Writers Who Inspire Us: The Honest Awareness of Dani Shapiro
“The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.”
-Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
I’ll confess that I found Dani Shapiro’s writing accidentally. I was exploring the local town before walking back to my graduate program when I stumbled onto a local bookstore and found in the midst of bestseller tables a small memoir titled Hourglass. As a writer drawn to questions about ordinary life and the relationships people shared, Shapiro’s inquiry on how marriage transforms over time struck me enough to walk away with a copy. I would later discover that she once sat at the same workshop classrooms where I now found a home; One writer finding her way to another, as all writers tend to do.
Over the course of a week, I fell in love with the elegant sentences and honest prose of Shapiro’s memoir. I was compelled by the mosaic of her marriage, and how the memories and growth color and shape the beauty and form of a chosen relationship between two people. Shapiro writes about the aging of herself, too, looking back through old journals at the version of herself and the earlier years of her marriage. “It seemed life was divided into chapters,” she says. “In the narrative as I understood it, we were in the early middle.”
Those beginning chapters of Dani Shapiro’s writing life started long before her journals. She was born on April 10, 1962 in New York City to Irene and Paul Shapiro (whom she would later discover and write that her father was not her biological father through a DNA test kit). Although Shapiro remembers writing and reading from an early age, she did not consider the path of becoming a writer until college when she attended Sarah Lawrence. Under the studies of many working writers teaching creative writing, including Grace Paley, Shapiro found mentors who modeled the possibility of having a life that held writing at its center. Her work led her to Sarah Lawrence’s MFA program, where she studied fiction and sold her first novel, Playing With Fire.
Though Dani Shapiro wrote three novels, she used fiction to find a voice in the art of memoir. “There was a story that was haunting my fiction and embedded in what I wrote,” she confesses. Shapiro acknowledges that an awareness led her to forgo her previous attempts to tell the story of her life and what happened to her after her parents’ tragic car accident and try to write the truth. This work would lead to her first of many best-selling memoirs, Slow Motion. Shapiro would then go on to write the five more memoirs, her latest one circling the secret of her father’s true identity titled Inheritance which was critically acclaimed.
What Shapiro does not pack into best-selling works she reveals in other creative outlets. Several of her works appeared in places like Granata and The New Yorker, along with her six-season podcast titled Family Secrets that creates a space for those who uncover hidden secrets from their families’ past. Shapiro also helps form the next generation of writers, having served in faculty positions at NYU, Wesleyan, and Columbia, and co-founding the annual Sirenland Writer’s Conference in Postitano, Italy.
I keep Hourglass on my bookshelf, besides some of the memoirs and craft works that push me to continue on the path to write. I devoured the journalistic discovery of identity in Inheritance, and have several other of Shapiro’s books placed in my TBR pile. What moves me about Shapiro’s work is her brutal honesty. Rarely will Shapiro shy away from the deep, sometimes dark and often messy parts of her life. Writing for Shapiro is to lay out all of the contents, no matter how vulnerable, and sitting with the uncontrollable obsessions to bring a connection between them to light. “In order to walk that path there has to be something propelling the writer,” she states. “What was propelling me were these questions and this desire to understand and seemingly the inability to really get at it, to get all the way there.”
When I walk away from reading Dani Shapiro I carry a greater sense of awareness. Not only are her sentences beautifully crafted, each word and structure choice leading to the next, but Shapiro’s thinking shows how strongly she’s aware and follows her own intuition. Reading Dani Shapiro’s work is a craft lesson in trusting your gut, both in making sense of what may seem unexplainable and the art of conveying memoir in a vulnerable, touching voice. She understands the boundaries with each subject or book, and finds a way for her writing to evolve after each complete project. What I’m more aware of after her works is the writer’s responsibility to bear witness, to listen to her own awareness, and to be completely vulnerable to feeling alive.
Recommended Reading
Fiction
Family History
Picturing the Wreck
Black + White
Nonfiction
Slow Motion
Devotion
Still Writing
Hourglass
Inheritance
About Greer Veon
Greer Veon is a writer based in Conway, Arkansas. Between writing and reading books, she works as an area coordinator for the Office of Residence Life at Hendrix College. In 2019, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been featured in ELLE and The New Territory Magazine. Find her at greerveon.com, or on Twitter at @greerveon
