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Time has not lately been my friend. I'm way behind on reading. I've got stacks of books here, begging for attention. I've got books behaving (for all the world to see) like furniture.

A few days ago I began to read the big book of the moment, an adult novel that has received every manner of acclaim, both from the prize givers and the lists. I wanted to love this book. I'd spent good hardcover money on it after all (something I thought about, something I must consider), and my friends were (mostly) enthralled. I chose it from the overwhelming pile, and I tried, believe me, I tried. Between sheets of baking cookies. While my husband watched Alaska shows. While I waited for the food shopping crowds to thin. I tried. I read. I tried.

Dutifully, I read. The story was important; I felt that on every page. But oh, those sentences. So relentlessly declarative. So devoted to moving the plot along at such a feverish pace that characters felt far more like symbols than people and scenes felt more like stage sets and philosophy felt stylized, rushed.

The book was an idea. But was it a book? And what kind of snob am I, to be asking such a question about a novel of what will be enduring prestige?

Had I, in the rush of my real life, in the daily swell of recommendation letters, bill writing, house cleaning, research, present wrapping, food buying, novel writing, forgotten how to read?

I needed to find out. I needed to get up early (this very morning) and reach for another book and determine whether I had lost my readerly touch, my patience, my gratitude for stories on the page. I chose Everywhere I Look, the new essay collection by the Australian Helen Garner. I opened up. I took a breath. I settled.

I settled and swelled. It took just a single page to believe in books again.

"When I was in my forties I went on holiday to Vanuatu with a kind and very musical man to whom I would not much longer be married, though I didn't know it yet," Garner writes—the fist lines of the first essay, "Whisper and Hum." She hates the tropics, she tells us, in the very next sentence, then:

And what I hated most was the sight of a certain parasitic creeper that flourished aggressively, bowing the treetops down and binding them to each other in a dense, undifferentiated mat of choking foliage. I longed to be transported at once to Scotland where the air was sharp and the nights brisk, and where plants were encouraged to grow separately and upright, with individual dignity.

Can't you just see it? Don't you marvel at how she chooses to introduce herself? As almost not married, as oppressed by density, as longing for sharp air and dignity?

I'm halfway through this collection now. I'll write more of it in the January edition of Juncture Notes, our memoir newsletter. I'm just here, on this blog, to say, Thank you, Helen Garner. Thank you, very much. For shaping and breaking and delineating your life in ways that bring about a pleasant startle.

Finally, a word on the photo: That is a photo I took in Berlin, a city for which we mourn over this holiday weekend, a city I came to love during my travels there and during my subsequent research for the Berlin novel, Going Over. We keep getting our hearts broken out here by losses, individual and obscene, suffered at the hands of cruel ideology. We don't know what to say. We remember the wild beauty of a place shedding a dark history and hope for that wild beauty to carry forward, while those who have been lost are remembered widely.

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I found this little girl in Berlin. She was mesmerized by the magic of bubbles. I left her city mesmerized as well, and then one day began to write a novel for it. I called that book We Could Be Heroes. I dedicated it to my editor, Tamra Tuller. It will be launched by Chronicle Books sometime next year, and I've held my breath, as I always do, hoping that it might find its right readers.

I cannot imagine being any more blessed than I am right now, today, by the kindness of two extraordinary readers—two young adult writers who have done so much on the page, done so much for others, done so much to elevate this genre, to prove its power. Thank you, Patricia McCormick and Ruta Sepetys for your words about We Could Be Heroes.

“Beth Kephart is one of my heroes. She’s spun gold out of the language of longing and has shown us how to make room for miracles. We Could Be Heroes –about a boy and girl separated by the cruelest of fates–will inspire any reader to make the leap for love.”
–Patricia McCormick, author of National Book Award Finalists Sold and Never Fall Down

 “An unforgettable portrayal of life and love divided. Kephart captures the beauty and desperation of 1980's Berlin with prose both gripping and graceful.”

--Ruta Sepetys, New York Times bestselling author of Between Shades of Gray and Out of the Easy

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I don't need to say much more than this:  the Berlin novel is complete.  There will, of course, be more things to do, as the story settles.  There is always more to do with books.  But the biggest part, the by-far hardest part, is done, as I say in this brief video.  It has been a blessed and emotional journey.

Happy birthday week, dear Tamra Tuller.  This one's for you.

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and allow myself to ponder how all of this (specifically) ends.  I am, perhaps, 5,000 words away from a first full draft.  In terms of plot and character, especially in terms of research, this is by far the most complex book I've ever attempted.  Every single word feels like a victory.  Every image is extracted from a graffiti-colored tangle.  I will work with and for clients on Monday, teach at Penn on Tuesday, then disappear for five days—the first time (these fifteen years into the writing of books, these sixteen books (not to mention an uncounted, embarrassing number of failures) in) I have ever gone away to be with a story, to be an author.  This book is that hard.  This book needs that much silence, and so do I. 

In the meantime, my boy is home for a day and a half.  The air is the right temperature for spring.

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