The Art of Writing the Personal: Dani Shapiro comes to Philadelphia (and thoughts on Slow Motion)

Yesterday, New York City beckoned—a chance to talk about some of the young people I've taught before a wonderful audience at Bank Street (thank you, Jennifer Brown), a review of Voice in a mentor workshop (we talked The Book Thief, Two Boys Kissing, Small Damages), a quick run through the wonderful exhibit of children's books at the New York Public Library with special people, lunch with my son and husband, a hurried walk through Hoboken, a drive back home in twilight hours.

Today, I travel to my city, Philadelphia, to spend time with the incredibly talented Dani Shapiro on behalf of the First Person Arts Festival. We'll be at Christ Church Neighborhood House (20 N. American Street) from 4 to 5:30. Tickets can be bought at the door. I hope to see you for many reasons, but mostly because of this: Dani Shapiro has something to say, she says it with profound intelligence, and this is a rare opportunity to see her in person in the City of Brotherly Love.

I've read Dani through the years. I've heard others talk about her generosity toward other writers, about her powers as a teacher, about the choices that she's made; I've watched her in conversation with Oprah. I've read and loved Devotion as well as Still Writing, Dani's newest book on the writing life. I've anticipated this conversation, I'm saying, for a long, good time.

But it was not until this morning that I read Slow Motion, Dani's bestselling memoir about the accident that changed her life. Dani was a young beauty mired inside an unwanted relationship with her good friend's stepfather when Dani's father and mother were involved in a car accident. Dani's father would ultimately, and somewhat mysteriously, pass away. Her mother would heal from 80 fractures—and premature widowhood. The boyfriend would want what such boyfriends want, and Dani—who had left Sarah Lawrence in pursuit of an acting career and of this relationship—would have to make choices about who she was, what she wanted, where her life was going.

I hadn't read Slow Motion because I wanted to know Dani first, to see her as a person first, and not as this defining story. And here is the spectacular thing about having just now read the final page: Slow Motion is one of those books that has earned every accolade it's ever gotten. The story itself is remarkable. But what I believe is even more remarkable is the way that Dani tells it—her use of time, her measures of distance, her patience with the story itself, her silken language. Many may read Slow Motion for the story, but I read for the artistry.

And I was not disappointed by a single page.

Here is Dani, toward the end of the book—re-enrolled in college, emerging, at last, as the writer she must have always been. Dani has musical training in her background. Her sentences are the proof of this:

The professor sits back as the students finally start speaking. Until now, I have been the quiet one in the class, too insecure and frightened to say a word. But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that transcends my own experience. I can organize the noise in my head into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

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Taking the First Person Arts Stage, with Dani Shapiro

Incredibly happy as I anticipate my conversation (about books, memoir, writing, meaning) with Dani Shapiro during the upcoming First Person Arts Festival on Sunday, November 10, 4 - 5:30, at Christ's Church in Philadelphia.

The details are here. My thoughts about Dani's wonderful new book, Still Writing, are here.

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Still Writing/Dani Shapiro: Reflections

When I set out to write Handling the Truth, I burrowed in with the books that I have always loved—built a minor cathedral with printed paper, stiff spines, glue. Memoirs, specifically. Books that had taught me something or reinforced something, that exemplified, were exemplary.

One of those loved books was Dani Shapiro's Devotion, a memoir that, as I wrote here years ago, felt pure to me, spun from a sacred, silent place. Dani's book became one of the nearly 100 books I celebrate in the pages of Handling. Her prose offering an essential lesson in quiet generosity.

When I learned that Dani was publishing a book called Still Writing, I knew that something significant was about to make its way into the hands of writers all around the world. I trusted that she would write with both clarity and beauty, that she would open her heart, that she would not hide, that she would elevate writing advice to profoundly intelligent writing insight. All this she does, seamlessly, in a book that is destined to be a classic.

Reading Still Writing is like sitting with a best friend who gets you—really gets you. Someone in whom you might confide, someone with whom you might look out upon a garden space, silently. Yes, you hear yourself saying, I have been there. Yes, I've felt lost, too, uncertain, crushed, but also moved, privileged, calmed, finally certain in the midst of making a book. Wisdom, honesty, and reach abide in Still Writing. But so does companionship.

As one who teaches as well, who writes about words, who sometimes writes her own stories, I felt so aligned with Dani as I read that I'm afraid I sometimes spoke out loud while reading. I loved many passages. Let me share just one. It's the sort of advice I've tried to share with many writers throughout the years. But Dani says it better:

There's nothing wrong with ambition. We all want to win Guggenheims and live and write in the south of France, or some version thereof—don't we? But this can't be the goal. If we are thinking of our work as a ticket to a life of literary glamour, we really ought to consider doing something else.

Still Writing will be published in October by Grove Atlantic.

Dani and I will appear together on stage, for a conversation about the writing life—Still Writing/Handling the Truth—at the First Person Arts Festival in November in Philadelphia. Details here. 

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It's Not Love, It's Just Paris/Patricia Engel: Reflections

Anyone who had the privilege of reading Patricia Engel's collection of stories, Vida, knew for sure: a new true writer had emerged, and attention was to be paid. Oh, the sentences, I kept murmuring, as I read. Oh, the heartbreaking sentences. (My thoughts on Vida are here.)

At the BEA two weeks ago, I came home with just three books—Someone by Alice McDermott (the immaculate surprise of that book shared here), Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, and It's Not Love, It's Just Paris by Patricia Engel. Who could need more?

Engel's first novel is the story of an American girl (though indeed, for this is an Engel tale, and Engel is deeply entrenched in many languages and multiple cultures, the heroine is a Colombian American girl) in Paris. Lita del Cielo lives in the "House of Stars" under the care of an aging countess and in the company of other young women with international blood and sure ideas about love. She is a faithful daughter, a skipped-two-grades academic, a girl who wears her one good dress to a safe length below her knees. She is the sort of person who can judge the quality of a friendship by the silence it can withstand, and while the girls in the house go about their notching affairs, Lita waits, ghostwrites term papers for a sustaining fee, helps a young waiter perfect his English. Mostly she watches, and she listens, tries to make sense of the lessons brought to the worn down, still-haughty home of the stars.

Here, for example, Lita is having a conversation with a housemate with whom "you weren't required to respond in order for her to have a full conversation."

"But you see, men are born guilty Women are built to forgive and love and forgive all over again. Men are built for war and because we live in mostly peaceful times, they just turn on themselves. My point is you have to learn to get through life without being sentimental about boys because they are never worth the trouble."

But of course Lita does find a boy—imperfect and mysterious, capable of silence, slow to assume and long to love. He is the son of a notorious politician. His mother is dead and he is ill. He lives by himself near the sea, finds city noise and dust endangering. Lita has only come to Paris for a year. She has come certain that she will return to the family who needs her, but Paris changes everyone and Paris changes Lita.

This is a book filled with incomparable sentences, a book so international in its aura, so mysterious in its trajectory, so veiled and so specific at once. Yearning is a universal language. Paris just after Princess Diana's death, in a house of many languages, through the eyes of an unchastened soul, is resolutely particular. I read in awe of Engel's ability to bridge so seamlessly between the two—to burrow so deeply into the story itself and to transcend with great swaths of sudden truth.

My galley is wildly dog-earred. Here, below, one of many additional passages that I loved:

And then I understood that between us there was a common spore of isolation that grew in my overpopulated home and within his quiet cottage. We were young but we'd both grown well into our loneliness. We were the kind of lonely that wasn't ashamed to be so. A lonely without self-penitence.

It's Not Love, It's Just Paris is set to launch on the same day—August 6th—as Handling the Truth, a book birthday we also share with Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya, whose San Francisco I've observed from the balcony of his home in the hills.

I'm thinking cake. In the meantime, huge congratulations to Patricia Engel, for doing it, again.

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