Still Love in Strange Places - A Memoir (Paperback, Revised)

A love story and a journey across the continents of marriage.

When Beth Kephart met and fell in love with the artist who would become her husband, she had little knowledge of the place he came from—an exotic coffee farm high in the jungle hills of El Salvador, a place of terrifying myths and even more frightening realities, of civil war and devastating earthquakes. Yet, marriage, she finds, means taking in not only the stranger who is one's lover but also a stranger's history—in this case, a country, language, people, and culture utterly foreign to a young American woman. Kephart's transcendently lyrical prose (often compared to the work of Annie Dillard) has already made her a National Book Award finalist. In each of her memoirs she has written about love, using her own life to seek out universal truths.

"Unclouding the lens through which she looks at her husband...becomes her difficult, powerful act of love" (Washington Post). Kephart's "lush...poetic evocation of Salvadorian life, its magic and tragedies" (Los Angeles Times) offers her testament to the ties that bind: to the chosen love of a man, and the necessary love of the place he comes from. "This luminous memoir [goes] deep into the territory of her marriage, and straight to the heart of the embattled, beautiful country her husband calls home" (Katrina Kenison). 19 b/w photographs. Reading group guide included.

"An exquisite gift, a poet's text on love, travel, spiritual sustenance, and the dark magic of El Salvador."—Jayne Anne Phillips

"With richly evocative prose than can only be called masterful, Beth Kephart illuminates here the questions we somehow keep forgetting to ask: how is it possible to fully love our mate without knowing and loving, too, where he or she was engendered? Still Love in Strange Places is a revelation and a feast!" —Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

"I don't know how it is possible to take something as simple as words and make them into something as magnificent as this book, but Beth Kephart surely does. Here, again, is her exquisite devotion to language and to family. Here, again, is a book you will want to keep close at hand."—Sue Halpern, author of Four Wings and a Prayer

"In the best tradition of the memoir, Beth Kephart's Still Love in Strange Places intimately speaks to the reader about the daunting limits of memory, the irrepressible power of blood ties, and the impossible task of fully knowing those we love. Her exquisite prose, as sensuous as the El Salvador land she describes, conjures the wounds of an irretrievable past and offers the salve of wisdom, compassion, and promise." —Maria Laurino, author of Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America