True To Form

Fitting praise for
True to Form

“In Katie, Berg has created a narrator true to adolescent form at a time when the larger world was beginning to change dramatically.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“Elizabeth Berg, as usual, explores her main character in detail. Readers develop sympathy for Katie on her journey of self-discovery and personal redemption.”

—
The Seattle Times

“Katie Nash is someone we can relate to, especially if we are of an age to be nostalgic about Pat Boone, Prell shampoo and Green Stamps. . . . Plus, to give Berg her due, she (or Katie, if you prefer) is capable of some lovely writing.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

“[W]ritten with great tenderness and understanding . . . [
True to Form
] takes readers back to their own days of awakening . . . . It flows with grace and beauty and a clarity that have not been so inspiring since some of the classicists.”

—
The Communicator
(Spokane, WA)

 . . . and acclaim for Elizabeth Berg's stunning
New York Times
bestseller
Never Change

“Berg inhabits each of [her characters] as though she's known them since she wrote in their high school yearbooks and has kept her promise to keep in touch. . . . Berg shows that life is most beautiful in the moments that come and pass away again, a lesson often learned long after high school.”

—
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A five-tissue-box novel. . . . Elizabeth Berg has written one of the most dramatic and beautiful books of her career, one that celebrates life to the fullest.”

—
The Midwest Book Review

“Vital connections are Berg's primary concern. Readers of her earlier novels will hear echoes in the broad themes of
Never Change.
 . . . This book is about the wisdom and closeness that crisis can bring. The narrative road that leads to them is funny, poetic, and moving.”

—
Atlantic Monthly

“A superb novel about the persistence of desire and the perils of commitment.”

—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Combines romance, heartfelt emotion and cuteness. Berg's observations on life and death ring true.”

—
The Washington Post

“[A] must-read for the romantic heart that lies in all of us.”

—
Winston-Salem Journal
(NC)

“An engaging read that forces us to question who we are and who we want others to think we are. . . . An emotional story of memory, longing, and the confines of social roles.”

—
Denver Rocky Mountain News

Praise for the previous novels of Elizabeth Berg

“Berg knows her characters intimately . . . she gets under their skin and leaves the reader with an indelible impression of lives challenged and changed.”

—
The Seattle Times

“Berg sits somewhere between Anne Tyler and Alice Hoffman.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

“Berg shows a sparkling ability to distill complex human emotions into clear, evocative prose. And she hits every note . . . with a wry honesty.”

—
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

This book is for that beautiful Asian woman who came to one of my readings in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and asked if I were ever going to write about Katie again. I said I didn't know. She said, “Well, you have to. I have to know what becomes of her.”

I think this book will tell you.

I am supported in my work by a number of really fine people:

Lisa Bankoff, my stylish and elegantly formidable agent

Patrick Price, her charming assistant, who knows how to do
everything

Emily Bestler, whose qualities of sensitivity and responsiveness make her an ideal editor

Sarah Branham, her creative assistant

Cathy Lee Gruhn, my fearless publicist

Paolo Pepe, my art director, who so beautifully translates words into images

Phyllis Florin, my best friend, who read this manuscript first and offered honest and valuable criticism

Marianne Quasha, my other best friend, who knows what fabric
really
is

Bill Young, my sweetie, who makes daily life more joyful than I had ever imagined it could be

Last, but certainly not least: The friends I've made here in the great city of Chicago, where I've finally found home.

I
T IS THE FIRST
S
UNDAY
evening of the summer, the sky an ash rose color and losing its light to night. I am sitting on the floor in my room with a mirror propped up against a stack of magazines, setting my hair according to the directions in
Modern Style.
If I do it right, I will get a perfect flip. I just need to sleep in such a way that the rollers do not become pushed out of place, as they usually do. Either they get pushed out of place or I take them all out in the middle of the night. I don't know why. I don't even remember doing it, I just wake up and there the rollers are, thrown down on the floor. I guess my sleep self and my awake self don't agree about beauty.

The radio is turned on low to “Moody River,” and my question is, Why did she kill herself if the guy was just a friend? And also, how can Pat Boone be singing so smoothly if his heart is broken? He sounds like Perry Como singing “Magic Moments” when he should be sounding like Brenda Lee sobbing, “I'm sorry, sooo sorry.”

I am thinking about how tomorrow I will lie out on a towel in the yard, slicked up with baby oil to get going on my tan. I like it when you lie there for a long time and feel the sun's heat like a red thing behind your lids. You see a map of your own veins, and then when you open your eyes the view is bleached a bit of its colors. When I was nine years old someone told me you must never look at the sun straight on because it could make you blind. This made me
go right outside and stare up at it, and when my eyes protested and shut automatically, I held my lids open until my eyes burned and watered so much I had to stop. I did not go blind. I do have to wear glasses, but I was wearing them before I stared at the sun. I am this way, sometimes, that I just have to find things out for myself.

I have a feeling percolating under my skin that says this will be a really important summer. Just a feeling that doesn't go away. I think sometimes I am a little psychic, like my grandmother who could read tea leaves. She would sit at the kitchen table with her beautiful white hair up in a bun, and she would be wearing an apron that sagged over her bosom like another bosom. She would stare into the cup for a long time, and nobody talked; even the air seemed to hold still. Then she would look up, and her blue eyes would seem clearer and not quite her own. She would settle her shoulders, and, in a low and intimate voice, tell people things about their lives. I thought for a long time she was a gypsy queen, but my mind just made that up; she was really just a woman from England who married my grandfather from Ireland. She was a housewife who made good gravy and kept a parakeet in her kitchen.

Once, when I was in third grade, my grandmother read tea leaves for me. My mother was there, and her sisters, my aunts Rose and Betty, were there, too. I remember I was so nervous I sat under the kitchen table, and my grandmother had to tell me things without looking at me. She said I had a boyfriend, which was true, Billy Harris was his name, and I got all embarrassed even though no one could see me. Then she told me he liked me too, which was not so true, since if you asked him, “Do you like Katie Nash?” he would have said, “Who?”

I miss my aunts a lot. Since my mother died a couple of years ago, I never see them anymore. We used to go and visit for a week or so every summer. Rose was very prim and proper, but full of a warm love. When I used to stay there, my cousins and I washed up
for bed at night in a dishpan at the kitchen sink, and Aunt Rose made sure we got our ears good. Ivory soap, she used, those floating cakes bigger than a kid's whole hand. She made plain dinners but they were the kind of food a person always enjoys. Like just meat loaf from the recipe on the back of the oatmeal box, served with mashed potatoes, butter filling the little well in the middle, and some green beans from the can, all served on an embroidered table-cloth. Her sheets smelled like outside, and everybody used to say you could eat from her kitchen floor. I used to think,
Why would you want to do that?
and I would imagine my uncle Harry sitting there cross-legged with his napkin tucked into his shirt, leaning over awkwardly to lift his scrambled eggs from the linoleum.

Aunt Betty was a wild woman, that's what she called herself. She told me she was engaged to another man when my uncle Jim proposed to her. She wore a lot of makeup and smoked constantly and painted her fingernails and toenails blood red. She and my uncle were very social, and I never saw anyone look as glamorous as she did when they went out. She would wake up her children for a meteor shower or a good sunrise, and she was always asking them to tell her things they learned in school; she thought her children were wonderful. Every Sunday morning, she would make Monkey Bread, and there was always enough for everyone.

My dad doesn't want to visit my aunts anymore. I guess he has a new life now with my stepmother, Ginger, and the aunts just don't figure in. Sometimes I get mail from them: a joke card from Betty; a card with Jesus on it from Rose. They both call me Honey, which makes for an inside curl of pleasure. I thought I would always go and see them, every summer.