Why am I passionate about this?

The first memoir I ever read—Road Song by Natalie Kusz—pierced me in ways I did not know were possible. Kusz had written, in this elegantly crafted book, of an Alaskan childhood, a life-changing accident, early motherhood, and family love. She had written, I mean to say, of transcending truths. I have spent much of my life ever since deconstructing the ways in which true stories get told, and writing them myself. I’ve taught memoir to five-year-olds, Ivy League students, master’s level writers, and retirees. I co-founded Juncture Workshops, write a monthly newsletter on the form, and today create blank books into which other writers might begin to tell their stories.


I wrote

Wife Daughter Self: A Memoir in Essays

By Beth Kephart,

Book cover of Wife Daughter Self: A Memoir in Essays

What is my book about?

Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays, by National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart, reflects on the…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Who's Your Daddy

Beth Kephart Why did I love this book?

Arisa White grew up with the looming absence of her biological father—a man whose genes and behaviors haunt her. Finally White, an award-winning poet and teacher who was “born into a bracket of boys,” decides to visit this man in his far-away country to learn more about where she came from and who she may or may not be. The book moves chronologically. It swirls with poetry. It doesn’t always make for easy reading, but every line is well designed and, often, shattering. As a memoir-in-essays, it reaffirms the power of the crystalized scene and the intentional white space.

By Arisa White,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Who's Your Daddy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. A lyrical, genre-bending coming-of-age tale featuring a queer, Black, Guyanese American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates a difficult relationship with her father.


Book cover of An Earlier Life

Beth Kephart Why did I love this book?

“In an earlier life,” Miller writes, “I was a baker, in a bakery on a cobblestoned street.” It takes Miller just one single paragraph to tell this whole tale—how she proofed yeast, how she scraped her spoon, how she made loaves for children: “It was my only kindness.” In every successive chapter—most all of them short, many of them formally inventive—Miller deconstructs her life and soul—the roots of her unease, the startling incidents of loss, her learning to sleep, and her learning to live with the person she becomes. Miller is a stellar choreographer, knowing just where to place which expertly fashioned scene and knowing, always, what to leave out.

By Brenda Miller,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked An Earlier Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How many lives do we create in one lifetime? In her latest collection of innovative, shape-shifting essays, Brenda Miller evolves through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood to enter the wry maturity of middle age. Whether traveling from synagogue to sweat lodge, from the Arizona desert to a communal hot springs in California, she navigates the expectations placed on young girls and women at every turn. She finds guidance in her four major creeds (Judaism, Home Improvement, the Grateful Dead, and Rescue Dogs), while charting a course toward an authentic life. Each stage demands its own form, its own story, sometimes…


Book cover of Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life

Beth Kephart Why did I love this book?

Abigail Thomas likes to say that she didn’t know what she was doing when she set out to write Safekeeping. Memories returned and she wrote them down. Sometimes she wrote of herself in first person. Sometimes in second. Sometimes in third. Sometimes she wrote of apple cake, and of people she loved, and of unsustainable loss. No one remembers their entire life in systematic order. Few lives conform to outlines. That is why Thomas needed to invent the shape of her memoir in essays—to arrange all of its idiosyncratic pieces into an utterly compelling idiosyncratic whole.

By Abigail Thomas,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Safekeeping as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A beautifully crafted and inviting account of one woman’s life, Safekeeping offers a sublimely different kind of autobiography. Setting aside a straightforward narrative in favor of brief passages of vivid prose, Abigail Thomas revisits the pivotal moments and the tiny incidents that have shaped her life: pregnancy at 18; single motherhood (of three!) by the age of 26; the joys and frustrations of three marriages; and the death of her second husband, who was her best friend. The stories made of these incidents are startling in their clarity and reassuring in their wisdom.

This is a book in which silence…


Book cover of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

Beth Kephart Why did I love this book?

When Renkl’s book arrived on my doorstep a few years ago, I was lost in the rush of the day. But just one glance at the first page and I stopped all else, found a chair, and settled in with this book of woven fragments. The solace and danger of the natural world braid, in Renkl’s hands, with personal losses, worry, and wonder. Images, metaphors, and motifs repeat and repeat again—enlarging the story with each appearance. Illustrations by Renkl’s brother complete the story, making this book endlessly re-readable and finally reassuring.

By Margaret Renkl,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Late Migrations as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Named a "Best Book of the Year" by New Statesman, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Washington Independent Review of Books

Southern Book Prize Finalist

From New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family-and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents-her exuberant, creative mother; her steady,…


Book cover of The Circus Train

Beth Kephart Why did I love this book?

“Ever since the chemo leaked, your toes have had no feeling. So start there. This is the beginning. Eternal. Cold. A dizzying loss of balance.” These words, high on the first page of Kitchen’s mesmerizing book of pieces, announce what is to come—the mystery of living, the mystery of dying, and the transitory in-between. Kitchen is battling the cancer that will kill her. Her mind takes her back and forth, between her present day and her youth. Stories tug at her and she can’t quite find the center, and there is no room, or time, for extended passages. This is poetry as memoir-in-essays, and it will take your breath away. 

By Judith Kitchen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Circus Train as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Explore my book 😀

Wife Daughter Self: A Memoir in Essays

By Beth Kephart,

Book cover of Wife Daughter Self: A Memoir in Essays

What is my book about?

Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays, by National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart, reflects on the iterative, composite self as she travels to lakes and rivers, New Mexico and Mexico, the icy waters of Alaska, and a hot-air balloon launch in search of understanding. Who is she, in relationship to others? Who is she when she is alone, with a pen in her hands? And how will she write the truest version of her life after spending many years teaching others to unlock their own tales? A book of interlocking essays by an acclaimed writer, teacher, and critic that engages the reader in soul searches of their own.

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Follow Me to Africa

By Penny Haw,

Book cover of Follow Me to Africa

Penny Haw Author Of The Invincible Miss Cust

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Storyteller Dog walker Dreamer Runner Reader

Penny's 3 favorite reads in 2024

What is my book about?

Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.

It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories. 

Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…

Follow Me to Africa

By Penny Haw,

What is this book about?

Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.

It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.

Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…


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