Beginning ~ with a single room

Beginning

First a room.  Then two rooms.  Then a three-room, three-floor house.  Then two stories with a porch plopped along the railroad tracks, big enough to hold a child (just one child).  Then another house that got fat with things until we counted what we needed and didn't need much of that.

Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays ~ by Beth Kephart, illustrated by William Sulit, 2021, memoir, 202 pages

How are we shaped by the people we love?  Who are we when we think no one else is watching?  How do we trust the choices we make?  The answers shift as the years go by.  The stories remake themselves as we remember.  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.

Gilion at Rose City Reader

hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.