Beth Kephart

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of 21 books—including six memoirs—and the 2015/2016 recipient of the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir won the 2013 Books for a Better Life Award (Motivational Category and was named a best writing book by O magazine, Poets & Writers, and many others.

Ms. Kephart’s other books include Love: A Philadelphia Affair and acclaimed novels for teens. She is a National Book Award finalist and an NEA and Pew grant winner. She is a partner in Juncture Writing Workshops, has lectured about memoir in venues across the country, and writes frequently on the topic for the Chicago Tribune.

She blogs daily at http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/

Book Reviews by Beth Kephart

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At the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach memoir, I’ve started a tradition.

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In The Duke of Deception, memoirist Geoffrey Wolff wrote of a man—his own father—who lied voraciously, died in shame, and nonetheless was loved. He left questions in his wake.

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I need a replacement word for fierce. I need something slightly less bloodying than savage and something more devastating than captious.

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He wrote The Caine Mutiny, Marjorie Morningstar, Youngblood Hawke, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. He won the Pulitzer, TV miniseries fame, and the girl of his dreams.

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Angel is remorse, and it is redemption. It is (highest compliment) craft.”

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In my college years I fell hard for the shadows and complexities of 20th century Russia.

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It’s been more than three years since the release of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, and into that vacuum has swept a class of tender-funny romance novels featuring one or more young

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After I finished reading M Train, Patti Smith’s mesmeric new memoir, I sat on a round chair in a humid house and didn’t move. The hour, it seemed, had been churched.

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Life runs ahead of us, it runs away from us, it never stops until, one day, it does. How do we live the happiness we tentatively achieve? Is happiness sustainable?

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Julianna Baggott can do anything with words. Anything, I tell you.

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“It is a memoir full of ache. An ache siblings understand.”

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“This is a novel for the bold of heart.”

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Mesmerizing and at times mesmerizingly confusing, Harold Bloom’s new opus, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, is (but only fractionally) this: A mix of the tend

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“Petterson’s language is immaculate.”

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“A writer of extreme beauty, a shaper of divine sentences, Macdonald is also a memoirist who understands the power of telling a story . . .”