An interview with Dani from Lit Magazine #8, Winter ’03-‘04

Keeping the Channel Open: An Interview with Dani Shapiro

A faculty member at the New School, Dani Shapiro is the author of four novels and a bestselling memoir. Whether she is tackling innocence lost in the wake of love and death (Playing with Fire), exploring an unconventional mother-daughter relationship (Fugitive Blue), inhabiting the soul of a Holocaust survivor estranged from his grown son (Picturing the Wreck), or confronting the personal tragedy that saved her (Slow Motion), Shapiro writes with a clear, unpitying honesty. Her latest novel, Family History tells the riveting story of the breakdown of a family through the eyes of its central figure: a woman slowly losing control of everything that matters -- her career, her marriage, and her children. It is a novel that instructs, teaching us that despite the painstaking effort we put into building our lives, and toward making the right choices, it can nevertheless all crumble without rhyme or reason. Hers is a prose of quiet elegance; the vision she conjures haunts us with its stark, unflinching intimacy. This summer I sat down with her at her home in Litchfield County, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and son. We spoke about writing, motherhood, courage, and the silver screen.

-Sara Lippmann

The story of the Jensens in Family History is so gripping that I practically forgot I was only reading about them. You wove two narratives the entire time, not simply alternating chapters, but in a complex and complicated way and with seamless results. How did you arrive at those structural choices?

All of my books have moved, structurally, back and forth in time. In fact, when I started Family History I was determined to tell a story linearly if only just to see if I could do it -- but in the end, I realized that the past story
and the present story each needed their own space, and that it was a book which, once again, was asking to be written in layers. I have always found myself interested in the ways in which fiction can explore the interplay between the present and the past-how both can really coexist simultaneously on different planes-much in the way that consciousness does. Of course this isn't something that I'm wholly aware of as I'm writing. To be aware of it would be counterproductive. But looking back now, I see that this is something I continue to explore in my books.

This interplay, the tug between past and present, can be a painful and uncomfortable space. Much of the tension in the novel stems from here.

In my earlier books, I saw things very much as being split, as before and then after the dramatic event. I tend to be a neat writer, and I can't move on until I think I have my first sentence. I usually never do, but boy, don't try to tell me that at the time. I have to trick myself. The original opening line of Picturing the Wreck was "Life can be ruined in a day, in a minute." But I realized through the writing of that book that while it may seem that a single minute can alter a life irrevocably, there are many subtle and not-so-subtle moments that build up to what may seem to be a life-changing minute, but what is actually an accrual, a result of all that came before. I wrote about this more recently in the short story "Plane Crash Theory," which was published in Ploughshares in the Spring of 2001. That story sort of defines what I understand about these moments now. Of course it continues to evolve. To return to the actual opening line of my third novel, Picturing the Wreck, it wound up being a far cry from the original. "This morning begins like all other mornings."

But I think that's so true. There isn't necessarily a direct repercussive link or tidy equation of cause and effect, and yet we all try to pinpoint a single moment where things take a turn. When Rachel Jensen wracks her brain for that precise instant at which her family began to unravel, I could absolutely relate, however futile her efforts wound up being, because that is something we all do.

Even actions done with the best intentions don't always bring the best results. Rachel goes back over the series of events. Her pregnancy. Having another baby was something she really wanted. And yet, maybe it wasn't the best thing for [her adolescent daughter] Kate. Next. Inviting Kate to the hospital to be a part of the labor and birth. A perfectly reasonable thing to do. Many people do this. Rachel and [her husband] Ned wanted to include her, and they couldn't have anticipated what would happen. Kate got traumatized. The babysitting decision at the end is trickier, more complicated. Rachel and Ned really needed to get out for themselves. Maybe they shouldn't have left Kate with [her new baby brother] Joshua. But they wanted to give her responsibility, to show her they trusted her, and besides, Phyllis [Rachel's mother] was just downstairs. Maybe if none of these things happened, it wouldn't have made a difference, Kate still would have been Kate. Maybe she would have taken this turn regardless. I think Kate is within the realm of normalcy, on the tippy tippy edge, maybe, but I have a very good sense that she will be just fine, and that someday she'll make a very interesting 30-year-old. I've never felt this way about any of my characters before, but I might not be done with the Jensens. I may need to revisit them and see how this family, hit with terrible things, turned out.

We feel like we know the Jensens. They are us; they are our parents, our neighbors. You provide just enough details about the characters and the small Massachusetts town to place us there with them. At the same time, their characters are broad enough to include and implicate all of us. It's a very interesting balance.

Family History seems to have two kinds of readers. The readers who are right there and get it and can relate, and those who are angry, who have told me they had a hard time believing all that happened because they wanted more direct motivation for given actions. I resisted labeling Kate with a diagnosis because I didn't want the book to be about that, and I also didn't want to provide an excuse, to give her a reason. I visited a book club in Greenwich, Connecticut, and there was a woman there who said that she had a hard time believing how troubled Kate became because there didn't seem to be a clearly defined reason, etc. But then she said, "Oh, but I cried." How could she have cried if it wasn't believable?

I think that's partly what's so unsettling about your novel. It's a universal story that you can't easily dismiss with, "Oh that couldn't happen to me." Because it could happen.

When I started Family History, I was conscious of wanting to write about ordinary people. In my other novels, the characters and the narrators in particular were outsized characters in some way. Solomon Grossman [Picturing the Wreck] certainly was, and in my second novel, Fugitive Blue, there were outsized characters, a famous artist's daughter, and they lived dramatic lives. I really wanted to write about an ordinary family that gets sideswiped and what they contend with, which is not ordinary at all. What does ordinary mean? There is the notion that there is a certain amount of tragedy that is doled to each of us. I don't think that's true. Sometimes we are given more than we can handle. It was something I wanted to explore.

You continue to explore the friction between worlds, the past and the present. There are a number of opposing worlds set up here, and I found Rachel to be that much more vulnerable and alienated because she occupies this murky middle ground. The city vs. the country is just one of the dichotomies. Did your own move from the city to the country influence the novel?

I did most of the writing of Family History at the Writer's Room on Astor Place. I did do some revising here. Family History was originally set in Brooklyn. It actually grew out of a failed short story, which took place in Brooklyn and that involved Ned and Rachel and Kate in a car on their way to meet Phyllis, Rachel's mother, in the city. It wasn't working because it had to be in a small town where everyone knows your business. And although it's the least overtly Jewish of my books, Rachel's outsiderness, the fact that she doesn't feel at home, she is a city girl, she is her mother's daughter, she has intermarried, all of that is very important.

Let's talk about the ending.

I needed to have Kate say, "I'm sorry." When I got there, I knew I needed to end it. I wanted it to be hopeful, for there to be a sense of possibility, but also to be realistic. The Jensens are like a fragile vase that breaks. All the pieces are there and you can put it back together, but you will still always be able to see the cracks. Rachel and Ned do love each other, and in the end it's up to them whether or not they will let their circumstances get the best of them.

I have to admit that the first time I read the ending, I felt a bit let down. I don't know what I was hoping for, to be gratified with a pat family reunion, birds chirping in the background. Which would have been awful. In truth, there could be no ending other than the one you wrote. Kate's not ready to leave Stone Mountain, and the Jensens aren't quite there either. The Jensens are incomplete, like Ned's paintings. When Rachel comes upon them in Ned's studio, she observes that "the combination of the blurred images and aspects left undone force the viewer to enter the painting." To me, that line serves as a larger metaphor for the novel.

It's interesting to hear you say that. There needs to be a certain amount of undoneness about the story in order for readers to enter it.

How did you begin Family History?

I pictured this woman in bed. I actually wrote the first thirty pages of it and put them away. I was struggling with all those voices whispering in my ear, telling me this is terrible and boring and who would want to read about a woman in bed. So I deleted those pages and kept a hard copy on the top shelf of my closet along with all the other discarded things I'd ever done.

A couple of nights later I was having dinner with a friend, who's not a writer (if she'd been a writer I never would have shown them to her), and she asked if she could read them. I gave them to her. She read them on the subway and called me when she got home and left a message saying, "You're crazy. It's the best thing you've ever done." So I pulled them back out. Actually, I hadn't managed to trash them, I'd only deleted them without emptying the trash on my computer. Had I listened to those voices, there just wouldn't be a book.

I want to share this letter that I often show my students. For years I've kept it on my bulletin board above my desk. It's something that Martha Graham wrote to Agnes DeMille on the opening night of Carousel:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You don't even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU. Keep the channel open...No artist is pleased...There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a clear divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the rest.

I love that. They're words to live by, but it's more than that. My whole life as a writer has been about forgetting that piece of wisdom, and then remembering it. The voices were so loud after [my son] Jacob was born [in the spring of 1999]. I spent a lot of time feeling guilty because he was downstairs, and I kept thinking about what he was doing, and then I would think, What am I doing? Writing? How frivolous! Fiction? You're writing fiction? And so on. From his birth until I was well into Family History, I wasted so much time. There were times I couldn't write.

Grace Paley, who was my teacher, once said she wrote in the bath. At the time, I thought she meant she literally wrote in the bath, so I used to picture her there with notepad and suds. But of course she meant she takes baths, she goes for walks, goes to museums, browses through a store, and that's all part of the process. That is the space around the work. I never used to feel guilty about it, but suddenly I had all this parental anxiety. I was paying someone so that I could be working and not be with my son. The voices continue to be loud which is why I need to leave the house to write.

Have your writing habits changed since becoming a mother?

My hours aren't as regulated as they were before Jacob. I need to have a block of hours. I used to carry my laptop to the Writer's Room, and it was great to be surrounded by other writers, the quiet, but since Jacob's birth I've gotten much lighter on my feet. I now carry around these spiral notebooks. I write in longhand and it allows me to be messier and freer, use crossouts and arrows.

It's funny. I searched for the perfect cafe in Brooklyn and in New York, but I actually found the perfect space here at this inn nearby. The truth is, when I'm working well, I could write on the subway. Whatever quiets the noise in my head feeds my work. Yoga does that for me. If I can get in that hour and a half in the morning of breathing and physical activity, I will have a good writing day.

What did you discover or learn about yourself in the writing of Family History?

I think that during the course of writing it I learned more about myself as a writer who was a mother specifically. What I knew already, what I already had in my fist, was what the book came out of. I learned that motherhood was a really valid subject and that the whole idea of the domestic novel or the woman's novel as being lesser subject matter was bullshit. And it's something that books that deal with this subject matter have to contend with. And there were reviews that I had, and almost all of the reviews were good, but if you look at some of them, it's as if they had to open with this caveat: "There are certain kinds of books that come along every once in a while like Ordinary People, or Before and After...." These are books I love being compared to; I think they're great books. But it was putting them into a genre and it annoys me to have to say this, but if a male writer writes a book about family, it's considered to be a breakthrough.

You're right. I read an op-ed piece not long ago commenting on the New Yorker's recent double issue on family, which the writer claimed lent legitimacy to the institution as subject matter. As if only now has family arrived on the serious literary scene.

The New Yorker has anointed it. In the past number of years, there have been novels by men about family, novels about a domestic world, novels that have been taken very seriously-as well they should be-but there also have been novels by women about that world that are relegated to the back pages of book reviews or not reviewed at all because they are seen as "women's fiction," and I disagree with that with everything I've got.

It was a struggle to arrive at that. I remember at a certain point I was at the Writer's Room, I was in the middle of the book, and I was working on the scene where Ned and Rachel are driving back from New York with Josh in the car, and Josh is an infant and he poops in his diaper in the backseat of the car and I used the word "poopy."

I love that scene. That's too funny.

I was depressed for the rest of the day. I remember walking along Astor Place and thinking, "I just used the word 'poopy' in my novel. A serious literary novel cannot possibly contain the word 'poopy.'" And then all these many months, a year, two years later, I sort of feel like, why not? And what is family, what is parenthood if not this universal and profound part of people's lives, and why is it sort of okay to write about, terrorism, say, but not family? And so what came out of it for me was a feeling of consciously not thinking about subject matter in that way. What perception is, is also none of my business. Perception is essentially faddish.

I remember reading that you hated writing this novel.

Hated writing it. It's what I was talking about with the voices in my head. I struggled with the feeling that it wasn't good enough. I struggled with the feeling that these characters in their ordinariness weren't interesting enough. I think that each book gets harder. A truly successful writing life is one where the book you write at seventy-five is infinitely deeper, stronger, and more important than the book you write at twenty-five. I remember speaking with Peter Matthiessen, and he said to me about his own work, "The early books aren't worth reading." And I realized at that moment, it was a few years ago and I had written four books by then, that he was basically dismissing as many books as I had written at that point in my life. He's in his mid-seventies and to be able to say that is a great thing. I feel that way about my first two books. So what goes along with that is, as you learn more about craft and as you understand more about what it is you are trying to do, you cast a colder and colder eye on what it is you are doing. The notion of loving your work reminds me of another thing Grace Paley said to me that stuck: if she loved a sentence enough to go running into the other room to share it with her husband, she'd cut it.

Kill your darlings.

Yes. But I really didn't get it. I loved my first novel as I was writing it, and I quite loved my second. And Picturing the Wreck was a struggle, but I certainly loved [the main character] Solomon. My memoir Slow Motion was a whole different idea. I didn't love writing that book. But with Family History, it was the feeling of never being fully in the heat of it, always writing it and judging it, writing it and judging it, and although it is uncomfortable to feel that way, I'm not sure it's a bad thing. I don't know that I'll ever again just love what I'm doing while I'm doing it. But I would have rather produced what I now think is my best book-and thought it sucked the whole time I was writing it-than have loved it while I was writing and be kind of blinded.

It's difficult to believe that you struggled with it at all, because the final result seems effortless. One of the things I admire most about your writing is that your style, which is graceful and subtle, is also wonderfully spare. Many writers, particularly young writers, suffer from this tendency to overwrite, to inflate their prose so that it feels stressed and overwrought. Was this ever an issue for you?

There was a writer I loved while I was in graduate school whose prose style was incredibly lush and poetic and intense, and to read her work was to sort of fall into this incredible lyricism. I loved reading her and I liked attempting to write that way, but when I look back on my first novel, Playing with Fire, now, I want to take a red pencil to it. I remember being told at some point, "If you are describing something in a string of adjectives or a string of similes, find the perfect one." Because nothing is evoked in that feverish rush of "like a flower, like a bloom, and like a blade of grass...." In reality, there is one perfect thing that you haven't arrived at yet, or that is buried within this bog of purple prose. So yes. It's been absolutely evolutionary and I see it in each of my books. Again, it's not a conscious choice. It has to do with the way that even what I like to read has evolved. This writer whom I'm talking about, I wouldn't buy one of her books anymore; they wouldn't be what I gravitate to now. And what I find I admire is a kind of spareness that feels effortless on the page but you know is very hard won.

Well, that is your writing, exactly. Your style mirrors what I was saying earlier about Family History: It's quiet and understated enough to draw us in, and at the same time so lucid that we don't want to leave.

I love hearing that. Because the writer I admire most for that is Virginia Woolf. You read Virginia Woolf and the prose does not get in the way-it's exquisite, but it does not get in the way. It's like looking into an utterly still body of water and being able to see the sand. Just clear and still without a ripple because the prose is the water.

Reading her is like a tonic for me. I always go back and read her. As opposed to the prose calling attention to itself. There is a kind of prose that's admired for calling attention to itself. Some of it I like, but it's not what I want to do. It's not what I'm good at. It's not what I'm most interested in reading. It's not what pierces me as a reader.

I also think Family History is a novel that only gets better after you've allowed it some time to simmer in your consciousness.

One of the comments I consistently hear is, "I finished the book and then the characters started to live and breathe," and I love that, because that's what characters should do. When people respond to Family History in that way, I really try to take it in. It's instructive, and it's important for me to know that as I move on to the next thing, which I'm probably going to hate as I'm working on it. There is that struggle to just simply do it. When I say, "I was writing it, I was judging it," that's part of the process of working. But the big judge, the big inner censor, the voice that says, "This isn't working, I have to delete it from my computer and put it away on my shelf," that's not what I'm talking about. I do have an entire shelf full of things that belong on the shelf. When do you know to leave it there? I think you know when for some reason or other it doesn't stay on the shelf. In my case, it happened to be a dinner with my friend Emily but something else probably would have happened to make me take it off that shelf, as opposed to everything else I've got up there.

In your memoir, Slow Motion, you revisit the day when you completed grad school. Your first novel was already slated for publication, and your teacher approached you at the ceremony and said, "You've done it. Now you've got to keep doing it." Does that sentence still have any relevance?

The pressure of having something to prove starts to lessen. I think that pressure is mostly felt with a first book or between a first book and second. After my first novel, some jerk at a party said to me, "Oh everyone has one book in them," and that's what I heard; that's what I retained from all the things people had said to me. And I just thought, "Oh, yeah, they do, and I had my one and that's it." I feel like I rushed my second novel for the sake of having a second novel. Now of course, there's the feeling of "I've got nothing; I've got nothing inside me," but then something starts to build. And at this point, I hate to say it because I am superstitious, but I have more trust in the idea that a book will emerge.

So it's not the pressure to keep doing it in that way. It's more about becoming harder on myself, in terms of what my expectations are, what I feel my creative ambitions are. And as those grow, that's the pressure. And it also goes back a little bit to what I was saying about motherhood and writing. While I was writing Family History part of the pressure I felt was "I can't just write another novel, I can't just write an okay novel, I can't write a novel that doesn't really contribute anything," and I'm not saying I have done that.

You're so hard on yourself.

Yeah, well, I couldn't just write another novel. It just didn't feel important enough to me. So that's a certain pressure. I feel like I have to be writing a really damn good novel.

And you did.

Thank you. To justify not picking up my kid at school, or not being at his play-date, and that changes as he gets older, but there is that feeling -- that's the pressure. And also, as you get a bit older, you realize it's a long haul. And you only have a certain number of books in you. There were five years between Slow Motion and Family History.

I no longer feel that pressure of "I have to get another book out" at all -- I feel that it's just about doing the best possible work and what is going to feed that work and how to live life. Time is so limited that my life winds up being about how do I have time for my work, how do I have time for the time around my work, the time with my child, the time with my family, and then that's sort of it.

You spoke about the lessons you learned from Grace Paley. What are some of the lessons or values you hope to instill in your students?

Courage. Finding your subject matter is largely about courage. It's certainly not about writing for marketplace, especially for graduate students. Over the years I've taught graduate students who say, "1 should write a novel because that's what sells," or, "1 shouldn't write about X." Courage is about eradicating the shoulds and finding your way into your subject matter. By subject matter, I don't mean story, but the themes that emerge over time, and voice comes out of that. What is uniquely yours. Subject matter and voice are inextricably bound.

There is another quotation that I keep on my bulletin board, and I'm not sure who it's attributed to but 1 think it was John Gregory Dunne who said essentially that failure of nerve is writer's block. That's all it is. It is no more mystical or complicated than that. Craft is something that evolves over time, and craft is the only thing that can actually be taught. But finding that subject matter is like hitting a vein -- find that, and you are on the river. You'd be amazed, or maybe you wouldn't be because you've sat in workshops, there are so many layers and failures of nerve between the writer and that genuine something that is the bedrock. And I see my job as helping to remove some of those layers, those obstacles, and also, to get my students to really read. Not everyone does.

You mentioned Virginia Woolf as someone you admire. Who else would be on your ideal syllabus?

As a graduate student, I was very much influenced by nineteenth-century fiction, by almost all of it -- George Eliot, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. Part of it was having a teacher named Ilja Wachs, who was a nineteenth century literature professor at Sarah Lawrence, and who helped me to learn to read as a writer at the same time while I was finding my way into my own work.

I remember when Robert Polito called to ask me to teach literature at the New School, I said to him, "But I'm not a Ph.D.," and he said, "I want you to help them read as writers." And I said, "Oh, 1 can do that." Reading as a writer as opposed to reading as a literary critic is very different. I learned to have a response, to have a real dialogue with a book through nineteenth century fiction, which is why I think in part it has been as important to me as it has. As for contemporary writers, my answer to this would be different every day. It changes.

It's interesting to hear you talk about instilling courage into your students. You continually go to the source, in both your nonfiction and in your fiction.

I have to. It doesn't feel remotely like courage. I was recently contacted by a literary magazine soliciting essays on a subject, and as soon as I read it I knew I had to write something on that subject. And although it horrified me that I would write this essay, I had known for years that I was going to write about it. I absolutely had to. Because that is where my best work comes from, in terms of creative nonfiction. I wrote a piece some time ago that made a lot of people really mad. When it came out and I realized it, I told my husband, who said, "Didn't you know it would make people mad?" But had I known that, I never would have written it. There is a kind of disconnect between writing and the awareness that what I have written will be read. This is not the case with fiction, which has an irony to it, because my fiction is probably infinitely more revealing than my nonfiction, but then, it's fiction, so I don't think of it that way.

Writing nonfiction is not about confession or exhibitionism. At its simplest level it's about a need to be understood. Not understood personally-I want to be clear-there is very little choice in the matter. I write things and then want to dive under my bed and wait until everyone has read it and gone away. I actually had an interesting experience, which was rather instructive. A magazine called to ask if I had any travel and coming-of-age stories. One occurred to me. It was personal and revealing and I sat down to work. And I sat down to work on it again, and I sat down to work on it again, and I couldn't write it. Finally, I had to back out of it, which I've never done before. The idea hadn't come to me organically out of a story I needed to tell. It felt cheap and confessional and revealing in a way that I didn't need to be revealing because it was not something I had to write.

Some part of it has to do with becoming a mother. When I write about something that's personal and revealing, somewhere inside of me I am aware that someday it's highly likely my son will read this stuff. So it puts even more of an onus on it to be important, to be necessary. Even if someday he says, "Omigod. I don't want to know this about my mother." I have to make my peace with that, because this is what I do and this is who I am. There will be things about his life that will be more complicated and also more interesting because of that. There are certain things that are off-limits. I won't write directly about him. And I won't write directly about my husband. I got a letter from a magazine asking to write about my marriage, and I said no; that's private, that's ours. When does something have that need to be written? Joan Didion describes it at “the shimmer around the edges.” You just know that you have to write it. Then all bets are off. Then it's okay.

What are you working on now?

I'm practically done with everything for Family History. I'm sort of playing around. I'm working on a couple of short pieces. I'm going to Prague. It is about feeding the work. And something will start to emerge.

You also co-wrote the screenplay of your memoir, Slow Motion. What was that like?

It was very different. It's what my husband does, and he's really good at it; I don't think I am. To write a screenplay is to think in pictures. Language is what propels me, and language does not propel a screenplay. Screenplays do not need to be beautifully written, they shouldn't be. They shouldn't be written at all; they are really about seeing a story unfold visually. But I liked working on the screenplay. I was writing with a partner, the partner was my husband. I couldn't have written it with anyone else. It was my story but I wasn't really thinking of it as my story because you can't. Reese Witherspoon was producing it and was going to star in it. We'd met with her, and I was really writing it for her and not me. I was picturing her in it. All of my books have been optioned. They never get made, though.

Is it weird to imagine your novels through a different medium, on the big screen?

I hate it when writers whose work has been turned into film complain if something is not good or wasn't their vision, because the fact is a film brings many thousands of readers to the book. It looks like Family History is going to be a television movie. I know the writer, and his choices are really smart, and they have everything to do with making it a better movie, which I wouldn't have been able to do. If Family History winds up on television, then an entire audience of people who have not read the book will discover it and read it. And that is good. That is nothing but good.