My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera

by Beth Kephart

Overview

Paper both shapes and defines us. Baby books, diaries, sewing patterns, diplomas, resumes, letters, death certificates—we find our stories in them. My Life in Paper is Beth Kephart’s memoiristic exploration of the paper legacies we forge and leave.

Kephart’s obsession with paper began in the wake of her father’s death, when she began to handcraft books and make and marble paper in his memory. But it was when she read My Life with Paper, an autobiography by the late renowned paper hunter and historian Dard Hunter, that she felt she had found a kindred spirit, someone to whom she might address a series of one-sided letters about life and how we live it. Remembering and crafting, wanting and loving, doubting and forgetting—the spine and weave of My Life in Paper came into view.

Paper, for Kephart, provides proof of our yearning, proof of our failure, proof of the people who loved us and the people we have lost. It offers, too, a counterweight to the fickle state of memory.

My Life in Paper, illustrated by the author herself, is an intimate and poignant meditation on life’s most pressing questions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439923948
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	11/03/2023
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Beth Kephart is an award-winning teacher, the co-founder of Juncture workshops, and a book artist. She is the award-winning author of more than three dozen books in multiple genres, including Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays, and We Are the Words: The Memoir Master Class. Her book Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River (Temple) has become a regional classic. Visit her online at bethkephartbooks.com and etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND.

Editorial Reviews

"In Kephart’s skilled hands, an everyday item made of plant fibers becomes a repository not just for personal history, but also ‘varnished intimacies.’ The poignant irony...is that while paper serves as an instrument for history, it is as ephemeral as the lives it documents.... As she offers insight into the fascinating world of papermaking, Kephart also reveals the intimate connection between memory and its most ubiquitous—and also most fragile—receptacle. An eloquent and unique memoir.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2023-07-21
An award-winning writer interweaves a narrative about her life with stories drawn from the obscure, sometimes beautiful world of paper and papermaking.

Kephart opens this prose-poem memoir with self-reflexive musings on Dard Hunter, a master printer and papermaker whose 1958 autobiography My Life with Paper inspired her own. Hunter’s book found its way to Kephart through her brother, who retrieved it from their deceased mother's belongings. Over time, it became a contemplative instrument the author used “to find out what paper means and what I might mean.” In an early chapter, the author recalls how the “bursting paper bags” filled with craft items inform a memory of making handmade cards with a beloved uncle. That recollection then becomes a springboard into a brief history of the paper bag itself. In Kephart’s skilled hands, an everyday item made of plant fibers becomes a repository not just for personal history, but also “varnished intimacies.” The poignant irony that undergirds the author’s explorations of everything from report cards to birth and death certificates is that while paper serves as an instrument for history, it is as ephemeral as the lives it documents. What makes paper so powerful are the many ways it weaves together relationships, such as the happy one Kephart has with her husband and fellow papermaking enthusiast, and the more complicated one she had with the mother. Threaded throughout Kephart’s elegantly nonlinear narrative are her imaginative ruminations on the life of Hunter, a man who traveled “more than a million miles to track down the secrets and tools and traditions of those who make their paper by hand.” As she offers insight into the fascinating world of papermaking, Kephart also reveals the intimate connection between memory and its most ubiquitous—and also most fragile—receptacle.

An eloquent and unique memoir.

Kirkus Reviews