Beard
A Memoir of a Marriage
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
“At once brave and tender, this is a candid look at the burdens of love and the challenges of discovering oneself.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review) Kelly Foster Lundquist was nineteen when she met Devin at church camp in the late’90s. Immediately inseparable, the two bonded over bootleg Tori Amos recordings and a sense of disconnection from the spiritual fervor of their fellow camp counselors. Devin was classically handsome and Kelly on the plain side of pretty, but they matched. Their twinned search for God, acceptance, and love would profoundly shape the rest of their lives. In this striking debut memoir, Lundquist revisits her relationship with Devin twenty years after their divorce, as she investigates the “beard” trope in literature, culture, and her own romantic life. The straight woman who unwittingly marries a gay man is either a laughingstock or a fool—or both—in the popular imagination. And yet reality—much like desire—is more wild. Reality is midnight pad Thai, tenderness in Ralph Lauren sheets, ritual visits to Blockbuster, and beginning a PhD in queer theory while your husband secretly struggles to reconcile his double life. A tour de force of empathy and vivid prose, Beard reckons honestly with the harm done to both husband and wife by churches that required rigid performances of gender and sexuality. In contrast, Lundquist learns to let go of brittle certainties as she embraces what her first marriage taught her about risk and redemption. Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award Life Writing Finalist (2025) Friends of the St. Paul Public Library Minnesota Book Award Memoir & Creative Nonfiction (2026) Last Syllable Book Award Nonfiction Finalist (2025) Memoir Magazine Memoir Prize Honorable Mention (2025)
Endorsements (9)
“Kelly Foster Lundquist examines an archetype and emerges with a magnetizing story of a relationship that defies category: shifting, cryptic, tender, marked by contradiction and care. In vital, kinetic prose, Beard maps the fault lines between love, desire, and performance, the roles we learn to play whether we’re conscious of them or not. A bracing, fresh testament to becoming, no matter who we are.”
“Beard is everything I want from a book: hilarious, moving, surprising. Imagine the humanity of Gail Caldwell mixed with the absurdity and wit of Amy Sedaris. Kelly Foster Lundquist’s memoir of her complex marriage is timely and timeless. A true feat of storytelling and personal revelation.”
“Beard traces the aftermath of love, secrecy, and the longing to be seen. Moving between memory and myth, Lundquist weaves personal narrative with the charged symbols of queer iconography—glamour, disguise, survival. What does it mean to carry someone, or to be the one carried? What remains when the performance ends? An incisive, beautiful meditation on intimacy and identity, Beard reminds us: not all beards are false, and not all truths are spoken.”
“Beard is a keenly observed personal history, an enduring story of love and loss and then, ultimately, love. Lundquist beautifully renders her fragile first marriage and all its earnest striving with honesty and grace. She has given me everything I want in a memoir; Beard is smart, funny, richly detailed, candid, revelatory, thoughtful, meaningful, and moving. And, in the way of all great works, it leads us to higher truths.”
“In breathtaking prose, Kelly Foster Lundquist renders visible the ‘beard,’ an experience so often presented as little more than a footnote in someone else’s story. A love story, a treatise on seeing and overlooking, and an exploration of what it means to know oneself and be known by another, Beard is a tremendous achievement, and also just tremendous writing. I will be recommending it to everyone I know.”
“Beard is brilliant and bristly and heartbreaking and funny as hell, despite the fact that this book turns out to have very little to do with actual facial hair. Kelly Foster Lundquist debuts here as a wry, cunning Rumpelstiltskin, turning the straw of human suffering into literary gold. The queerest thing of all turns out to be what all of us need: love.”
“Out of the heartbreak of shame and fear, Kelly Foster Lundquist crafts truly beautiful and searching family portraits as she simultaneously chronicles her own deepening intellect, her capacious, hard-won sense of compassion, and her commitment to authenticity.”
“Kelly Foster Lundquist’s Beard announces the arrival of a powerful voice in memoir. Beard offers an unsentimental, unqualified account of two people discovering themselves around and through the tether of their marriage. In scenes rendered with vivid, wrenching detail, Lundquist presents the complicated algebra of the facts and fictions of those years, giving readers access to even the most vulnerable of moments in her life. What I loved about this book was its tenderness, its compassion. Beard reminds us love is a living, growing, changing force—that it calls us to be the best version of ourselves even in the most difficult moments, and that understanding and forgiveness are not idle acts. They are radical, nourishing, and necessary to thrive with dignity. Lundquist’s work to unpack this story for herself and for us is a gift.”
“Kelly Foster Lundquist turns the well-worn trope of the ‘beard’ inside out, delivering a memoir as sharp as it is tender. With wit, precision, and unflinching honesty, she shows how easy it is to be both the punchline and the truth-teller. Moving between the personal and the cultural, Beard excavates the messy realities of love, shame, queerness, and belonging. Ultimately, it’s a memoir about misrecognition of others and of oneself. About the longing to be chosen, the betrayal of self-erasure, and the bittersweet process of rewriting the stories we once believed would save us.”
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