Dani Shapiro

“Every day includes much more non-being than being. This is always so. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; washing; cooking dinner. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.”

– Virginia Woolf

July 30, 2007

Neuroplasticity


Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment. Previously thought to be a characteristic only of the brains of the very young,…this capacity for rewiring of the neuronal synapses to allow for re-development of entire regions of the brain is present in adults as well as children.

At a reading from Black & White the other night at Stockbridge Booksellers, a cozy little bookstore in Stockbridge Massachusetts, the Q&A; afterwards turned into an interesting discussion–who knows why?–about neuroplasticity. A fellow in shorts who was sitting in the rear of the audience asked me in my capacity as a student of the human condition (those were his words) whether I believed adolescence to be the time in life when we are most able to withstand trauma, when our brains are most elastic. It was clear from the way he phrased the question that he believed this to be the case.

I emphatically didn’t agree with him. And it got me thinking, both about adolescence, about development in general and about the whole subject of developmental milestones. (I guess this is what we students of human nature do in our spare time.) Do we all grow at the same rate, as if we’re on a conveyor belt being stamped with certain criteria for growth at certain precise moments along the continuum? This thinking seems more and more prevalent in this wacky culture we live in. Take the books that mothers of young children read. For instance, What to Expect: The First Year. What To Expect: The Toddler Years. And so forth. I could have saved myself a few gray hairs and a few sleepless nights as a mother of an infant and toddler if I hadn’t poured over those books as if they were an owner’s manual to my child. Developmental milestones such as stacking blocks, putting two words together, pulling up to stand are very clearly delineated by the authors into categories such as:

Should be able to:
Probably is able to:
Might Even be able to:

Not taking into account the vastness and complexity of human nature, even–or perhaps particularly–as it relates to babies. Not taking into account that there are children who don’t talk until they’re five (hello, Einstein?) and children who literally never crawl but just get up and walk one day (my own dear boy). This idea that there are markers on the marathon of life that we each pass precisely at the same clip (if at all) strikes me–based solely on my own personal experience–as ludicrous. And I said as much to the fellow in the shorts. Using myself as an example, I told him I had been a late bloomer. That I had been a tremendously screwed-up adolescent. (I even have proof! See my memoir, Slow Motion.) That I didn’t come into my own true self until I was past thirty. That–like the wonderful character of Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie–I hit my prime well into my thirties, and that I feel more aware now of my own capacity to adjust than I ever have in my life.

If new age wisdom holds that there are no crises, only opportunities, it seems there are those among us (and again, who knows why?) who are able to grow from their crises at any age, at any point in their lives, regardless of the crisis. And others who fold. Who stop growing. Who ask: why me? I’m thinking now of my mother, who after suffering terrible injuries in the car crash that killed my father, was able to heal physically–in and of itself, a remarkable feat–but never took hold of the life- changing opportunity she had been presented with to become a different (happier, more fulfilled, less angry) kind of person. And I’m thinking of the man I (along with the rest of America) have been haunted by for the past week: Dr. William Petit, the endocrinologist in Cheshire, Connecticut who has just suffered the most unthinkable, impossible, monstrous loss of his wife and two daughters at the hands of murderers. There was a photograph of Dr. Petit in The Hartford Courant yesterday, speaking at the memorial service for his family. He stands gripping the lectern, the gash on his forehead from his own injuries still visible. Dr. Petit exhorted the people in that auditorium to do good in the world. To love one another. To take care of another human being. To reach out to a neighbor. He was able to impart that message less than a week after suffering the worst kind of loss. Neuroplasticity, indeed.

July 6, 2007

Instinct vs. Impulse

I’ve been thinking a lot lately–my mind unleashed like a hungry, mad dog–about the roles of instinct and impulse in my life and how to tell the difference. We are creatures of impulse, all of us, and often impulses become habit. For instance: when I wake up in the morning these days, I go straight to the computer and check my Amazon number, as if, perhaps in the middle of the night Terry Gross or Oprah have interrupted regular programming to praise the virtues of Black & White, and I have shot stunningly and instantly to #1. And so, on these mornings, after I check my (so not #1) Amazon number, I type my name into Google. I check book reviews, blogs, you-name-it, for up-to-the-minute news about the state of my book’s publication. And given that my book’s publication is now three months old, very little news is to be had. There might be a mention of a book club choosing it as their next pick. (Fleeting small surge of pleasure.) Or there might be a blogger tearing it apart into tiny, bite-sized morsels. (Devastation, the certainty that of course this blogger is right and everyone else is wrong.) By the time I have finished this insane sprint through cyber-world, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes have passed, but my mind has become fragmented and buzzy. A cartoon version of me would have my eyes swirling madly and bits of lightning escaping from the top of my head. I know I shouldn’t start my days this way, and yet I do. I do, because after three months of doing very little other than publicizing my book, I am used to a certain pace. A fast, exciting pace full of news and people and nice outfits. I am used to getting up in front of audiences and performing. It was hard to get into that mode–but now it’s even harder to get out of it. I fight against the idea that it’s time to go back into the cave. To start all over again with a single word, a sentence, a page. A glimmer of an idea…so delicate, so easily blown away. So hard to trust or believe in.

When I am following my instincts–rather than my impulses–the inside of my head becomes quiet enough so that I can hear the whispering voice that tells me what to do next. That voice–which of course is my own best self talking–tells me it’s time to read, or take a drive, or practice yoga. It’s the voice that will eventually tell me what my next novel is about, if only I can be still enough to listen. Writing a novel is a devotional act–Annie Dillard describes it as following the line of words. This devotion, this following, cannot be done in a frenzy. And it most certainly cannot be done in the same hyper-self-conscious universe in which Amazon numbers and anonymous bloggers take up valuable, semi-conscious morning time–time time when the mind is at its softest, most open. It has always fascinated me that some of our finest, most lucid writers have also had some of the noisiest, most painfully cluttered, dare I say damaged minds–and I stand in awe at the sheer courage, discipline, determination that it takes to heave all that noise away as if it’s a solid mass, a boulder.

All I know is this: whenever, in my life, I have followed my impulses, it’s never led me anywhere good. And when I have followed my instincts–whether in falling in love at first sight with my husband, or realizing, one summer morning, that it was time to have a baby, or hearing the whispering voice through the fog telling me just enough to begin again, and again, I have been rewarded beyond anything I could ever have imagined.

June 12, 2007

On Being a Working Mom

In an hour a car is coming to pick me up and take me into the city, where I am taping a radio show — part of the slow and steady trickle of book publicity that I continue to do two months after Black & White’s publication. And this evening, I’m giving a reading at a Barnes & Noble in New York with ten (you read that right, ten) other writers for the anthology The Other Woman, in which an excerpt of my memoir Slow Motion is included. These are two non-negotiable things that I have to show up for, for a variety of reasons, all having to do with my career.

And so, early this morning, I sat down with my eight year old son on the bottom step of our staircase, and–after wrestling his “twenty questions sports trivia” game away from him–told him that I would be going to New York today. That I would be sleeping over in the city tonight, since I have no way of getting back to our home in the country at night. (There are no trains, one of the things I like about living here on most days– except for today.) And, worst of all, I told him that I will not be able to attend the Montessori School’s second grade performance of “The Terrible Leak” at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

His little face fell. There is nothing sadder than an eight year old boy’s little face falling, crumbling into momentary crushing disappointment. And I’m not even sure I should be writing about this, since it is my policy not to write about him — but really, right now I’m writing about myself, and about the dilemmas that face working mothers everywhere.

“Why?” he asked.
“Because I have to work, honey.”
“This book publication is taking a long time.”
“I know.”

I thought I had “The Terrible Leak” nailed. I had called his second grade teacher a week ago to ask when the performance would be, so that I could do everything I could to work my schedule around it. She told me the date, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief because I realized (so I thought) that I would not have to miss the performance. The delicate balance between my life as a mother and my life as a working woman would remain exactly that: balanced. Everything getting somehow accomplished, no one or nothing getting lost in the shuffle. And so, when the little slip of paper appeared in our school mailbox announcing that the performance of “The Terrible Leak” would be at nine in the morning–the very morning I would still be in New York– I felt it like a physical blow. That voice that I am convinced visits all mothers at least once in a while, that voice screamed: see–you’re failing, you’re not getting it right, you’re a Bad Mother.

But here is my question, and I know it’s an inflammatory one, my small contribution to a term I deplore, the Mommy Wars: why would a performance of a school play be scheduled for nine o’clock in the morning? Where does the assumption come from that parents would be able to arrange their lives in order to be there when most people are at work? Granted, my family and I live in an unusual community where a lot of people make their own hours and have an inordinate amount of flexibility — but what about those who don’t? Why are we penalized — and much worse, why are our children penalized — by the notion that the stuff of real life (in other words, working to make a living) can be dropped at a moment’s notice?

Fortunately for us, my husband is able to go to tomorrow’s performance of “The Terrible Leak”. As a screenwriter who is, at the moment, not on a crushing deadline, he’s able to take the morning off. In fact, he’s taking three mornings off in a row: this morning, as I write this, he is at the Montessori School, showing the first-through-third graders slides from his years spent in Africa, first as a Peace Corps volunteer, then as a foreign correspondent. And the day after the play is the last day of school, which means the school picnic, which takes place at eleven in the morning. And of course I will be there.

I know this isn’t a problem limited to my son’s school, or to the community I live in. I hear these stories from my friends in New York and LA. But this blind spot seems to be spreading, rather than diminishing, and I found myself wishing that the people who make these decisions–the teachers, school administrators, even the stay-at-home moms who arrange some of the school events–had been able to see that little face crumbling this morning, that child’s voice piercing the air, asking why?

Why, indeed.

June 2, 2007

Blogging Elsewhere

I was excited to receive an invitation from the folks at The Huffington Post asking me if I’d like to occasionally blog there. My first blog post appeared this week, and here it is and it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop blogging here — so check back soon!

May 13, 2007

Mother’s Day

Earlier this week I was in New York City to tape a segment of “Weekend Edition” with Scott Simon. I have always loved Scott Simon’s interviews, and the prospect of being on his show was both thrilling and terrifying–mostly because the way it works is, he interviews you for a half-hour or forty-five minutes, and then–depending on a combination of world events and your own ability to string sentences together in an eloquent manner, a segment either a) doesn’t run at all, b) runs for three minutes, or c) runs for up to ten minutes. So my own personal eloquence was on the line. Now, I’m certain that one of the reasons I became a writer is because I never feel, when I’m speaking, like I’m getting it right. I never say quite what I intend to. I tend to feel like I’ve landed slightly to the side of the point I’m trying to make. The words flee, they have no heft, unless I’m committing them to the page. I like to control my ideas, to hone them and craft them–arrange and re-arrange words until they fall into a precise order, like a line of musical notes. And you can’t do that on the radio.

Before heading down to NPR’s offices, I took myself to lunch at a restaurant called E.A.T. on the Upper East Side. I settled into a seat against a mirrored wall, ordered a ridiculously expensive salad and cappuccino, and realized that I was thinking about my mother. E.A.T. was a restaurant where, for many years, I used to meet her for lunch. We probably had fifty E.A.T. lunches, my mother and I. The bread basket with its raisin nut bread, it’s ciabatta and sourdough, are like Marcel’s madeleines to me. As readers of my non-fiction know, my mother and I had, to put it mildly, a contentious relationship. (One magazine editor who shall remain nameless even carped behind my back that I have only one subject: my mother.) Be that as it may, for many years it is true that I turned my difficult mother into my muse — it was all I could reasonably do with her. And now–as I sat in this improbable, noisy restaurant filled with well-turned out women in complicated designer jeans, their sapphire-and-diamond solitaires flashing–my mother, who died almost four years ago, appeared before me. Not quite an apparition, she was nonetheless very much present. And she was not pleased. How could she be? I was here. She was not. I was about to go on NPR. She was not. I was about to have an essay come out in the June issue of Vogue, about HER. She was not. I had become the author, not only of my own destiny, but, in a deeply uncomfortable way, of hers as well. The mother of my memory quivered with rage. Her jaw shook. She seemed to be telling me that I am a terrible person and deserve nothing good. I felt myself shrink. I began to disappear.

I paid the check, bolted out of the restaurant, and began to quickly walk downtown on Madison Avenue, trying to leave my mother behind, in the cathedral of memory that is E.A.T.. As I headed south, I had no way of knowing that in just an hour, Scott Simon would ask me to read a passage from Black & White about a little girl who wants to shrug out of her own skin, to leave her shell behind the way the cicadas in her backyard do. But what I was thinking, on that beautiful spring day as I headed off to do battle with my own fears and my own sense of deserving, was that my mother will always be lurking in the cathedrals of memory: Jean-Georges, where my husband and I first introduced her to my future in-laws. Edgar’s Cafe on West 84th Street, where she first met my husband after we had been dating for three weeks. The hushed, airy floors of Bergdorf Goodman, where I used to walk with her–our shared love of fashion one of our only true bonds. My mother–all of our mothers, whether we had it easy with them or not–is like a phantom limb. I feel her presence–and her absence–when I least expect it. I will never be able to totally shrug out of the skin of my childhood and leave her behind. Honestly, I don’t even want to. Not exactly.

May 3, 2007

God Is Not Great

Which is, of course, the title of the brilliant Christopher Hitchens’ new book about religion. It is also, lately, the ground zero of my deepest confusions as a mother. What am I supposed to teach my son about God? What do I do about the fact that I am, at best, on the fence when it comes to the spiritual life? My basic relationship to the whole notion of God is a lily-livered, poorly thought-through, pathetic melange of Buddhism, self-help, nature, the Hebrew songs and melodies of my childhood, the transcendence of great music, and little bits of my dead father’s voice that float around in my consciousness. I could have drifted along in exactly this stupor for my whole life if not for motherhood. If not for the fact that it is my responsibility to expose Jacob to the religion of his heritage–if only so that he can later reject it.

When I was Jacob’s age, I went to a yeshiva. I spent half a day learning in Hebrew, the other half in English. On Shabbat, the Sabbath, I went with my father to temple where I played with the tassels on his tallit, and listened to the passion in his voice has he swayed back and forth, davening. I spoke Hebrew so fluently I thought in it. When I traveled to Israel with my family, at the moment we disembarked at Lod Airport my inner life, my thoughts and random daydreams took place in a language I no longer can speak, nor understand. The language of Hebrew eludes me, much in the same way I am eluded by an understanding of faith, or of God.

But since we live in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut — the land of white Protestant people — since we live in a house with no mezuzah on the door, a house where my parents Shabbat candlesticks are on display on the dining room table only because they’re beautiful, old Tiffany ones, and satisfy my aesthetic desire for lovely silver–since if you saw us, my husband and son and me, riding the winding Connecticut hills, you might be forgiven for mistaking us for characters in a Cheever novel–I end up embroiled in what feels like a moral dilemma. My concern has grown over the last couple of years as Jacob has begun to ask questions. What happens when we die? he asks regularly. Where do you go? What does it feel like? And then, just last week, when Little League practice was canceled because of rain four times in a row: “There’s a man in the sky who’s making it rain.” A man in the sky? Where do we go when we die? How am I supposed to guide him through these questions when I myself don’t know how I feel about any of it. And as for my husband, it’s easy for him. He’s an atheist. End of story.

But for me, it can’t be the end of the story. The faith that I grew up with–that faith is inside me still, not as a belief in God but, rather, as a part of me that gives me a tangible access to my childhood. My father has been gone for more than twenty years–and yet, if I want to hear his voice, if I want to feel the way his short hair bristled against my small fingers on the top of his head, if I want to see his eyes–hazel-green and kind, as he gazed at me–all I have to do is go to temple and a door opens. Memory floods through, unstoppable. And that is the closest answer to what happens when we die that I ever get.

April 19, 2007

New England

I can comfortably give a reading in front of hundreds of strangers (okay, well maybe not exactly comfortably, but I can do it without feeling like I’m about to die of a heart attack). But put me in front of a bunch of friends and family–particularly the strange and unpredictable amalgam of friends and family who show up in distant cities for readings–and I find myself–in the midst of a passage–erupting into a full-blown panic attack. Take the other night in Boston: at the Brookline Booksmith, one of my favorite New England bookstores, I gave a reading to a nice crowd (my karmic payback after suffering in the Bay Area) and scattered throughout the audience were the following: my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, two sisters-in-law and a brother-in-law, my 9th grade English teacher, and my favorite aunt.

It was my favorite aunt–or perhaps the combination of my favorite aunt and my 9th grade English teacher–who tipped the balance. I was so happy they were there–thrilled really–but then I realized that I had to read in front of them. From my new novel, Black & White. From passages in Black & White that contain graphic images, nudity, and even the word fuck. It was the word fuck that did me in. It comes fairly late in the reading–on the last page, the home stretch–when my protagonist’s father asks the gallery owner who is displaying provocative photographs of his young daughter, if the gallery owner thinks he “gives a flying fuck” about what other people think as he takes his daughters out of the gallery.

Well, as my heart pounded, my throat threatened to close up, and my mouth went dry, I spent the better part of the reading trying to figure out how I was going to avoid using the word fuck in front of my favorite aunt (did I mention that she’s 83? did I mention that she’s a deeply observant Jew?) and her friend who she brought along (also in her 80’s, also yada-yada) and every once in a while also catching a glimpse of my 9th grade English teacher and wondering how Black & White was measuring up to A Separate Peace in his mind.

When I finally got to the offending passage, my eyes quickly skimmed the line. I figured I could say damn. Damn was definitely better than fuck. Wasn’t damn in the bible? Or maybe that was the new testament. “I don’t give a damn” I found myself reading. So it was a little bit flat. So it didn’t have quite the same impact. So what?

April 17, 2007

Waiting Never Works, or Perils of the Book Tour

Even though I don’t believe that anyone up there is micro-managing my life, even though I don’t believe that God finds me parking spaces, I can’t help but believe that waiting for something to happen is the surest way to be sure that it won’t happen. This has proven to be true again and again. The writer’s life is full of waiting. There’s the good kind–the patient, quiet waiting for a character to reveal himself, for the story to unfold. And then there’s the bad kind: waiting for news. Waiting for reviews. Waiting for things to happen.

I remember, last summer, my husband-the-screenwriter was waiting for a phone call from Hollywood. Now, Hollywood has invented new forms of torture–an entire glossary of terms– for the waiting writer. For instance, “the weekend read”. The weekend read does not, in fact, mean that the producer/star/director will actually read said work over the course of the weekend. It simply means that the manuscript or screenplay is on a pile somewhere, perhaps on the floor of an office, with the vague intent on the producer/star/director’s part that, eventually, it will be cracked open. On some weekend. Some day. So my husband (and therefore I) was waiting and waiting for a call from Hollywood. A lot was riding in the balance. Our mortgage, for instance. And do you know when that call came? When he was driving to dinner, along a country road with virtually no cell service, and at the crest of a hill is cell phone rang and it was his agent calling with good news from Hollywood. Was my husband waiting–at that exact moment–for that phone call? Of course not. Maybe he was thinking about dinner. But if he had been concentrating on his cell phone, willing it with all his might to ring–it never would have.

During publication, way too much of the writer (okay, this writer’s) life is taken up with the wasted time of waiting. The internet has not done us any favors in this regard. There’s always Google, and Google News, and Nexis (which my teaching job allows me to access) and a dozen other websites to be browsed when in fact there are better things to do. It would be safe to say that anything would be better. Staring into space would be more productive. Or taking a walk. Or a bath. I remember Grace Paley–who was my writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence–once telling a class that she did her best work in the bathtub. I thought she meant that she got into the hot, steaming water with a note pad. It was many years before I understood: she meant that she took a lot of baths. That ideas come when the mind is relaxed and empty.

Which brings me to the crux of the matter. When a writer is in the midst of publication–when a writer is even lucky enough to be on book tour–the mind is not relaxed and empty. The mind is tortured, waiting. And waiting for what? The reviews come. Some are raves, some are pans. The news dribbles in. That magazine is running the essay you’d hope it would run. That foreign publisher sends a lovely book jacket. The truth is that none of it is enough–and I doubt very much that there could possibly be such a thing as enough. My ex-agent once told me that she had a writer-client who was #3 on the bestseller list and he was concerned about #2 and #1. At the time, I was baffled and thought that writer was a fool. (Well, I still do, a little bit.) But I understand the moral of the story, which is that when you’ve poured everything you have–your life’s blood–into a book, there is no enough. There are only things to be checked off a mental list with relief. And therefore, there is no writing going on. No ruminating, no musing, no peace. I was on the phone with a good friend yesterday, a novelist who just had a book come out last summer and hasn’t started working on a new book yet. “The good news,” she laughed, “is that it will be that much longer before I have to go through publication again.”

April 12, 2007

Pathetic Reading Story

Last night I gave a reading at Book Passage, a lovely bookstore north of San Francisco. I’ve heard of Book Passage for years and have always wanted to read there. And I should preface this by saying that the story I’m about to tell is in no way Book Passage’s fault. They are a stellar bookstore, and I hope to read there again some day in the future, when I have Anne Lamott’s career. Now, I’ve been collecting pathetic reading stories for as long as I’ve been giving readings. All writers collect them. They are our battle scars. We share these stories with each other the way foreign correspondents do:

How about that time in Sudan?
Remember that road block? I thought we were goners.

One such reading was at a strip mall in Westchester during a blizzard — I believe it was for my third novel, Picturing the Wreck — and no one showed up. I sat alone at a table for an hour, until finally a woman walked up to me and asked: “Are you Dana?” Then there was the one in Boston–also for Picturing the Wreck, as it happens–where the event took place in the way, way back of a store above a food court, and I couldn’t find where I was supposed to read, and my audience couldn’t, either. I had a few relatives there –and I was about to cancel (the shame of reading to only family members was too much for me) but then two fans showed up, who had driven an hour. So I read.

Well, last night I read to five people. The manager of the store, a man with his eyes closed in the back row, a woman my age in the middle of a sea of empty seats, and my two cousins who I haven’t seen in a couple of decades–a delightful couple who must have been thinking: she makes a living at this?

April 9, 2007

Book Tour

Every time I land in LA I feel like I’m walking into a sliding doors version of my life. I’ve never lived in Los Angeles though in aggregate I’ve probably spent a year here in dribs and drabs–a few weeks here, a month there. It’s a city I know well, but only as a visitor. My husband and I regularly entertain fantasies of moving here–especially because it would be an easier commute for him, as a screenwriter, than the CT/LA trips that he makes regularly. But what would it be like to live here? Certainly my days wouldn’t be like these few days: beautiful hotel on the beach, room service coffee with hot milk first thing in the morning, meetings and phone interviews and even a lunchtime trip to the LA Barney’s New York — which may well be my favorite department store in the world. Michael and I had lunch at Barney Greengrass –on the roof of Barney’s in Beverly Hills –which bears little or no resemblance to the Barney Greengrass of the Upper West Side, which has catered every Yom Kippur break-the-fast we’ve ever had, as well as my son’s bris and my mother’s shiva. That Barney Greengrass is one of the only places left where the Upper West Side feels like the Upper West Side, complete with cranky, overwhelmed waiters. But the Bevery Hills Barney Greengrass has a Cobb Salad on the menu and happy, attentive surfer-waiters, and the conversation drifting around us was a pleasant blur of Hollywood speak. I actually heard the word “characterization” at the next table. You never hear that word in Connecticut. Could we live here? Today–as I look out over the Pacific, at a view we could never afford, as I get ready to go downstairs and meet my agent for a glass of good white wine, as I contemplate tomorrow’s yoga schedule instead of the solitary unrolling of my mat–today, I think perhaps yes.