In the Acknowledgments section of this deeply felt and thoughtfully crafted book, the author, Beth Kephart, writes: “Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News begins with truth. It extends through fiction.” The truth consists of fragmented details of the life of her grandmother, Margaret Finley D’Imperio, who died on October 30, 1969, when Kephart was nine. “She was the great love of my life,” Kephart writes. “She was a mystery.”
Kephart observes that decades after Margaret’s death, her brother arrived one Thanksgiving with “a box that included a handful of long-lost pages–family genealogy, notes from my mother’s cousin. … My Aunt Miriam’s few spare pages suggest the contours of my grandmother’s life”–for example, her favorite song and her employment at the Fleisher Yarn Company in Philadelphia. Yet at the time of the box’s arrival, so much about Margaret remained unknown, a deficiency that Kephart overcomes, to great effect, in the pages of Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News.
Kephart immerses us in the vividly imagined life of Margaret (known mostly as Peggy in the book) and in scenes from Philadelphia at the time of the First World War, when Peggy was a teenager and at a turning point in her life. In the process, Kephart makes us care deeply about Peggy’s loves, dreams, and fears, creating a work that stands as a profound gesture of love for both her grandmother and the city of Philadelphia.
As the book begins, Peggy, who is in her final days, tries to resurface–and finally confront–the details of a year that she’d tried so hard to forget. During that year, 1918, “[w]hat she loved was taken from her. Stolen. She will steal it all back.”
In the book and actual fact, 1918 truly stands out as an annus horribilis, marked by an ongoing world war that had recently drawn in the United States, a devastating flu epidemic, and bloody racial violence, to name just a few tragedies. For Peggy, the year is marred by these events and more-personal difficulties–for example, the untimely death of a close family member and a horrifyingly violent hate crime against a dear friend who is of German extraction and as a result, has become a target of the anti-German sentiment (and worse) that was all too common at the time.
One of Peggy’s greatest difficulties in “the year that had changed everything” is the military enlistment of a boy she’s fallen in love with. (Throughout the book, he’s known only as “the boy,” because recalling his actual name has become too painful for Peggy.)
The structure of the book both echoes and amplifies Peggy’s emotional and physical states as the end of her life draws near. Specifically, the story moves back and forth through time in a fever-dreamish way, suggesting a consciousness that’s been turned loose to roam between the worlds of the living and the dead. At certain moments we’re near the time of Peggy’s death. At other moments we’re back in World War I–era Philadelphia, where Peggy is falling in love, learning the ropes of a job at Fleisher’s, and trying to endure immeasurable losses. At still other moments, we seem to be in or near the present, when Peggy’s grown granddaughter reflects on what it means to tell–and in certain ways construct–the story of a woman who was as mysterious as she was beloved.
The writing in Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News is staggeringly beautiful, and it feels unfailingly in tune with the emotions of the characters and with the book’s historical settings. Here, for example, Peggy remembers spotting the boy on a train that was transporting troops through Philadelphia.
Later in the book, the boy thinks of Peggy while he’s overseas in the war:
As the previous passages suggest, this book is rightfully subtitled “A Philadelphia Story.” That city is present on almost every page, through scenes of the bustling streets, the loud and potentially perilous factory floors, and the partially soothing / partially industrial banks of the Schuylkill River. It is clear that Kephart carefully researched the Philadelphia of Peggy’s youth and other historical elements of the book.
Another remarkable aspect of the book is the asynchronous conversation that takes place between dying Peggy and her grown granddaughter, the author of the imaginings on these pages. As she faces death, Peggy is eager to share her long-buried stories with her granddaughter (back then, “the girl”), whose visit she awaits for much of the book. Peggy observes that “she will accept her dying, if her remembering lives.”
But in the book, as in real life, the granddaughter never gets to hear Peggy’s full story and is left, instead, with that box containing mere fragments of her life. As if to make up for what has been lost, the granddaughter-as-author not only reconstructs a pivotal time in Peggy’s life but also takes certain loving liberties with her story. For example, she describes how Peggy and fellow members of Fleisher’s “girl” baseball team, the Bloomers, run away with a Sunday game. As the fans cheer, the author observes:
Keep the camera where it is. Don’t judge. Don’t call me sentimental. Give Peggy what she deserves, which is an afternoon of glory.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Historical fiction, especially stories connected to World War I, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and the U.S. suffragist movement
￭ Love stories
￭ Stories about family relationships
