Title: Wife | Daughter | Self — A Memoir in Essays
Author: Beth Kephart
Publisher: Forest Avenue Press (Portland, Oregon), 2021
Honors: National Book Award Finalist (2021)
Available locally: Black Sun Books, 2467 Hilyard Street (541-484-3777); and J. Michaels Books, 160 E. Broadway (541-342-2002)
By Daniel Buckwalter
A gem of a memoir is now out.
It’s where honesty and poetic-like lyricism intersect to fashion a brisk read and remind readers that, yes, we are shaped by the ones we love, but those memories are fragments, stuffed into buckets we can carry only so far.
The further we travel, the more memories are added or eliminated, until we have to stop and ask ourselves a hard question in a third-person freeze frame: “What do you think now?”
“A memoir is never right. Nor is the memoirist,” Beth Kephart writes.
Daniel Buckwalter; photo by Randi Bjornstad
I found myself asking the question often — “What do you think now?” — when reading Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays by Kephart, which was released in early March.
Kephart does a masterful job of distilling the complex fragments of her voyage into swift vignettes and with sparse language that fully covers every scene. The minimalist pictures she paints with words, with her true talent and inspired by her husband Bill’s watercolors, are vivid and engaging.
I never felt bogged down. I was in tuned from the start with the author and her travels to Mexico, New Mexico and Alaska, as well as her childhood in an inventive search of understanding.
There’s Bill, a native of El Salvador who is an architect by trade but an artist in his blood; an itinerant upbringing that saw Kephart’s family travel from job to job as well as the studied (and deeply moving) time she spends later with her aging, widowed father. It is a portrait of a life well lived — with both unsteady, tender steps and mighty roars — in the many roles Kephart (as with all professional women) has taken on, and those roles are better understood spiritually today by the 61-year-old author.
It’s not typical of me to explore how the sausage is made in a memoir, but Kephart’s writing is so crisp that I allowed myself to read the author’s three-page explainer at the end: “Small Pieces: On the Making of Wife | Daughter | Self. “ There is some humor to this.
She writes, “It was in an attempt to save a novel from near-certain publishing oblivion that I overcame myself to write myself — small personal pieces that extracted the truth from the fiction.”
Later, Kephart notes, “The pages now held within these covers found their present form only after I returned to the much younger version of myself who choreographed her own skating routines to the music she carried in her head … If we were out on the ice I would skate you this book.”
Kephart’s presence, and the fact that her memoir is a National Book Award Finalist, is a high note for Forest Avenue Press and publisher Laura Stanfill, who founded the Portland-based house in 2012.
Kephart — who lives in Philadelphia and teaches from time to time at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania — is an essayist who has written poetry and more than 10 nonfiction books, including A Slant of Sun: One Child’s Courage, nominated for a National Book Award for nonfiction in 1998.
Stanfill explained in an email to me for this review that Kephart “wrote an exquisite blog post” for a novel that Forest Avenue Press published in 2014.
“When Forest Avenue published its first memoir in 2019, This Particular Happiness by Jackie Shannon Hollis (which Buckwalter reviewed then for Eugene Scene), “Beth reached out to see if I’d take a look at her memoir in essays,” Stanfill wrote. “I said sure, we met in person at the American Library Association conference in Washington, D.C., and then I signed her book in a matter of a few weeks.”
I can see why, and I would encourage everyone to read Wife | Daughter | Self. It is worth it.
