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Into the Tangle of Friendship : A Memoir of the Things That Matter
With her first book, A SLANT OF SUN, Beth Kephart wrote about parenting and drew us, in the words of the National Book Award jurors, “into a world of timeless and universal themes: the art of mothering, the cost of difference, and the difference one individual can make.” In her second work of nonfiction, she again explores something we often take for granted — friendship — and invites us to see it as if for the first time.
Beginning with the rediscovery of a long-lost best friend, INTO THE TANGLE OF FRIENDSHIP follows the intertwining stories of a cast of characters for whom friendship is a saving grace. We meet a next-door neighbor facing the death of a spouse, watch two young boys learn what it means to be friends, and feel the heartache of a professional caregiver whose compassion and dedication ultimately come up short. Kephart is concerned with the haphazard ways we find one another, the tragedy, boredom, and sheer carelessness that break us apart, the myriad reasons people stay together and grow. What is friendship, and what is its secret calculus? Telling stories to illuminate this question, she also engages us in an essential dialogue about what it means to be fully alive.
Profound, original, and exquisitely written, INTO THE TANGLE OF FRIENDSHIP is a hymn to the intimate realities of our lives and what makes those lives not only worth living but magical. It will resonate with anyone who has ever had a friend, or lost one.
Beginning with the rediscovery of a long-lost best friend, INTO THE TANGLE OF FRIENDSHIP follows the intertwining stories of a cast of characters for whom friendship is a saving grace. We meet a next-door neighbor facing the death of a spouse, watch two young boys learn what it means to be friends, and feel the heartache of a professional caregiver whose compassion and dedication ultimately come up short. Kephart is concerned with the haphazard ways we find one another, the tragedy, boredom, and sheer carelessness that break us apart, the myriad reasons people stay together and grow. What is friendship, and what is its secret calculus? Telling stories to illuminate this question, she also engages us in an essential dialogue about what it means to be fully alive.
Profound, original, and exquisitely written, INTO THE TANGLE OF FRIENDSHIP is a hymn to the intimate realities of our lives and what makes those lives not only worth living but magical. It will resonate with anyone who has ever had a friend, or lost one.
204 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2000
2 people are currently reading
151 people want to read
About the author
Beth Kephart
57 books336 followersI'm the award-winning writer of more than two-dozen books in multiple genres—memoir, middle grade and young adult fiction, picture books, history, corporate fable, and books on the making of memoir.
I'm also an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and an essayist and critic with work appearing in The New York Times, Life magazine, Ninth Letter, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and elsewhere.
Please visit me at junctureworkshops.com or bethkephartbooks.com.
I'm also an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and an essayist and critic with work appearing in The New York Times, Life magazine, Ninth Letter, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and elsewhere.
Please visit me at junctureworkshops.com or bethkephartbooks.com.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 16 reviews
October 1, 2012
my favorite passage of the book is this (p.64 hardback edition):
"If I could I would build you a nest high up, on a land of trees, near where the river bends to blue."
"A nest?" I ask. It is the present time. Down the hall, behind a closed door, on the bed that was mine years ago, Jeremy sleeps. here, in this forest-colored room, I lie with Bill. Memories are blowing like a chinook through the house, and I have pulled the bed sheets over our two weary heads to keep us safe. We are face to face; I see the spangles of his eyes. I can feel, and am desperate for, his heat.
"A nest of glass, high in the clouds, where you could see everything, always, where you could just look out and see," Bill says after a while. "And a staircase of books between the ground and the nest."
"And for you?" I ask, kissing him softly, grateful that he remembered the books. "What about you?"
"And for me, I suppose, a cave - dug out of roots and slugs and leaves, the crumble of humus," he decides, leaning back into his own reverie. "Where I could paint. And think. And rest."
"What about Jeremy?" I ask, absurdly rushing toward the details now, trying to conjure this house, trying to decide which river we'll live beside. "What room will be his?"
"It's a house without doors," Bill says, his voice fading in the darkness. "He'll run between us." Bill's breathing comes from a calm inside his chest. His eyes are closed, he has the atmosphere of sleep. In the heat of his arms, which have gone loose around me, I am aware of the wind, still in the house, blowing above the bed sheets. We have little in common, I think. So very little. The sky and the earth, the light and the dark, the height and the depth, the words and the colors, and the child between us. Little in common, but who would I be without him.
"If I could I would build you a nest high up, on a land of trees, near where the river bends to blue."
"A nest?" I ask. It is the present time. Down the hall, behind a closed door, on the bed that was mine years ago, Jeremy sleeps. here, in this forest-colored room, I lie with Bill. Memories are blowing like a chinook through the house, and I have pulled the bed sheets over our two weary heads to keep us safe. We are face to face; I see the spangles of his eyes. I can feel, and am desperate for, his heat.
"A nest of glass, high in the clouds, where you could see everything, always, where you could just look out and see," Bill says after a while. "And a staircase of books between the ground and the nest."
"And for you?" I ask, kissing him softly, grateful that he remembered the books. "What about you?"
"And for me, I suppose, a cave - dug out of roots and slugs and leaves, the crumble of humus," he decides, leaning back into his own reverie. "Where I could paint. And think. And rest."
"What about Jeremy?" I ask, absurdly rushing toward the details now, trying to conjure this house, trying to decide which river we'll live beside. "What room will be his?"
"It's a house without doors," Bill says, his voice fading in the darkness. "He'll run between us." Bill's breathing comes from a calm inside his chest. His eyes are closed, he has the atmosphere of sleep. In the heat of his arms, which have gone loose around me, I am aware of the wind, still in the house, blowing above the bed sheets. We have little in common, I think. So very little. The sky and the earth, the light and the dark, the height and the depth, the words and the colors, and the child between us. Little in common, but who would I be without him.
March 3, 2013
[Reviewed in 2000]
Beth Kephart has chosen an elusive theme for Into the Tangle of Friendship. “The more we let others into our lives,” she writes, “the safer we become and also the more endangered.” Her prose style, like the subject of her memoir, is a risky alliance of counterpoised harmonies, a tripartite melding of poet, essayist, and storyteller. The narrative unfolds through an accumulation of graceful meditations and vignettes. Time frames are shuffled and then examined for underlying metaphoric patterns. High school memories are recalled, as well as literary struggles, her marriage to a Salvadoran architect and artist, her unusual and sometimes prickly relationships with neighbors and coworkers, and her challenges as a parent. The recounting is more impressionistic than the author’s highly praised 1998 memoir, A Slant of Sun, a finalist for the National Book Award. The earlier book chronicled her son Jeremy’s pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), which was diagnosed at age two and sent Kephart’s life into an agonizing tailspin.
Jeremy was a miraculously normalized seven-year-old in the final pages of A Slant of Sun. In the new book, he’s nine years old and Kephart makes no overt mention of any lingering developmental difficulties (which may confound some admirers of the previous work who are looking for a diagnostic update). Her concerns for her son are now blessedly universal in scope:
Storytelling is perceived as a redemptive force throughout Into the Tangle of Friendship. There are stories within stories, sometimes comprised of accounts from friends and family. Her husband Bill tells a riotous tale of the dress-up games played by his grandmother and her female companions in El Salvador; Jeremy and his best buddy James weave a fanciful ghost story about the pilot light flickering inside the basement furnace; Kephart’s friend Andrée writes of her husband’s final days in the cancer ward of a Korean hospital. Like a Scheherazade of the suburbs, Beth Kephart tells stories to save her life—and all of our lives—by bestowing a fragile nobility upon human connectedness. One doesn’t have to read too far between the lines to surmise that her reverence for language and social interaction stems in part from having witnessed her son’s retreat into a near-autistic silence and withdrawal from the world.
Into the Tangle of Friendship stands on its own, but it achieves a deeper resonance when seen as a response to some of the issues raised in A Slant of Sun. Kephart was hard on herself in the earlier book, both as a writer and as a parent. Prior to the diagnosis of PDD, she wondered if Jeremy’s “deviations” from the norm weren’t in some fashion the result of being “the offspring of artists.” She felt shame when confessing that she and her husband were “not really people people, if you know what I mean.” A Slant of Sun never fully resolved this ambivalence toward the solitude of artistic creation and its seeming denial of fellowship. By focusing on storytelling as a foundation for intimacy, Into the Tangle of Friendship succeeds in reconciling the paradox between solipsism and community. It’s clear that stories assist Jeremy in engaging with other people and with his environment. Moreover, we come to recognize that Kephart’s literary life flourishes in a shared culture of friends and readers.
Seen in this light, her latest book is a revealing portrait of a writer’s emerging faith in the grandeur of her profession. She invokes the work of authors—Elias Canetti, William Maxwell, M.F.K. Fisher, Capote and Hemingway—whom she admires for their craft and the themes addressed in their work. When she talks about the courtship of her future husband Bill, the rituals don’t revolve around dinner dates and moviegoing, but rather pursuing their artistic passions—her writing and his painting—late at night together in his apartment. “We gave each other silence,” she tells us. “Hours would go by, and there we would be, taking our light from separate splinters of the moon, I with a pen, he with a paintbrush, the sounds of the city through the window.” Charting her development as a writer, Kephart describes a six-year period during which she and her next door neighbor Andrée forged a two-party literary salon via their front porch mailboxes. Poems and stories and critiques crisscrossed their lawns on a regular basis:
The dance of “back and forth” is an apt metaphor for the comingling of the mind’s creative energy and the world’s validating embrace. Kephart’s “tangle” in the title of her book ultimately suggests both the intertwining of camaraderie and the threaded lifeline of literary striving that extends outward from her authorial vision. “If you think friendship is an organ of convenience,” she warns us, “think again: it takes its toll.” The toll, in this instance, is the burnished purity of her rich and satisfying memoir.
Beth Kephart has chosen an elusive theme for Into the Tangle of Friendship. “The more we let others into our lives,” she writes, “the safer we become and also the more endangered.” Her prose style, like the subject of her memoir, is a risky alliance of counterpoised harmonies, a tripartite melding of poet, essayist, and storyteller. The narrative unfolds through an accumulation of graceful meditations and vignettes. Time frames are shuffled and then examined for underlying metaphoric patterns. High school memories are recalled, as well as literary struggles, her marriage to a Salvadoran architect and artist, her unusual and sometimes prickly relationships with neighbors and coworkers, and her challenges as a parent. The recounting is more impressionistic than the author’s highly praised 1998 memoir, A Slant of Sun, a finalist for the National Book Award. The earlier book chronicled her son Jeremy’s pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), which was diagnosed at age two and sent Kephart’s life into an agonizing tailspin.
Jeremy was a miraculously normalized seven-year-old in the final pages of A Slant of Sun. In the new book, he’s nine years old and Kephart makes no overt mention of any lingering developmental difficulties (which may confound some admirers of the previous work who are looking for a diagnostic update). Her concerns for her son are now blessedly universal in scope:
How do parents help their children get ready for friends who are not, in some manner, just like themselves?… I don’t know all the answers; no one does. But for now I use stories when I can find them. Stories from life, stories from books, stories that matter. I ask Jeremy himself to fashion stories about unexpected friendships. I encourage the communion of unlikely souls…
Storytelling is perceived as a redemptive force throughout Into the Tangle of Friendship. There are stories within stories, sometimes comprised of accounts from friends and family. Her husband Bill tells a riotous tale of the dress-up games played by his grandmother and her female companions in El Salvador; Jeremy and his best buddy James weave a fanciful ghost story about the pilot light flickering inside the basement furnace; Kephart’s friend Andrée writes of her husband’s final days in the cancer ward of a Korean hospital. Like a Scheherazade of the suburbs, Beth Kephart tells stories to save her life—and all of our lives—by bestowing a fragile nobility upon human connectedness. One doesn’t have to read too far between the lines to surmise that her reverence for language and social interaction stems in part from having witnessed her son’s retreat into a near-autistic silence and withdrawal from the world.
Into the Tangle of Friendship stands on its own, but it achieves a deeper resonance when seen as a response to some of the issues raised in A Slant of Sun. Kephart was hard on herself in the earlier book, both as a writer and as a parent. Prior to the diagnosis of PDD, she wondered if Jeremy’s “deviations” from the norm weren’t in some fashion the result of being “the offspring of artists.” She felt shame when confessing that she and her husband were “not really people people, if you know what I mean.” A Slant of Sun never fully resolved this ambivalence toward the solitude of artistic creation and its seeming denial of fellowship. By focusing on storytelling as a foundation for intimacy, Into the Tangle of Friendship succeeds in reconciling the paradox between solipsism and community. It’s clear that stories assist Jeremy in engaging with other people and with his environment. Moreover, we come to recognize that Kephart’s literary life flourishes in a shared culture of friends and readers.
Seen in this light, her latest book is a revealing portrait of a writer’s emerging faith in the grandeur of her profession. She invokes the work of authors—Elias Canetti, William Maxwell, M.F.K. Fisher, Capote and Hemingway—whom she admires for their craft and the themes addressed in their work. When she talks about the courtship of her future husband Bill, the rituals don’t revolve around dinner dates and moviegoing, but rather pursuing their artistic passions—her writing and his painting—late at night together in his apartment. “We gave each other silence,” she tells us. “Hours would go by, and there we would be, taking our light from separate splinters of the moon, I with a pen, he with a paintbrush, the sounds of the city through the window.” Charting her development as a writer, Kephart describes a six-year period during which she and her next door neighbor Andrée forged a two-party literary salon via their front porch mailboxes. Poems and stories and critiques crisscrossed their lawns on a regular basis:
Back and forth, back and forth, the ground rules somehow establishing themselves, the notes couriered, always, in the dark, down the sidewalk, up the steps, across the porch floorboards, on very quiet shoes… This is what I needed more than my sleep, which I began, in increments, to sacrifice…
The dance of “back and forth” is an apt metaphor for the comingling of the mind’s creative energy and the world’s validating embrace. Kephart’s “tangle” in the title of her book ultimately suggests both the intertwining of camaraderie and the threaded lifeline of literary striving that extends outward from her authorial vision. “If you think friendship is an organ of convenience,” she warns us, “think again: it takes its toll.” The toll, in this instance, is the burnished purity of her rich and satisfying memoir.
April 17, 2015
The poetry and imagery of Beth Kephart never fails to delight the reader. Kephart seamlessly gathers essays and anecdotes and deep memories for the reader to ponder. I'm on page 72 and can't wait to tuck time to read into my busy day.
The writing is musical. The life lessons are as deep as the Grand Canyon. Kephart brought me into the lives of her friends. I prayed and hoped along with her. I worried. I cried. What more could any writer hope for in her story. There is no better friend than Beth Kephart. Blessed are her friends.
The writing is musical. The life lessons are as deep as the Grand Canyon. Kephart brought me into the lives of her friends. I prayed and hoped along with her. I worried. I cried. What more could any writer hope for in her story. There is no better friend than Beth Kephart. Blessed are her friends.
July 21, 2008
I love just about anything by Beth Kephart. Her memoir about friendship and her search for what defines that relationship and how it impacts who we are is fabulous and very touching. It was a good reminder of how precious my girlfriends truly are.
May 13, 2011
A book to celebrate and learn from; a marvel of topical structure, beneath and through which a life and vision press through. I think of Annie Dillard, and of Virginia Woolf's "life is a sem-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning."
September 20, 2016
Many of us (I hope, all of us) reach an age where we start to seriously consider the value and permanence of friendship. Which friends will we take with us forever? We ask, which friends do we wish we had not let go of so easily?
I recommend this book as essential to that questioning.
I recommend this book as essential to that questioning.
July 21, 2011
This is what life could have been like had my best friend and college roommate not disowned me.
February 15, 2013
Great story about growing up and adult life and a person's friendships
March 4, 2014
Perhaps it's merely a matter of reading it at the right time and place, but kephart's words captured my soul.
June 8, 2021
When her childhood best friend comes back into her life, Kephart has cause to question the nature of friendship as she has experienced it and observed it in others, including her young son and her husband, who is from El Salvador and doesn’t keep up with people in between visits back home but picks right back up where he left off when he sees them again. She also writes a lot about her relationship with her neighbor, whose husband is terminally ill. There were a number of standout lines, but overall this felt a little meandering, vague and try-hard. I think she was going for a Kelly Corrigan and Anne Lamott sort of vibe but didn’t quite succeed. I will certainly give some of her later books a go, however. Better books on friendship that I would recommend include Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell and Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett.
Favorite lines:
“Friendship is not merely an act of imagination, a desire. It is a pair of eyes turned back, with genuine interest, upon you.”
“Too many friendships barely outlive their contexts. Too many are merely serial, convenient, a way station, a passing through.”
“Is it friendship, if it thrives only in containers? Is it friendship if, like fashion, it is bound to geography, ideology, popularity, mood?”
“We grow too old to lose old friends”
“I am struck, as I so often am, by the wonder of my life here on earth. By the web of providence and implausibility that formed my cells and instructed my genes and endowed me with friendships, family.”
Favorite lines:
“Friendship is not merely an act of imagination, a desire. It is a pair of eyes turned back, with genuine interest, upon you.”
“Too many friendships barely outlive their contexts. Too many are merely serial, convenient, a way station, a passing through.”
“Is it friendship, if it thrives only in containers? Is it friendship if, like fashion, it is bound to geography, ideology, popularity, mood?”
“We grow too old to lose old friends”
“I am struck, as I so often am, by the wonder of my life here on earth. By the web of providence and implausibility that formed my cells and instructed my genes and endowed me with friendships, family.”
June 11, 2025
I've spent many hours trying to write about friendships, particularly those with other women I've had as an adult. Also, I enjoyed a webinar I recently attended with Beth Kephart entitled "The Ideal Sentence: Your Voice, Your Tone, Your Pace." That made two reasons to borrow a volume by Kephart that my Berlin library could offer. Her approach is to look at the significance of friends in general, overall, in our lives by looking at their role in her own life and in the lives of those around her: her son, husband, mother-in-law, five men on a bench on a town square near Bordeaux, etc.
At her class, Kephart was in love with sentences, with improving them, enjoying them. Twenty-five years earlier, she wrote this book full of beautiful sentences. That's an impressive consistency.
For this reader, the references to church and Sunday school, the sense of a very rooted life (despite the painter husband from El Salvador she's convinced she'll never quite know), the ecstasies of happiness ("Maybe we have to go far from home to see all that friendship is. Maybe we have to sit in the sun with a river behind us to catch our breath at the unplanned interludes that make us who we've been.") -- taken together, it can make a person like me (perhaps rather a cynical person? or at least super-pragmatic?) restless in its relentless appreciation of life.
At her class, Kephart was in love with sentences, with improving them, enjoying them. Twenty-five years earlier, she wrote this book full of beautiful sentences. That's an impressive consistency.
For this reader, the references to church and Sunday school, the sense of a very rooted life (despite the painter husband from El Salvador she's convinced she'll never quite know), the ecstasies of happiness ("Maybe we have to go far from home to see all that friendship is. Maybe we have to sit in the sun with a river behind us to catch our breath at the unplanned interludes that make us who we've been.") -- taken together, it can make a person like me (perhaps rather a cynical person? or at least super-pragmatic?) restless in its relentless appreciation of life.
March 23, 2024
true friendship is a continuous journey, filled with seasons of old and new. “Friends are always there even when they are not; we talk to them in our heads.”
Beth writes so personally and intentionally that you just feel like you’re sitting in the living room listening to her stories. such a sweet read!
Beth writes so personally and intentionally that you just feel like you’re sitting in the living room listening to her stories. such a sweet read!
April 3, 2024
I always enjoy Beth Kephart’s writing, and I consider her a writing mentor and, appropriately enough for this book, a friend. I’ve had this memoir on my shelves for years, perhaps a decade or longer, saving it for "the perfect time." That came in May. Beth reflects on the meaning of the various friendships in her life — a renewed connection with a childhood friend, a neighbor, her young son’s first forays into friendships, and others. Gorgeously written, thoughtful and exquisitely touching.
August 26, 2013
Makes you think about friendship - who your friends are!
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December 26, 2017Recommended by Lois Lammert, high school friend.
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