The Reading Life: The In-Between Hour

 The In-Between Hour, by Barbara Claypole White Paperback: 400 pages Publisher: Harlequin MIRA; Original edition (December 31, 2013)

Publisher’s Summary: Bestselling author Will Shepard is caught in the twilight of grief, after his young son dies in a car accident. But when his father’s aging mind erases the memory, Will rewrites the truth. The story he spins brings unexpected relief…until he’s forced to return to rural North Carolina, trapping himself in a lie.

Holistic veterinarian Hannah Linden is a healer who opens her heart to strays but can only watch, powerless, as her grown son struggles with inner demons. When she rents her guest cottage to Will and his dad, she finds solace in trying to mend their broken world, even while her own shatters.

As their lives connect and collide, Will and Hannah become each other’s only hope—if they can find their way into a new story, one that begins with love.

If it sounds like the characters of this novel have a lot on their plates -well, they do. Author Will Shephard has been dealt a double whammy, between the sudden loss of his five year old son and his aging father’s descent into dementia. In addition, Will still has unresolved feelings about his mother, whose mental instability made his youth miserable. Meanwhile, Hannah Linden is desperately trying to save her grown son from his own demons and from following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who committed suicide.

The summary of this novel pushed all my interest buttons - caring for an aging parent, adult children with mental illness, dealing with grief - and I wasn’t disappointed on any level. It was a compelling, well researched novel, with complex and believable characters.  And setting the novel in the North Carolina foothills provided the author with an opportunity to use the natural surroundings to enhance the mood. The title of the piece refers to the time of day between daylight and dusk, the time once know as “the gloaming,” and many of the characters find themselves at such a period on their lives, at a crossroads between light and dark.

The intersection of Will and Hannah’s lives was my favorite aspect of the story. Merging two disparate lifestyles as well as the very demanding needs of family members is a daunting task for any couple, but the reader is left feeling as if they will indeed be able to manage it, and provide each other with some much needed stability for the journey.

Barbara Claypole White writes and gardens in the forests of North Carolina.  Her son’s battles with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have inspired her to write love stories about damaged people. The In-Between Hour goes a step beyond most conventional women’s fiction, with it’s authentic focus on the havoc mental illness can create within a family, and the legacy it leaves for generations to come.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for the opportunity to read this novel.

Reading Life: This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Long before Ann Patchett’s imaginative novels (Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, State of Wonder) were bestsellers, she was making a living as a writer - but as a writer of nonfiction for magazines.  Patchett cut her writing teeth as a journalist/essayist in the 1970’s, beginning with a book review for Seventeen magazine (for which she was paid $250). She spent eight years writing almost exclusively for Seventeen, until she herself was thirty years old when she moved on to “grown up” publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and Gourmet. While she was writing freelance articles, Patchett was honing her craft as a fiction writer, with short stories and eventually novels. She credits her training in journalism - the intense editing, the research, the deadlines - with teaching her the kind of skills and endurance necessary to persevere as a novelist. “All those years of writing articles…made me a workhouse, and that in turn was a skill I brought back to my novels."

And while Patchett started writing nonfiction as a way to literally support her fiction writing (“The tricky thing about being a writer or any kind of artist is that in addition to marking art you also have to make a living”) she was surprised to find her work as a journalist supporting her fiction in other ways as well. When she was working on Bel Canto, her novel about an opera singer, the editors at Gourmet magazine sent her to Italy on assignment to write an article about famous opera houses. Later, they fronted a trip into the Peruvian jungle while she was working on State of Wonder, her book about scientists in the Amazon. In fact, there have been so many benefits to this “day job” of nonfiction writing that even when her novels were successful enough to provide a living wage, Patchett has continued to write nonfiction, just more selectively than when it was the mainstay of her livelihood.

This is the Story of  Happy Marriage collects a variety of Patchett’s essays and articles into one volume. It’s an interesting look at her life through essays that are well written and evocative of the writers time, place, and personality. We learn about her childhood, her love for her grandmother, her first marriage and divorce. We meet her dog Rosy as a puppy and then, 16 years later, as Patchett says goodbye to this beloved pet. We cheer her on when she writes about the success of her new bookstore in Nashville.

And we hear The Story of a Happy Marriage, with her husband Karl. “I  can tell you how I came to have a happy marriage,” Patchett writes in the title essay, “but I’m not so sure my results can be reproduced. I continue to think back to (my friend) Edra, standing in that swimming pool on a bright day in summer. ‘Does he make you a better person?’ was what she asked me, and I want to tell her, Yes, with the full force of his life, with the example of his kindness and vigilance, his good sense and equanimity, me makes me a better person. And that is what I aspire to be, better, and no, it really isn’t more complicated than that.”

This collection is an irresistible blend of memoir and journalism - the kind of writing I really love, probably because it’s the kind of writing toward which I have aspirations of my own. Whether you’re a fan of Patchett’s novels or not, these pieces form a portrait of a real life, lived with thoughtfulness, compassion, and love.

Having It All

To me, having it all - if one wants to define it at all - is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up. Like an eclipse. A perfect eclipse is when the moon is at its perigee, the Earth is farthest from the sun, and when the sun is observed near zenith. I have no idea what that means...but one thing is clear: It's rare. Personally, I believe having it all can last longer than that. It might be a fleeting moment - drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I'm in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading Goodnight Moon to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match. Having it all definitely involves an ability to seize the moment. It's when all your senses are engaged. It's when you feel at peace with someone you love. Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It's when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind.

Not particularly American, unquantifiable, unidentifiable, different for everyone, but you know it when you have it.

Delia Ephron's  new collection of essays,  Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc.), is a wise, warm, and witty exploration of what's really important in this 21st century. In her own inimitable Eprhon-istic vernacular, she writes about Life, Love, Family, Dogs and Bakeries. Like her sister Nora, with whom she collaborated on everything from dinner parties to award winning screenplays, Ephron has a distinctive voice that rings in the readers ear.  Her writing style is so conversational that reading her words feels like chatting with her while drinking coffee and sharing slivers of  a perfect chocolate brownie from Spoon bakery.

I especially loved her take on "having it all," because, like the Ephron sisters I was raised in that era of the 1970's when that idea first arose in women's heads. Marriage, children, and careers were not mutually exclusive entities, we were told.  After all, "we are strong, we are invincible, we are women!"

And we have Helen Reddy cheering us on, so what more could we possibly need?

"Our job as writers," Ephron says, "is to figure out what we can do. Only do what you can do. It's a rule I live by."  What Ephron does so well is combine humor and poignancy to illuminate the human condition, define the family dynamic, and make us feel a little less alone as we navigate our life in general.

Slow Reading

As if often the case, I have two books on the go at once, and these particular books, more than any two I've read together in some time, are a dichotomy in subject, in writing style, and in thematic material. The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit, is the kind of book that invites slow reading, practically begging the reader to stop and re-read a paragraph or a line, swirl it around in your mind like an oenophile would do with a sip of fine Burgundy. It invites reflection, it sets the mind racing in a kaleidoscope of directions. There are only a handful of writers who can do this, can pull the reader up short so they must stop, go back, say to themselves "Let me try that part again."

And then there is the other book (which will remain unnamed at the moment because it is a book for eventual review), a novel with stock characters, choppy sentences, hackneyed descriptions - no slow reading here. On the contrary, I find myself reading this one as quickly as possible, speeding through the pages in the same way I drive on the expressway, barely noticing the surroundings just getting from one place to the other as fast as possible.

But there's nothing wrong with that, is there? Sometimes we need a way to get from place to place quickly and efficiently, without a lot of moodling in between. Sometimes it's the middle of the night and we need to be distracted from the myriad of heavy thoughts that have disrupted our sleep. Sometimes we're just relaxing by the pool and want to be entertained by a story.  Other times, on a fresh new morning with our minds and bodies refreshed, we want to be stimulated, want to challenge our thoughts, want to meander along the back roads stopping at interesting little villages along the way.

In our Reading Life, just like Life in General, we need a variety of choices, a balance of experiences, to round us out and make us whole.

Here's a passage from Solnit's book that I read this morning. She's talking about Mary Shelley, and Frankenstein...

In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children, she also created a work of art that yet lives, a monster of sorts in its depth of horror, and a beauty in the strength of tis vision and its acuity in describing the modern world that in 1816 was just emerging. This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.

Entering into communion with a writer's imagination is always a fascinating adventure, especially when a writer leads you - compels you, even - to take the slow road and savor the journey.

The Sunday Salon: Handling the Truth

No one can or should tell you what to write about. But if you don't know where the memoir impulse is coming from, if you can't trace it, can't defend it, can't articulate an answer when somebody asks "Why'd you want to write a memoir anyway?" - stop. Hold those memoir horses. Either the mind has been teased for years upon years, or there's that small thing that won't be refused, or there's something else genuine and worthy. But nobody wants to hear that you're writing memoir because you need some quick cash, or because you think it will make you famous, or because your boyfriend said there's a movie in this, or because you're so mad and it's about time you get to tell your version.  from Handling the Truth, on the writing of memoir, by Beth Kephart

I love Beth Kephart's writing. I love every lyrical, magical, evocative word of it.  I wallow in a Kephart book, marvel at the way she uses language like a paintbrush, eat up her daily blog posts like part of my healthy breakfast.

So how happy am I that she has finally written a book about writing?

Ecstatic.

Handling the Truth distills the wisdom from Kephart's own experience as a writer of memoir, from her class at the University of Pennsylvania, and from the work of those writers  whom she most admires. It's chock full of sound writing principles and  imaginative exercises, set out in a systematic way to prepare you for the actual writing of your memoir.  If you follow it, you will have a firm foundation for writing your personal story.

But what I love most about Handling the Truth is that it reveals a side of Beth Kephart I've not seen before. She is fierce in this book, like a mama bear protecting her cub. Kephart has written five memoirs of her own, each one astoundingly good, each one proving anew her passion for this genre. And throughout handling the truth she exhorts all of us - we fledgling, aspiring memoir writers - not to take this work she loves and mess it up. In the opening pages, she gives us a forthright and adamant list of what memoir is NOT - not "a lecture, a lesson, a stew of information and facts." NOT "a self-administered therapy session." NOT "an exercise in self-glorification." NOT a "trumped-up, fantastical idea of what an interesting life might have been, if only."

What must we do, then, in order to write the stuff of our lives that is good and strong and true? The stuff that speaks?  Real memoirists "open themselves to self-discovery," she says, "and, in the process, make themselves vulnerable...They yearn, and they are yearned with. They declare a want to know. They seek out loud. They quest. They lessen the distance. They lean toward."

Makers of memoir "shape what they have lived and what they have seen. They honor what they love and defend what they believe. They dwell with ideas and language and with themselves, countering complexity with clarity and manipulating time. They locate stories inside the contradictions of their lives...they write the stories once; they write them several times. (...) And when their voices are true, we hear them."

If there is something in your mind that's been "teasing you for years," if there is "some small thing that won't be refused," if you are brave enough to take up the memoir standard, then Handling the Truth is the book you must read.

I have purchased a copy of Handling the Truth to give away to an interested reader. Simply leave a comment with the name of your favorite memoir.  Winner will be chosen at random on August 18.

Handling the Truth, by Beth Kephart

Copyright 2013, Gotham Books, published by the Penguin Group

ISBN: 978-1-592-40815-3

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