Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir by Beth Kephart (English) Paperback

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A beautifully written work in its own right, Handling the Truth is Kephart's memoir-writing guide for those who read or seek to write the truth.In the tradition of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, a critically acclaimed National Book Award finalist shares inspiration and practical advice for writing a 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 is Kephart's memoir-writing guide for those who read or seek to write the truth.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Author Biography

Beth Kephart's first memoir was a National Book Award finalist and was named best book of the year (1998) by several publications. Her subsequent four memoirs earned her additional acclaim and standing among memoir readers. A respected reviewer, essayist, and blogger, Kephart chaired juries for both the National Book Awards and the PEN First Nonfiction Awards. A veteran writing teacher, she currently teaches memoir at the University of Pennsylvania.

Review

"Beth Kephart's A Slant of Sun offers a most original and moving examination of what it means to be a parent. The book also offers a thought-provoking way of looking at children and their differences....Kephart is a very gifted and insightful writer." — USA Today"In page after page of intimate, searching prose. . .this brave book serves as a parenting guide stripped to its essentials, a testament to the open heart of one mother and solid proof that. . .parents do matter." — Salon.com"[Kephart] writes eloquently in A Slant of Sun...of her panic before his diagnosis and his first rounds of speech therapy....A Slant of Sun is a memoir--a personal and not a prescriptive book--but one of its strengths is that it makes us think...not just for Jeremy but for other idiosyncratic children too." — The New York Times Book Review"There are lessons here for everyone about, quite simply, what it means to be fully alive." — Salon Magazine"A mother's bittersweet account of raising a son to whom experts had given the ungainly label… Her efforts… for Jeremy are a story of determination, frustration, ingenuity, partial successes, tireless efforts, and most of all, a mother's love. While Kephart does not claim to have cured her [son], parents who have received a similar diagnosis will find her revealing story immensely encouraging." — Kirkus Reviews"[Beth] Kephart conveys her frantic reaction to the original diagnosis, her furious desire to change conditions for Jeremy at once and her ultimate realization that a tangible, positive outcome was possible, given great patience. Kephart tells an affecting story of parental dedication." — Publishers Weekly"Her affecting story will make a welcome addition to any collection." — Library Journal"Beth Kephart . . . is a gifted, even poetic writer." — The New York TimesPraise for Into The Tangle of Friendship: "Kephart is nothing short of a virtuoso when it comes to dissecting the many friendships people experience." — Orlando Sentinel"With grace and quiet wisdom, with lyrical prose and astonishing insight, Beth Kephart...embarks on a journey." — Baltimore Sun"Kephart in a single voice, lyrically and poignantly explores the dimensions of friendship." — Library Journal"Her lyrical yet conversational prose neatly evokes friendship's delicate balancing act." — The New York Times Book Review"Invigorating...earnest and endearing. Kephart succeeds at drawing a stirring picture of our humanity through the prism of her... relationships." — Salon"With infectious passion and hard-won wisdom, Beth Kephart eloquently celebrates the rigors and rewards of the creative process and – equally necessary – the art of crafting a meaningful life.  Part memoir and part memoirist's manifesto, this small, urgent book inspires on many levels.  Read it and learn how to tell your story.  Better yet, read it and begin to understand why your story matters." — Katrina Kenison, author of MAGICAL JOURNEY: An Apprenticeship in Contentment"Generous, intelligent and genuinely insightful."—Kirkus Review, Starred Review"Kephart…has composed a gorgeous meditation on memoir. . . . she has created a work of art simply by reflecting on her own art—the writing and teaching of memoir. . . . She writes with the same lyricism found in her own works and offers here passionate encouragement for would-be memoir writers to embrace truth and empathy, mystery and exploration. . . . Highly recommended for anyone interested in the anatomy of a successful memoir and for all writers of literary nonfiction."—Library Journal, Starred Review"Not a memoir proper, this book fits nicely with the others on this list because it's about writing memoir. Kephart has penned five.... She's also mastered the fiction and essay forms and currently teaches memoir writing at the University of Pennsylvania, so she's got the skills to explain every facet of the writing process, including that crucial issue for memoirists: where does imaginative shaping stop and disregard for truth begin."—Library Journal, Prepub Alert"A marvelous primer for anyone who would dare to face the furies and write about his or her life. Beth Kephart has read the genre closely, put her own feet to the fire, and distilled the form with all the passion of a great teacher." —Marie Arana, author of the National Book Award finalist American Chica."With infectious passion and hard-won wisdom, Beth Kephart eloquently celebrates the rigors and rewards of the creative process and – equally necessary – the art of crafting a meaningful life.  Part memoir and part memoirist's manifesto, this small, urgent book inspires on many levels.  Read it and learn how to tell your story.  Better yet, read it and begin to understand why your story matters." —Katrina Kenison, author of Magical Journey:  An Apprenticeship in Contentment "Beth Kephart has done something extraordinary with this huge and messy thing called memoir—roping it into submission with her typically beautifully writing. There is authority here, scholarship, challenge. In this well-organized book, every example is a precious stone to turn over and to learn from, particularly in terms of crafting a voice and finding one's way in. Too many students think memoir just happens. Nothing ever just happens. Memoir is an academic field. This should become the seminal text."—Buzz Bissinger, author of Father's Day, A Prayer for the City, and Friday Night Lights"Not a memoir proper, this book fits nicely with the others on this list because it's about writing memoir. Kephart has penned five.... She's also mastered the fiction and essay forms and currently teaches memoir writing at the University of Pennsylvania, so she's got the skills to explain every facet of the writing process, including that crucial issue for memoirists: where does imaginative shaping stop and disregard for truth begin."—Library Journal, Nonfiction Previews for August 2013

Prizes

Winner of Books for a Better Life (Motivational) 2013Winner of Books for a Better Life (Motivational) 2014

Review Quote

"Generous, intelligent and genuinely insightful." - Kirkus Review, Starred Review "Kephart…has composed a gorgeous meditation on memoir. . . . she has created a work of art simply by reflecting on her own art-the writing and teaching of memoir. . . . She writes with the same lyricism found in her own works and offers here passionate encouragement for would-be memoir writers to embrace truth and empathy, mystery and exploration. . . . Highly recommended for anyone interested in the anatomy of a successful memoir and for all writers of literary nonfiction." - Library Journal , Starred Review "Not a memoir proper, this book fits nicely with the others on this list because it's about writing memoir. Kephart has penned five.... She's also mastered the fiction and essay forms and currently teaches memoir writing at the University of Pennsylvania, so she's got the skills to explain every facet of the writing process, including that crucial issue for memoirists: where does imaginative shaping stop and disregard for truth begin." - Library Journal, Prepub Alert "A marvelous primer for anyone who would dare to face the furies and write about his or her life. Beth Kephart has read the genre closely, put her own feet to the fire, and distilled the form with all the passion of a great teacher." -Marie Arana, author of the National Book Award finalist American Chica . "With infectious passion and hard-won wisdom, Beth Kephart eloquently celebrates the rigors and rewards of the creative process and equally necessary the art of crafting a meaningful life. Part memoir and part memoirist's manifesto, this small, urgent book inspires on many levels. Read it and learn how to tell your story. Better yet, read it and begin to understand why your story matters." -Katrina Kenison, author of Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment "Beth Kephart has done something extraordinary with this huge and messy thing called memoir-roping it into submission with her typically beautifully writing. There is authority here, scholarship, challenge. In this well-organized book, every example is a precious stone to turn over and to learn from, particularly in terms of crafting a voice and finding one's way in. Too many students think memoir just happens. Nothing ever just happens. Memoir is an academic field. This should become the seminal text." -Buzz Bissinger, author of Father's Day , A Prayer for the City , and Friday Night Lights "Not a memoir proper, this book fits nicely with the others on this list because it's about writing memoir. Kephart has penned five.... She's also mastered the fiction and essay forms and currently teaches memoir writing at the University of Pennsylvania, so she's got the skills to explain every facet of the writing process, including that crucial issue for memoirists: where does imaginative shaping stop and disregard for truth begin." - Library Journal , Nonfiction Previews for August 2013

Excerpt from Book

HANDLING the TRUTH HANDLING the TRUTH INTRODUCTION Throughout the 1990s, I was an unknown and in many ways unschooled writer who was deeply in love with her son. Love, for me, was the time I sat with this boy reading stories. It was the songs I sang to him at night. It was the walks we took and the hats we bought and the important things he taught me about language both received and given, and courage made essential. I wrote love one fragment at a time. I webbed it together until discrete essays became a binding narrative. I sent the manuscript out, a slush-pile writer. When this small book of mine--a family book, an intimate book--found readers beyond people I personally knew, I was utterly unprepared. I had been an outsider. I had written from the margins. I still had much to learn. I would go on to write four more memoirs and a river book that I called Flow that assumed the memoir''s form. I would be asked to conduct workshops and give talks--in elementary schools, in middle schools, in high schools, at universities, in libraries and community centers. I would write about the writing life for publications great and small. I would chair juries for the National Book Awards and the PEN First Nonfiction Awards and serve on a jury panel for the National Endowment for the Arts. I would explore new genres--poetry, fable, young adult literature. I would--a brave experiment--begin to blog daily in memoiristic fashion. The important thing to me was this: I was still writing. I was still reading. I was still learning. When the University of Pennsylvania asked me to teach creative nonfiction, I was not inclined to say yes. Raised up in memoir on my own, surrounded by my own huge but idiosyncratic memoir library, still in many ways making my outsider way into the book world, it wasn''t at all clear to me that I would succeed within an Ivy League environment among faculty members who knew what teaching was. I hadn''t grown up in the workshop system; how could I teach it? With the exception of three ten-day summer programs I enrolled in when I was already a mother, I had never taken a formal writing class. I was the true memoir autodidact, and this was Penn, where, as a student years before, I had studied the history and sociology of science, swerving clear of English. As it turns out, teaching at Penn had been my calling all along. I eased into the responsibility--first mentoring a single student, then teaching a select advanced class, then taking on the teaching of Creative Nonfiction 135.302, which has become my favorite job of all. In teaching others memoir, I have taught it to myself--the language of expectations and critique, the exemplary work of others, the exercises that yield well-considered work, the morality of the business, the psychic cautions. Teaching memoir is teaching vulnerability is teaching voice is teaching self. Next to motherhood, it has been, for me, the greatest privilege. It has also--perhaps inevitably--led to the writing of this book. Handling the Truth is about the making of memoir, and the consequences. It''s about why so many get it wrong, and about how to get it right. It''s about the big questions: Is compassion teachable? Do half memories count? Are landscape, weather, color, taste, and music background or foreground? To whom does then belong? And what rights do memoirists have, and how does one transcend particulars to achieve a universal tale, and how does a memoirist feel, once the label is attached, and what is the language of truth? Handling the Truth is about knowing ourselves. It''s about writing, word after word, and if it swaggers a little, I hope it teaches a lot, providing a proven framework for teachers, students, and readers. ONE DEFINITIONS, PRELIMINARIES, CAUTIONS PREFATORY MAYBE the audacity of it thrills you. Maybe it''s always been like this: You out on the edge with your verity serums, your odd-sized heart, your wet eyes, urging. Maybe this is what you are good for, after all, or good at , though there, you''ve done it again: wanted proof, suggested the possibility. You teach memoir. You negotiate truth. Goodness doesn''t matter here. Bearing witness does. Memoir is a strut and a confession, a whisper in the ear, a scream. Memoir performs, then cedes. It is the work of thieves. It is a seduction and a sleight of hand, and the world won''t rise above it. Or you won''t. You in the Victorian manse at the edge of the Ivy League campus, where you arrive early and sit in the attitude of prayer. You who know something not just of the toil but also of the psychic cost, the pummeling doubt, the lacerating regrets that live in the aftermath of public confession. You have written memoir in search of the lessons children teach and in confusion over the entanglements of friendships. You have written in despair regarding the sensational impossibility of knowing another, in defense of the imperiled imagination, and in the throes of the lonesome sink toward middle age. You have written quiet and expected quiet, and yet a terrible noise has hurried in--a churlish self-recrimination that cluttered the early hours when clear-minded nonmemoirists slept. You have learned from all that. You have decided. Memoir is, and will still be, but cautions must be taken. Teaching memoir is teaching verge. It''s teaching questions: Who are you? Where have you been? Where are you going? What do you believe in? What will you fight for? What is the sound of your voice? It''s teaching now against then , and leave that out to put this in, and yes, maybe that happened, but what does it mean ? An affront? You hope not. A calling? Probably. You enter a classroom of students you have never seen before, and over the course of a semester you travel--their forgotten paraphernalia in the well of their backpacks, those tattoos on their wrists, those bio notes inked onto the palm of one hand. They will remember their mother''s London broil, but not the recipe. They will proffer a profusion of umbrellas and a poor-fitting snowsuit, a pair of polka-dotted boots, red roses at a Pakistani grave, a white billiard ball, a pink-and-orange sari, a box with a secret bottom, Ciao Bella gelato. Someone will make a rat-a-tat out of a remembered list. Someone will walk you through the corridors of the sick or through the staged room of a movie set or beside the big bike that will take them far. Someone will say, Teach me how to write like this , and someone will ask what good writing is, and you will read out loud from the memoirs you have loved, debunk (systematically) and proselytize (effusively), perform Patti Smith and Terrence Des Pres, Geoffrey Wolff and Mark Richard, Marie Arana and Mary Karr, William Fiennes and Michael Ondaatje, C. K. Williams and Natalie Kusz. You will play recordings of Sylvia Plath reciting "Lady Lazarus" and Etheridge Knight intoning "The Idea of Ancestry," and you will say, in a room made dark by encrusted velvet and mahogany stain, You tell me good. You tell me why. Know your opinions and defend them. These aspiring makers of memoir are who you believe and what you believe in--the smiley face tie he wears on Frat Rush Tuesdays, the cheerful interval between her two front teeth, the planks he carries in his dark-blue backpack, the accoutrements of power lifting. Enamored of the color red and hip-hop, declaring you their "galentine," impersonating Whitman, missing their mothers, missing their dead, they are, simply and complexly, human, and they may not trust themselves with truth, but they have to trust one another. You insist that they earn the trust of one another. And so you will send them out into the world with cameras. And so you will sit them down with songs. And so you will ask them to retrieve what they lost and, after that, to leave aside the merely incidental. You will set a box of cookies on the table, some chocolate-covered berries, some salt-encrusted chips, and then (at last) get out of the way, for every memoir must in the end and on its own emerge and bleed and scab. Audacity was the wrong word; you see that now. The word, in fact, is privilege . Teaching, after all these years, is the marrow in your bones. Truth is your obsession. MEMOIR IS NOT HERE are some of the things that memoir is not: * A chronological, thematically tone-deaf recitation of everything remembered. That''s autobiography, which should be left, in this twenty-first century, to politicians and celebrities. Oh, be honest: It should just be left. * A typeset version of a diary scrawl--unfiltered, unshaped. There are remarkable diaries; A Woman in Berlin (anonymous), for example, is artful, heartbreaking, essential. New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 (Teresa Carpenter, editor) is a thrill. But the method of a diarist is to record events and thoughts as they are happening . A memoirist looks back. * Exhibitionism for exhibitionism''s sake. If nothing''s been learned from a life, is it worth sharing? Or, if nothing''s been learned yet , shouldn''t the story wait? * An accusation, a retaliation, a big take that! in type. Fights are waged in bedrooms and courthouses. A memoir is not a fight. * A lecture, a lesson, a stew of information and facts. Memoirs illuminate and reveal, as opposed to justify and record. They connote and suggest but never insist. * A self-administered therapy session. Memoirists speak to others and not just to themselves. * An exercise in self-glorification; an ability--or refusal--to accept one''s own culpability; a false a

Details ISBN159240815X Author Beth Kephart Short Title HANDLING THE TRUTH Publisher Gotham Books Language English ISBN-10 159240815X ISBN-13 9781592408153 Media Book Format Paperback Residence PA Year 2013 Imprint Gotham Books Subtitle On the Writing of Memoir Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Audience Age 18 Publication Date 2013-08-06 US Release Date 2013-08-06 UK Release Date 2013-08-06 Edited by Gnon Baba Birth 19691203 Affiliation Research Scholar, Amal Jyothi Centre for Nanoscience and Technology, Kerala, India Position Professor emeritus (deceased) Qualifications MD Pages 272 DEWEY 808.06692 Audience General NZ Release Date 2013-09-24 AU Release Date 2013-09-24 We've got this

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