title: Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir
author:  Beth Kephart 
description: National Book Award finalist Kephart, who has written several memoirs and teaches a college course on the subject, offers an exploration of the genre that is informative and enjoyable. Drawing on the work of dozens of great authors (Annie Dillard, Mary Karr, Jeanette Winterson) as well as student comments, Kephart dives deeply into all that memoir can offer writers while acknowledging the pitfalls of oversharing and naming high-profile memoir abusers. Her insights are thoughtful and erudite. Real writers, she says, do not write to trump or abolish. They write . . . to rumble or howl, or because language is salvation or because theyve been alive or because they have survived. As instructive as Kepharts book is, it is not a how-to but rather a careful argument for the value of memoir, a form that allows writers to know themselves and readers to join them in the journey. Intense, provocative, endearing, and kind, Handling the Truth recalls Anne Lamotts Bird by Bird (1995). The appendix alone is a reading course not to be missed. Delightful. --Colleen Mondor
zlib_text: Captured By You
  Beth Kery
  
  Copyright © 2012 by Beth Kery
  Excerpt from Exposed to You Copyright © 2012 by Beth Kery
  Excerpt of Only for You © 2014 Beth Kery
  The right of Beth Kery to be identified as the Author of the Work has been
  asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
  1988.
  First published in this e-novella edition in 2013
  by Eternal Romance,
  an imprint of Headline Publishing Group
  Published by arrangement with Berkley,
  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
  Cover image © dpaint/Shutterstock
  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may
  only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means,
  with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of
  reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by
  the Copyright Licensing Agency.
  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
  persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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