Ghosts in the Garden
By Beth Kephart & William SulitPublisher Description
?National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart’s new book is an enchanting midlife meditation on aging, identity, and memory set against the backdrop of Chanticleer garden in Pennsylvania.
On the morning of her forty-?rst birthday, Kephart — a mother, a wife, and a writer pressured by deadlines — finds herself at Chanticleer, one of the world’s most celebrated pleasure gardens. She knows little of the language of flowers. She cannot name the birds in the trees. She is a stranger among the gardeners and the people passing by. And yet she understands that she has somehow found her way to a place that can teach her about life and growth, about the past and the future. Week after week, she returns to Chanticleer — recalling her childhood self, mulling over legacy and soul, striking up friendships with gardeners and conversations with other visitors. Succored by the seasons and the weather, she finds the grace in approaching middle age. There are lessons in seeds, and she finds them. There are lessons in letting go.
Kephart writes about questions we all ask ourselves: How do we remember who we used to be? How do we imagine who we’ll become? Have we lived our lives as we set out to? What legacies do we wish to leave behind? The book spans a two-year cycle, and each chapter is accompanied by a gorgeous black-and-white photograph of Chanticleer by William Sulit. Ghosts in the Garden pulses with possibility and purpose, with wisdom that is ageless and transcendent.
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About Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart is the author of a
memoir trilogy and of Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination
in a Fast-Forward World. Her first book, A Slant of Sun: One
Child’s Courage, was a National Book Award finalist and
Salon.com winner; her second, Into the Tangle of Friendship: A
Memoir of the Things That Matter, was written with the support
of an NEA grant. Frequently anthologized, Kephart’s essays
have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the
Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, Real Simple, Organic Style, Lifetime,
Redbook, and elsewhere. She lives in a Philadelphia suburb with
her husband,William Sulit, and their son, Jeremy.
Other books by Beth Kephart
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