Handling the Truth is named a finalist in the 18th Annual Books for a Better Life Awards Program

I was sitting in the back of the ALAN conference room, listening to some very interesting writers talk about love in YA literature when my phone buzzed. I took a quick look. It was Lauren Marino, my Gotham editor, sharing the news that Handling the Truth had been named a finalist in the 18th Annual Books for a Better Life Awards.

It was one of those blink twice moments.

And also a very happy one.

There are ten categories, and among those named are Temple Grandin, Anne Lamott, Bill McKibben, Sara Gilbert, Maggie Scarf, Rick Hanson, and two other special people—long-time friend Patty Chang Anker and new friend Josh Hanagarne.

The finalists in my category are esteemed and I'm blessed to be named among them:

Meredith Viera and Arianna Huffington will be on hand. Mark Bittman and Richard Pine will be honored. What a fun night we will have. I imagine swirling.

I must find a dress.

More about this wonderful program and the full list can be found here.

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Handling the Truth: the first-pass pages arrive

And soon I will sit and read again and hope that all I meant to say, all I need to say, is here, and here clearly.

Thank you, Lauren Marino and Susan Barnes of Gotham, for seeing this book through.

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my cup overflows—reviews of Flow and Small Damages; kindness from Gotham

My cup is overflowing.

On this rainy afternoon, I would like to thank the one and only Ed Goldberg for reading Flow, my Philadelphia river book, and having so much good to say on his spectacular, shared blog, Two Heads Together.  Ed, you are so integral to my writing life.  I am blessed by your kindness in so many ways.

Through Twitter, a tool I have yet to master, but a tool through which I have made new friends, I learned of two spectacular new reviews of Small Damages.  One, by the bloggess, Love Is Not a Triangle, made me smile in so many ways, and had me sharing, with the bloggess, my thoughts about the Small Damages sequel I hope to someday write.  The whole is here.

The second is by the good people of teenreads—or, I should say, by the super duper Terry Miller Shannon of teenreads—who wrote, among other things, "Characters are so fully realized, they could walk off the page.... Small Damages is on the short side but is nothing short of a glorious triumph for Kephart."  Those words will put sun into anybody's rainy day.

Finally, today, I want to thank Susan Barnes, Lauren Marino, and a certain publicist named Beth—all on the Gotham team.  I had called Susan with a concern not at all of Gotham's making.  She listened and took action at once.  With tremendous compassion and care, the team relieved me of a percolating anxiety.  They didn't have to do this.  Some publishing teams might not have.  But Gotham did, and I will always be grateful. 

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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 day that was: Melissa Firman, George Shaw, Small Damages, Truth

I began a blogging conversation with Melissa Firman of The Betty and Boo Chronicles so long ago that I can't remember the first prompt, the earliest words.  Melissa and I share many things—proximity (at least until a transfer took her west), friends, a love for our children, a love for books—and the first time I actually met Melissa was on a bitter cold night, when she came to a talk I was giving about the impact of place on my work.  She came bearing books, my own.  She has built, over time, an embarrassingly generous Beth Kephart library.  Even as she does so many things, for so many others, and even as she keeps her Facebook friends abreast of the special people in her life.

And so Melissa's words today, about Small Damages, are the words of one who has read an oeuvre with great care.  They are the words of someone who has carefully, patiently watched my work evolve over time.  Reading Melissa's blog post was, to me, akin to reading a scholarly piece.  I learned so much and became so absorbed in Melissa's thinking that it wasn't until the end that I remembered that she was writing about me.  This post was so exceptional that my publicist, Jessica Shoffel, sent an email earlier:  Making sure you saw this one.

I share Melissa's words at the end of a day of many emotions.  We honored our George Shaw this morning at a beautiful service in which grandchildren read, a son eloquently remembered, and family and friends and neighbors knit tight.  How proud George is, looking down, on his gigantic community.  His son referred to George as an extraordinary ordinary man.  My own son, sitting near me in the pews, said later that that is the best kind of man. 

After the service and lunch I came home to read Handling the Truth one last time, for it is bound for copyediting soon.  I'll never quite forget the note Lauren Marino, my Gotham editor, wrote last night to tell me that we are entering the book's next phase.  Having just sat here today and read all 61,000 words through again, I hope it is all right to say here that I am so at peace with Truth.

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in the aftermath of three made books.

Yesterday I sent dear Tamra Tuller of Philomel the revised Berlin novel.  A few days before, HANDLING THE TRUTH went off to Lauren Marino at Gotham, and the week prior to that DR. RADWAY'S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT was emailed to its publisher, a package made complete by my husband's eleven illustrations. 

It has been, in other words, a heady time—my thoughts, in overlapping intervals, inside a certain German city, circa 1983, inside a century's worth of 100 memoirs, and inside 1871 Philadelphia and the cacophony of Baldwin Locomotive Works.

But it was my office that was really showing the heat.

That space is so much neater now.  It's dusted and Windexed and vacuumed, too.  It's a place for starting over in, and that is what I'll be doing over the next many weeks.  I'll be back at work on corporate projects.  I'll be doing some teaching, some reviewing, some author interviewing, some essay writing.  I'll be reading some 20 new books and celebrating them here, on my blog, with the world.

And I'll be launching SMALL DAMAGES.

It will be an untangling time.  It will be a while, I suspect, before I begin to dream about any new books.

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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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Publishing Perspectives Conference: the day that was

If I am too exhausted to state with any inch of eloquence how grateful I am for today—for being included in a well-run, truly substantive, inviting conference, for sitting on a panel among greats, for meeting, at long last, the delightful Jenny Brown, for spying on Roger Sutton's socks, for a chance to hurry through a loved city's streets, for an excuse to visit the extraordinarily wonderful Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Jessica Shoffel, and Jill Santopolo, for the opportunity to meet the funny and fun and winning Lauren Marino—if I am too exhausted, might I at least share these two images of a conference I won't forget?

Thank you, Ed Nawotka and Dennis Abrams of Publishing Perspectives for making this day what it was.  For making me a part of it.

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HANDLING THE TRUTH: writing the next two-thirds

And so, having cleared my mind with three days of reading, with long walks, with dance, I turn to writing HANDLING THE TRUTH for Lauren Marino at Gotham.  Every pink and yellow square flags a chapter that waits (and wants).

I imagine myself just slightly underground, inside a grotto of time.

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HANDLING THE TRUTH: a little publishing news

It is just after five in the morning, and I have been sitting here searching for words, wanting to begin this post in just the right place.

But I am perplexed, for there are so many beginnings.  I shall begin at the end, then, and share what is, for me, such day-breaking, joy-making news:

April 17, 2012
Non-fiction:
General/Other        
Memoirist, fiction writer and National Book Award finalist for A SLANT OF SUN, Beth Kephart's HANDLING THE TRUTH, a book devoted to the reading, teaching, and making of memoir; about consequences and libraries, privileges and pleasures, and finally knowing ourselves -- providing a proven framework for teachers, students, and readers, to Lauren Marino at Gotham, by Amy Rennert at the Amy Rennert Agency (world). 

HANDLING THE TRUTH emerges from my years of writing, critiquing, and teaching memoir.  It erupts from a place both scorched and urgent.  It means so much to me because my students mean so much to me, and because memoir—the form, the possibilities—must, I think, be both reconsidered and defended.

But no book emerges on its own.  This one will exist because my agent, Amy Rennert, received the first 70 pages of this book on a Saturday morning, read it on a Sunday morning, and called me that Sunday afternoon.  She already had a plan.  She was certain.  She took the book out into the world, and before I even had a chance to dream, she had found this book its right home.   Shore lady, she wrote to me last week, as I was contemplating dolphins and sea, we have a deal. Lauren Marino is the executive editor of Gotham Books, a Penguin Group imprint (who doesn't love Penguin?). She has worked with Diablo Coady, Isaac Mizrahi, Thomas Moore, Jeffrey Zaslow, Ann Crittenden, Ruth Reichl, Jane Green, Cindy Crawford, Willie Nelson, and others.  I am honored by the chance to write for her.

I am delighted, too, to share this one other small thing at this early hour:  HANDLING THE TRUTH is a book that once sported another title.  And then one morning, while grousing on Facebook about a nonfiction writer who takes (in my opinion) far too many liberties, Melissa Sarno posted a video clip meant to make me laugh and (perhaps, who knows?) to silence my rant.  All day long I kept thinking about that clip and about how much I love Melissa.  I knew by dusk what I had to do.  Sarno, you are loveliness supreme.

I have many people, then, to thank today.  Gregory Djanikian, for inviting me to teach at Penn in the first place. Al Filreis of Penn's Kelly Writers House, for supporting my work in the classroom.  My students, whose work and faces and stories thrill, inspire, uplift me.  Amy Rennert, for believing so much in this book, for making sure it had the right home, for being a friend through all these years.  Lauren Marino, for your (joy-making) faith.  And, of course, Melissa and Jack.

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