New Memoir, Available Now;
"A writer with an enormous sense of humanity." —San Francisco Review of Books
The Consequence of Stars is the story of searching. Part travelogue and part memoir, these connected essays focus on our universal longing for home, our singular place in the world, in all its meanings. The author examines a modern life attempting to find balance after the death of a family member and how we continually redefine our lives. Unlike many memoirs, Berner's story is not about dysfunction or overwhelming grief, but rather the story of the existential journey all of us share.
In The Consequence of Stars, the author revisits his parents' lifelong love affair with their hometown and one another despite life-threatening odds. He recalls a solo and revealing cross-country train ride and a spiritual awakening in the Navajo Nation, journeys representing his search. He plays guitar with Jack Kerouac groupies at the writer's former Florida home, hunts for the ghost of Hemingway in the attic of his birthplace home, and sets out to build a Thoreau-like writer’s shed where he hopes to discover an artistic space, an artist's home.