling the Truth, was in good hands. Now I know for sure.

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There I was, sitting beside John Green and right near Christine Hinwood and Ruta Sepetys

... I mean — there was SMALL DAMAGES sitting alongside the work of Those Great Writers (at the Public Library Association meeting in Philadelphia), and of course I had to take a picture, because, seriously, what dream am I having that my book would be right there, in that glorious Penguin mix?  Of course, we all do know that Penguin rules.

When I wasn't busy being starstruck by my own shelf position (I hope you all do know that I am kidding; I am biologically predetermined never to be self-starstruck), I was taking photographs of the real stars—people like Carl Hiaasen and Gayle Forman, pictured here.  I was also running around looking for my dear friend Siobhan Vivian, whose THE LIST is due out soon (check back here for more on that soon).  Siobhan and I never found each other (sadness and sobs) but we got to talk for a long time on the phone as I took the train home.  Making the day even more special.

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The Fault in Our Stars: the goodness of John Green

A few years ago a friend told me about the long drive she'd made with her teenaged daughter to see John Green.  She described the lines that had wrapped the streets near the bookstore, the legions of teens and how they screamed for this rock-star writer.  I hadn't read Green yet, but shortly after that I did.  I understood.

Last night and early this morning I read The Fault in Our Stars, Green's new novel about teens living with cancer. Not long ago I interviewed a girl in recovery who was destined to make it—she told me her plans, she was certain—and didn't.  You can't forget a girl like that.  Nor will you forget Green's teens. 

It is true, perhaps, that Green's characters have a tendency to speak and think alike—that they are all, even the minor characters, equally witty and in the same gentle ways witty—but I'm not sure that matters here.  What matters is that John Green creates characters we care about, and that he allows them to think deeply, and that he sets them on life's course, which is to say that he can't protect them, he can't save them, and sometimes they can't save themselves.  What he can do is give them what we all need, which is to say love.  John Green writes from a place of goodness.  His stories are soul-centric.  They move us because they are not afraid of kindness, gentleness, tender affections.  They don't bother to wrap themselves inside the hard casings of excessive irony or gore, the aren't-I-outlandish, the please-look-at-me.  They may take some unusual plot turns, but they're not trying to pretend.  They're trying to love.  And they are succeeding.

There are so many lines in this book that are worth quoting.  I'm going to quote the simplest one.  "She is funny without ever being mean."

Yes.  And why not?  And why not more goodness like the kind we encounter in John Green?

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the big news: Small Damages sells to Tamra Tuller at Philomel Books

I began my travels to southern Spain more than 16 years ago.  I met an old man named Luis, who cooked for me when I was sick.  I found a bathtub full of oranges high up, on an old, odd roof.  I met one of the King's best friends, southern Spain's finest breeder of bulls, and he took me out in an open jeep, where the unsuspecting herd was chewing.  I watched the flamenco dancers dance; I climbed the towers; I studied the bridge. I read of the war, and I read of survivors, and I tracked down old memoirs from the Franco era, preserving the recipes I'd find clenched within the pages.  Seville was home to my brother-in-law, Rodi, his wife, and their children, and so to Seville my husband, son, and I would repeatedly return.  I walked through doors few do.

For years, I worked on a book I called Small Damages, except for the years during which I thought of it as The Last Threads of Saffron.  The novel evolved over time—became a story of gypsies, a story of the deaf, a story of an old cook's love affair.  Last summer, just about this time, I shared a draft of the book with Tamra Tuller, an editor at Philomel Books, whose Kathryn Erskine (Mockingbird) would go on to win the 2010 National Book Award and whose Ruty Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray) would appear on the bestseller list in her debut week earlier this year.  Tamra had ideas about Small Damages.  She encouraged me to keep working.  She emerged as one of those rare editors who agrees to read again, who quietly and gainfully encourages. 

Tamra shares, with me, a love of travel, a love of exotic foods, even a love of the TV show "Top Chef."  Tamra is also, as of today, thanks to the announcement (below) in the PW Children's Bookshelf, the editor of Small Damages.  I don't think I can express just what this means to me.

Tamra is kind, and she is smart.  She works within a team—which includes my dear former editor Jill Santopolo (who introduced me to Tamra by way of Ruta's book) and the remarkable Michael Green—that makes a writer feel at home.

My great thanks, then, to Tamra, to Jill, to Michael, to Philomel, and to my agent, Amy Rennert.  My thanks, too, to Kate Moses, Susan Straight, Alyson Hagy, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and Ivy Goodman, who read this book over time and kept me believing in it.  Maybe it took ten years and eighty drafts to write the book that Small Damages finally is.  But the book feels brand new and just right and full of hope in the hands of Tamra Tuller.

Tamra Tuller at Philomel Books bought world rights to National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart’s YA novel Small Damages, a coming-of-age story set in southern Spain about the difficult choices a teenaged girl faces when she gets pregnant. The publication is scheduled for summer 2012; Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency brokered the deal. 

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