Handling the Truth: notes on the launch journey

Later this year, on August 6th, Handling the Truth, my book about the making of memoir, the students I've taught, the many memoirs I've read, and the lessons I've learned, will be released by Gotham. 

I'll be celebrating its release on launch day at the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, where I will be offering not just a reading but a workshop opportunity.

Between now and then I'll be blogging about the new exercises I'm giving to my current University of Pennsylvania memoir class, the new/old memoirs I'm reading, and the debate that continues to swirl around this form.  I'll notch these new exercises, reviews, and commentary onto the dedicated Handling page after they appear here, so that that page will then serve as a supplemental repository.

Because no book about writing, especially, is ever really done.

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I think I'm making progress on HANDLING THE TRUTH until ...

I take all of those books down from the shelf (memoirs, most of them, or theories about them) and realize:  I haven't even scratched the surface.  So much to say.  So much to re-read.  So much to ponder.

One day at a time, I tell my tired soul.

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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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my students are here with their words

When I told my son that my Penn students were completing their memoirs during this spring break and had until last night at midnight to turn them in, he cocked his head and gave me one of those looks.  "Why would you do that," he asked, "to students you love?"

I tried to explain that the spring break due date was a way of giving my students more time—that they had been free to turn their pieces in earlier, if that's what they'd preferred, that we had been working toward this memoir all semester long, that more time outside the press of other school projects could be considered kind and beneficial.  Still, my son perpetuated his incredulous (but still quite handsome) stare.  "Friday night," he repeated.  "Midnight.  Had you considered, say, Wednesday instead?  Or Friday around dinner time?" 

Were I a real professor and not someone who teaches one course one semester each year, I might be attuned to all the nuances of academic life.  But I am, alas, merely and only me—this reader/writer/memoir evangelist who wants to give her students everything she's got...and who wants them to discover and apply every ounce of their own who-ness to the page.  I've got a kid who thinks I'm a little crazy.  I've got students who—by and large—don't resist.  And I have, this Saturday morning, some truly extraordinary work by young people who have put their hearts and very brilliant minds on the page.

At the end of a week of great exhaustion and sickness, my son is home cracking his sunny smile, and my students are here, with their words.

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