In An Imperfect Rapture, Kelly recreates the real-life shadowlands of her youth, and her unflinching examination of people and places offers readers a glimpse into an experience hidden from or ignored by our first-world culture. Its unsparing narrative resonates as both a personal exorcism and a public plea for empathy.
"Written with the spare, sensual, and deeply evocative prose of a master, this brave and ultimately transcendent memoir is an absolute gem. What Kelly J. Beard accomplishes here is stunning: by stepping nakedly back into her youth as the daughter of Christian fundamentalists, a lifelong couple whose love for one another never seemed to wane, she also steps back into violence and neglect, poverty and the shame of the poor, the striving for one's very selfhood when few seem to be able to help or pay much attention. And Beard renders all of this, and more, with a poet's clear-eyed search for the truth. An Imperfect Rapture is a plaintive hymn of forgiveness, and it moved me to tears many times over. This is, quite simply, a beautiful book." —Andre Dubus III, author of Gone So Long and Dirty Love
"Haunting in its recall, this elegiac book spins through a galaxy of fundamentalism, poverty and mental illness. Instead of 'coming of age,' it's a 'coming to terms' story, burning with desire to cut loose from a demon-possessed past. It's an eyewitness account of what happened inside a dark house. Beard's writing is vast, engulfing, accomplished. In many ways An Imperfect Rapture is itself a faith healing." —Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Milkweed Editions)
"An Imperfect Rapture is transcendent—a story of personal grace and self-realization, one woman's courageous path through the shadows of a fundamentalist youth. The memoir itself is a kind of prayer, a kind of promise, in which the vibrant prose shimmers, as in this passage, with 'a dreamy quality, as though conjured from smoke, trailing the razor edge of reality…' A luminous debut." —Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, author of Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams
"I am deeply shaken and moved by Kelly Beard's conscientious, harrowing, and psychologically acute memoir of her childhood and youth. She evokes the confusing, abusive, fundamentalist world of her impoverished family with an eerie precision and clarity. An Imperfect Rapture is an insightful, courageous book." —Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel: A Poem and The Living Fire
"From religion to love to death to demons to angels to discovering the secret mechanisms of forgiveness, An Imperfect Rapture is, in fact, rapturously perfect. Kelly Beard's debut memoir is not to be missed." —Connie May Fowler, author of Before Women Had Wings and A Million Fragile Bones
Kelly J. Beard practiced employment discrimination law in the Atlanta area for two decades and has received many honors for her work, including a certificate of recognition from the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence for her service with the Legal Assistance for Victims Project. In 2016, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work appears in the Santa Ana River Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Five Points. An Imperfect Rapture is her first full-length memoir.
"'My mother saw demons,' begins Kelly J. Beard's stunning debut memoir. Though I feared the narrator would show me the cruelty and violence of her parents' chosen faith, she does so with such a commitment to understanding the sources of her family's suffering that I had to follow her narrative. Religious fundamentalism and poverty, the latter made worse by the former, fracture the narrator's family into unrecoverable pieces. Only her parents appear unscathed by the 'steel belt' of their faith. They remain devoted to each other, their intimate and loving relationship a stark contrast to the isolation of their children. Over the years, I've wondered,' Beard writes, 'why it seems other families endure similar or greater deprivations without siblings turning rivalrous or mean…. I wonder what particular ingredient combined to make our compound combustible. Our father's complicated anger? Our mother's changeable heart? Or that one singularly unstable ingredient: their hard faith?' Beard examines all three influences from the perspective of a sensitive and perceptive child and that of an adult looking back, the two voices essential to memoir. Some of the most beautiful passages arise when both of these narrators co-exist. 'It was the last time I remember our family laughing together. We were headed into mean years none of us could see...'" - Margaret L. Whitford
"'In the Foursquare Pentecostal Church in the 1960s, Kelly J. Beard's mother saw demons, though those demons ended up being nothing like Beard's childhood self-imagined: 'Instead, they will appear in fires and floods, in her family's fractured lives, and in the carnage of their faith.' An earnest memoir about the destructive influences of poverty and fundamentalism, Beard's An Imperfect Rapture bears witness to their legacy. Beard's parents were deeply invested in each other, often at the expense of their children. When they transformed into strict fundamentalists, the family entered a 'spiritual and financial vise' with lasting repercussions. Theirs was a god who functioned as enabler and source of their fatalism, one whose answers to prayers begot a hopelessness and desperation so profound it's abject. Once her parents' anger and unpredictability combined with a rigid sense of God and church as the only sources of community and trust, the dissonance of violence, neglect, and poverty wasn't discussed. From authoritarian parents to abusive siblings, the trauma in this memoir is phenomenal and harrowing. The neglect ranges from benign to malign, and Beard delivers these horrors without ceremony, dropping them into her narrative almost casually. Beard's prose confers beauty on even the ugliest moments. The memoir thrives on unexpected and vital imagery..." - Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
