About Beth Kaplan

Beth Kaplan, who became a professional actress at nineteen, left the stage at thirty to earn an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin, a biography of her great-grandfather, was published in 2006 and called “a witty, shrewd, elegant book which tells a story of vital importance” by the renowned writer Tony Kushner.

Her first memoir All My Loving: Coming of Age with Paul McCartney in Paris, and her guide to creative writing True to Life: 50 Steps to Help You Tell Your Story, both appeared in 2014. Her second memoir, Loose Woman: my odyssey from lost to found, which came out in 2020, tells of her fraught years as an actress through the wild and crazy seventies and the year 1979 when her life changed forever. It was a finalist for the Whistler Independent Book Award.

Her newest work, Midlife Solo: writing through chaos to find my place in the world, to be released in the fall of 2023, is a compilation of the best of her essays.

Visit Beth’s website. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

From the publisher:

The memoir Loose Woman: my odyssey from lost to found tells how a quasi-alcoholic actor came to spend four astonishing months living and working among men with severe disabilities at a L’Arche community in Provence, and how the experience opened her heart and transformed her life.

The book brings to life the late seventies, when feminism and sexual liberation were ascendant, and a single woman had to come to terms with what this new kind of freedom meant. It gives a backstage view of the triumphs and miseries of a successful actor, celebrates daily life in France — tradition, argument, cheese — and shows a daughter struggling to emerge from the shadow of her powerful, flawed parents.

Loose Woman illuminates how, with the help of six damaged Frenchmen, a gifted, damaged young woman begins, at last, to trust and forgive herself, to live loosely, and to set off in a surprising new direction.

Praise

“A very moving story, well worth telling.”
Judy McFarlane, author

“Compulsive reading with very funny moments. Highly readable, entertaining, very moving.”

Allan Stratton, author

“How very much to admire in these pages from a writer of such ability, who recreates ordinary moments from her experience with exacting clarity, ease and grace.”
Wayson Choy, author