Elizabeth Berg - What We Keep  

Berg keeps a tight grip on readers as she takes us back and forth from a 12-year-olds perspective to the memories and secrets revealed at the reunion35 years laterof three sophisticated, mature women. By its finish, the story has taken your breath away with its twists and turns; it delivers an impact that stays with you well past the ending.

Rocky Mountain News

In her earlier novel, Talk Before Sleep, Berg was able to draw together remarkable humor and incredible pain with enormous insight into their intricate relationship. She does so again in What We Keep.

The Seattle Times

Fans of Elizabeth Berg are familiar with her extraordinary talent for descriptionyou can almost taste, feel, and hear her novels with amazing intensity. The poignant twists of rejection and eventual redemption will pull you along at full throttle, making you happy you stayed for the tear-jerking, life-affirming finale.

Detroit Free Press

Elizabeth Berg remembers what it was like to be a child. She gets it all delightfully right.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

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Berg has an almost painterly gift for choosing the telling detail. She neatly accomplishes that most ephemeral trick of memory.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Berg is very good, as always, at reconstructing the emotional and conversational rhythms of girls on the edge of adolescence.

New York Daily News

Compelling What We Keep takes the reader back to a time when TV didnt occupy every waking moment, when Mom was generally at home, and when families ate there together. A big night out might be a trip to Dairy Queen.

San Antonio Express-News

What We Keep bring[s] to mind such highbrow novels of girlhood as Lisa Sheas Hula and Susan Minots Monkeys. Ginnys shame, anger, guilt, and sorrow are presented with subtlety and suave humor in Bergs novel, which manages to be charming and painful at the same time.

The Baltimore Sun

Berg writes with tender confidence The life a girl growing up in the late 50s rings true, and the relationship between the sisters is perfectly realized.

Dayton Daily News

Love redeems us Berg hooks you when you least expect it through her talent for a well-crafted metaphor, and she uses that talent to full advantage in this ode to motherhood.

Greensboro News & Record

Bergs appeal as an author is our assurance that shes not creating fictional emotions and reactions, but that shes taken very real emotions and reactions and wrapped them up neatly. If the events in her books ever happen to us, we will respond exactly the way her characters do.

Sunday Oklahoman

The truths revealed in What We Keep are all too real.

Austin American-Statesman

Also by Elizabeth Berg

WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE
THE YEAR OF PLEASURES
THE ART OF MENDING ORDINARY
LIFE OPEN HOUSE
UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG
JOY SCHOOL
THE PULL OF THE MOON
RANGE OF MOTION
TALK BEFORE SLEEP DURABLE GOODS
NEVER CHANGE

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To women who risk telling the hard truths

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my editor, Kate Medina,
and to my agent, Lisa Bankoff.
Always true.

China
Decorates our table
Funny how the cracks dont
Seem to show

Youre right next to me
But I need an airplane
I can feel the distance
Getting close

From China, by Tori Amos

O utside the airplane window the clouds are thick and rippled, unbroken as acres of land. They are suffused with peach-colored, early morning sun, gilded at the edges. Across the aisle, a man is taking a picture of them. Even the pilot couldnt keep stillFolks, he just said, weve got quite a sunrise out there. Might want to have a look. I like it when pilots make such comments. It lets me know theyre awake.

Whenever I see a sight like these clouds, I think maybe everyone is wrong; maybe you can walk on air. Maybe we should just try. Everything could have changed without our noticing. Laws of physics, I mean. Why not? I want it to be true that such miracles occur. I want to stop the plane, put the kickstand down, and have us all file out there, shrugging airline claustrophobia off our shoulders. I want us to be able to breathe easily this high up, to walk on clouds as if we were angels, to point out our houses to each other way, way, way down there; and there; and there. How proud we would suddenly feel about where we live, how tender toward everything thats oursour Mixmasters, resting on kitchen counters; our children, wearing the socks we bought them and going about childrens business; our mail lying on our desks; our gardens, tilled and expectant. It seems to me it would just come with the perspective, this rich appreciation.

I lean my forehead against the glass, sigh. I am forty-seven years old and these longings come to me with the same seriousness and frequency that they did when I was a child.

Long trip, huh? the woman next to me asks.

Oh, I say. Yes. Although Well, I sighed because I wish I could get out. You know? Get out there and walk around.

She looks past me, through the window. Pretty, she says. And then, Of course, youd die.

Oh, well. Whats not dangerous?

Beats me, the woman says. Not food. Not water. Not air, not sex. You cant do anything. Well, maybe put your name on the list for Biosphere. We smile, ruefully. Shes pretty, a young blond businesswoman wearing a stylish navy-blue suit, gold jewelry, soft-looking leather heels now slipped off her feet. At first, she busied herself with paperwork. Now shes bored and wants to talk. Fine with me. Im bored, too.

Do you ever think that this is the end of the world? I ask. I mean, dont get me wrong

Oh, I know what you mean, she says. I do think about that. Dying planets, how unspecial we are, really. Just the most current thing in the line since paramecia.

The flight attendant stops her cart beside us, asks if wed like a drink. This seems petty, considering the content of our conversation. Still, I request orange juice; the woman beside me says shed like a scotch.

You know what? I tell the flight attendant. I think Ill have a scotch, too. I have always wondered who in the world would want a cocktail on an early morning flight. Now I know: people with a load on their minds that they would like very much to lighten.

After my seatmate and I have pulled down our trays and set up our impromptu bar, I say, I dont even like scotch.

Me neither. She shrugs, takes a sip, grimaces. But I really hate flying. Sometimes this helps.

I smile, extend my hand. Im Ginny Young.

Martha Hamilton.

You live in California?

Yeah. San Francisco. You?

I live in Boston. Im going to visit my mother. She lives in Mill Valley.

Nice. How long since youve seen her?