MY LIFE IN PAPER

An award-winning writer interweaves a narrative about her life with stories drawn from the obscure, sometimes beautiful world of paper and papermaking.

Kephart opens this prose-poem memoir with self-reflexive musings on Dard Hunter, a master printer and papermaker whose 1958 autobiography My Life with Paper inspired her own. Hunter’s book found its way to Kephart through her brother, who retrieved it from their deceased mother's belongings. Over time, it became a contemplative instrument the author used “to find out what paper means and what I might mean.” In an early chapter, the author recalls how the “bursting paper bags” filled with craft items inform a memory of making handmade cards with a beloved uncle. That recollection then becomes a springboard into a brief history of the paper bag itself. In Kephart’s skilled hands, an everyday item made of plant fibers becomes a repository not just for personal history, but also “varnished intimacies.” The poignant irony that undergirds the author’s explorations of everything from report cards to birth and death certificates is that while paper serves as an instrument for history, it is as ephemeral as the lives it documents. What makes paper so powerful are the many ways it weaves together relationships, such as the happy one Kephart has with her husband and fellow papermaking enthusiast, and the more complicated one she had with the mother. Threaded throughout Kephart’s elegantly nonlinear narrative are her imaginative ruminations on the life of Hunter, a man who traveled “more than a million miles to track down the secrets and tools and traditions of those who make their paper by hand.” As she offers insight into the fascinating world of papermaking, Kephart also reveals the intimate connection between memory and its most ubiquitous—and also most fragile—receptacle.

An eloquent and unique memoir.