Still Love in Strange Places: A Memoir

Beth Kephart met and fell in love with an artist from the jungle hills of El Salvador, a place of terrifying myths and frightening realities, of civil war and devastating earthquakes. She discovers love means having to take in a stranger and their history too.

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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 froman 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, love, she finds, means taking in not only the stranger who is one's lover but also a stranger's historyin 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. In this new work, gorgeously illuminated with her own photographs, Kephart offers her testament to the ties that bind: to the loveby choiceof a man, and the loveby necessityof the place he comes from. Reading group guide included. 19 b/w photographs.