Publisher Description
Wife | Daughter | Self investigates identity and the writing life through the perspective of one of the nation’s top memoir teachers and critics.
Curiously, inventively, Beth Kephart reflects on the iterative, composite self in her new memoir—traveling to lakes and rivers, New Mexico and Mexico, the icy waters of Alaska and a hot-air balloon launch in search of understanding. She is accompanied, often, by her Salvadoran-artist husband. She spends time, a lot of time, with her widowed father. As she looks at them she ponders herself and comes to terms with the person she is still becoming. At once sweeping and intimate, Wife | Daughter | Self is a memoir built of interlocking essays by an acclaimed author, teacher, and critic.
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“She believes in acute, clear-eyed attention to the small moments. Her stories are bare, stripped down, whittled to their very essence, like one of her husband’s dark, pragmatic vessels. To her father, she says, ‘I am here. Are you there?’ In each line of prose she poses the question to us and we answer: Yes, we are. We are here.”
—
Jacinda Barrett, actress and writer
About Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart is a National Book Award finalist, a Pew fellowship winner, an NEA grant winner, and the multi-genre author of more than thirty books that often appear on “best of” lists. She is an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely published essayist and critic who has written extensively about memoir and traveled the country giving workshops. Essays, some of them included in this book, have appeared, or soon will appear, in Life magazine, Ninth Letter, New York Times, The Normal School, North American Review, Salon, Catapult, LitHub, Brevity, The Millions, The Rumpus, and Chicago Tribune. Beth and her husband, artist William Sulit, collaborate on picture books, middle grade novels, Juncture Workshops, and a series of memoir workbooks and illustrated journals.