No. 6 - On Excavating Memory - Dani Shapiro
Photo by Michael Maren.
This interview is excerpted from Studio Visits, a monthly offering to deepen your creative practice through intimate conversations with some of our favorite writers and artists.
We follow a community-sourced agenda and learn about the tools they use, their earliest creative impulses, how journaling figures into their work, and what keeps them inspired.
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Today’s blog post is from a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with the one and only Dani Shapiro. She’s the author of five novels and five memoirs, most recently the instant New York Times-bestseller Inheritance. She's also the host of the podcast Family Secrets, which has been one of my favorite pandemic podcasts.
Dani is a beloved writing teacher, and she has been so important in my life and my writing. I first saw her at a PEN book event at the Powerhouse Arena, a bookstore in Brooklyn. I was 24, and it was the first New York City literary event I'd ever attended. I knew nobody there. Dani and a couple other authors each spoke for a few minutes. I remember watching Dani as she spoke, thinking, “Who is that rock star?” She was beautiful, eloquent, so poised, and so inspiring. I immediately wanted to get to know her and to read everything that she'd written.
I was definitely too shy to introduce myself to her that night, and I can’t quite recall how we became friends—I think it was a social media-turned-real friendship. During our Studio Visit, we had an amazing conversation about excavating secrets and writing memoir, and I’m thrilled to be sharing these highlights with you.
SULEIKA
Hi, Dani! Welcome.
DANI
Suleika, I didn't know that story! I was just sitting here with this big smile on my face listening to that, because I remember that night at Powerhouse. It was a large event, and I was at the top of a staircase, looking down at all of these people. I was shaking in my boots; at that point I still was not super comfortable with public speaking. That you were there, and that was your first encounter with me—such a great story.
SULEIKA
It never occurred to me that you might also be shaking in your boots!
I have a million questions for you, so I’m going to dive in. You've now published five memoirs—but you’ve called yourself an “accidental memoirist.” I'm curious what path you imagined for yourself when you were growing up.
DANI
I didn't grow up knowing that it was possible to be a writer. I didn't know any writers. I didn't know any artists. So giving myself permission to have a voice and to believe that it was possible to make a life as a writer, was something that it took me a while to get to. And many people don't realize this—because Slow Motion, my first memoir, is the book that put me on the map—but I had three published novels before that.
At this point, I've written an equal number of memoirs and novels—and no one is more surprised by that than I am. When I wrote Slow Motion, I had a sense that my fiction was being haunted by some autobiographical material that I needed to tackle head on. I didn't want it to be a memoir, but I didn't feel like I had any choice in the matter.
I imagined that would be my one and only memoir, and then I would go back to fiction. And I did go back to fiction for two novels that I'm proud of, my novels Family History and Black and White. But then I returned to memoir. Again, it was a pull. That's just where my creative impulse was pulling me. I think we have to follow where our creative impulses pull us. If we don't, then that's at our own peril of our creative process.
SULEIKA
I'm curious about that haunting—because another fiction writer might have just decided to write it as an autobiographical novel.
DANI
I think I understood that fiction is really an imagined world. Thinly veiled, autobiographical fiction, to me, feels like something that the writer has done in order to not write a memoir—either because she didn't want people to be mad at her or she was afraid of feeling too exposed. I couldn't have articulated that when I wrote Slow Motion, but it was my instinct. I needed to write from a place where my primary tool was memory, and not imagination. That is the simplest definition I know for the difference between writing fiction and writing memoir.
SULEIKA
Slow Motion was the first book of yours that I read. It tells the story of how, when you were 23, a catastrophic car accident badly injured your mom and killed your dad—and you write about not just that incident, but its aftermath. We have a question from a community member about what happens when you don't have a dramatic reckoning to write about.
Libby Lennie writes, “I've just finished reading Educated by Tara Westover. It made me want to write my own story. But as I read it, I realized I do not have the trauma, nor the extreme life path that she had. I'm wondering how one creates a dynamic memoir from a life that has been relatively serene? How do you find the fulcrum from which everything balances?”
DANI
There's a misapprehension that there has to be a big dramatic event for a memoir to be possible or to make any sense. And in Slow Motion, I had some dramatic events that I wrote about. But several of my memoirs—most notably, Devotion and Hourglass—have absolutely no big dramatic event on which the story hinges.
We read for many reasons and different kinds of pleasures. One of those pleasures is recognition—of a moment, a place, a feeling state. It's the writer’s job to find language for those moments, those feeling states, that allows the reader to access their own feelings, that makes them think, “Oh, I never thought of it that way before. I could never find the words or the language for that.” Illuminating ordinary life, to me, is one of the most beautiful ways to write and to read.
Another way that I would put it is that it’s a way to enter the consciousness of another human being. And I would much rather enter a consciousness than be told a story.
SULEIKA
One of the things I find endlessly awe-inspiring about your books is that you seem to invent a new form for each. The other thing that I find so intriguing is how you draw from such a vast array of sources—from literature, poetry, philosophy and theology.
We have a question from Stephanie in Washington, D.C., who asks about just that. She opens with a compliment: “Dani Shapiro is probably my favorite writer. One of my favorite things is how she weaves so many teachings from others into her stories. I'm so curious about her process, how she stores and synchronizes everything.”
DANI
Sitting here at my desk in my writing studio, I have next to me a little notebook. I have a series of these, all exactly the same. I got the first one at Heathrow Airport, in a stationery shop there, but it became so magical for me that I went on this deep search for more. And I did track them down, and they're made in Japan, and I have a store full of them now.
I didn't know what this process was called when I started it over a decade ago, but they're my commonplace books. For those who don't know, a commonplace book is a book where a person writes meaningful quotes, snippets, bits of wisdom from others, or lines that we've come across that illuminate something. I started this process intuitively. While I was writing Devotion, whenever I was reading, I kept a commonplace book next to me, and I would stop and write things down.
A student once asked me why I made it hard on myself by using these tiny little books. You can see how small I have to make my handwriting. I realized that that was intuitive too. It was a way to get myself to slow down. In doing that, it would embed those quotes within me. Many of them I have committed to memory.
Also, when I teach, I often reference the words of others. I’ve always had a sense of the wisdom of others who've come before. I'm not writing by myself, alone in a room. I am in a literal sense, but I'm writing on the backs of others, both living and gone.
I have a series of these books now, and they’ve become diaries of a sort, because I can look back at what I was most taken by in 2010. They form a kind of journal.
SULEIKA
Hourglass is one of my favorite books. The source material, among others, are your old notebooks. But in that book, you write that you stopped journaling. Is that still the case?
DANI
I do a different kind of journaling now. It's something that I picked up from the great novelist Ruth Ozeki. A process journal is where the writer is only engaging the process of a particular work. I do find that life leaks into it—because life leaks into everything.
SULEIKA
I recently taught a workshop about how journaling can be this space where we liberate ourselves from perfectionism, how you get to do the writing that doesn't count. We had a question from someone about what she should do with all of her journals when she dies. Another community member said, “I told my son when I die to burn my journals.”
The idea of others reading our journals is mortifying. But it occurs to me that it could also be liberating. Giving people a glimpse into ourselves in our most unedited form, not keeping secrets, somehow brings some air into the room. It seems like something that could help us live with less shame.
DANI
I’m so glad you said that. It reminds me of something that happened a few years back, when I was teaching at a weekend-long retreat. On the last morning, I usually would make up a writing prompt on the spot, based on what had come up over the course of the weekend.
That morning I was sitting on this elevated platform, and there were a couple hundred people in the room. I said, “I'm going to give you three minutes. At the end, no one is going to read what you wrote. You can burn it, you can rip it up, you can throw it away—whatever you want to do with it is up to you. But I want you to write about the thing that, if anyone knew about you, you think you’d curl up and die of shame. Okay, begin.”
I mention that I was on this elevated platform because I could look out at the sea of people, and I could see—not one person hesitated. Nobody sat there and was like, “Shame? That’s not resonating with me.” Everybody wrote for three minutes, and the room was radiant.
In the moment, I was trying to teach them: “Look how available that is to you. Use that in some way.” But when I was driving home, I had this fantasy. I never would do this because it would be a terrible thing to do, but I thought, what if I had said, “Just kidding, now you will have to read them aloud”—what would have happened? I believe that everybody would have been sitting there with tears rolling down their cheeks nodding, understanding, knowing, relating, full of compassion, full of identification.
Beneath every secret, there is shame. Shame is why we are silent. Shame is why we keep the secret.
This excerpt from our Studio Visit with Dani Shapiro on January 10, 2021, has been edited for clarity and brevity.