Lacuna

Growing up, Dani Shapiro never felt like she truly belonged to the orthodox Jewish community she lived in. All around her were kids who dressed and prayed and looked alike … and then, there was Dani — a fair-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed little Jewish girl.

Dani spent much of her early writing career authoring fictional stories about secrets within families, not knowing that she would soon learn her own family had a big secret: Dani herself.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Dani Shapiro: “Lacuna manuscripts: a missing piece of text. Lacuna music: an extended silence in a piece of music. Lacuna linguistics: a lexical gap in a language. Lacuna law: the lack of law or of a legal source addressing a situation. Lacuna histology: a small space containing an osteocyte in bone.”
There’s an uneasy sense a person gets when something is missing. That gap in the text, in music, in language, in law … in bone?

We like when the pieces fit together, and we like when we have them all laid out neatly before us. And I know that “puzzle” is a lazy metaphor to use, but I’m going to use it many times in this episode because I love puzzles, and I am not great at them. But I know we like when pieces fit together — in music, in podcasts, in puzzles, in LIFE.

And today’s episode is about that gap, that chasm, that open and unfilled space, and what happens when it finally all comes together.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.”

And this is Dani Shapiro.

Dani Shapiro: I remember so little about my childhood, I think in part because I didn’t have any witnesses to it. And the two witnesses I did have to it were my parents. And I was, like, lost to myself, didn’t have a real sense of my two feet on the ground. Like, I can’t summon what it felt like to be me as a child, and that’s been always true for me. I can remember certain things, or have certain flashes of images, but not inhabit what it was to be me, you know, growing up in this house in New Jersey with my two parents and a lot of quiet, and, you know, a sense that there were secrets kind of hanging in the air, and there was just so much that I knew I didn’t know. And I … but you know that feeling, Nora, like that feeling of being lost to oneself. Feeling like other kids had a sense of their families and a sense of belonging and a sense of their lives and of fitting in and of just having a right to be there, I guess I would say. I didn’t … I didn’t have that. I did have a feeling, somehow, of a kind of specialness, because I was in one way or another, always being told that I was somehow special. But, you know, specialness in isolation is a very strange and painful place to be. What does it even mean?

Nora McInerny: Mm-Hmm. That’s such a good way to put it, because what does it mean to be special? You’re only special in comparison to something. But if you don’t know what you’re being compared to, what good does it do you?
Dani Shapiro: Yeah. I felt like a hothouse flower. Like, I would die under the wrong conditions. I was very shivered over by both of my parents and by really all of the adults around me who were related to me, you know, really on my mother’s side. But the feeling that there was something very fragile about me and that I might just kind of vanish. And that and that contributed to that sense of specialness, you know? Like a very-delicate-but-perhaps-not-prepared-for-the-elements-in-some-way kind of little human being.
Dani was the only child of an orthodox Jewish couple. She went to a yeshiva — a Jewish day school — from kindergarten to seventh grade. All around her were kids who dressed and prayed and looked alike. And … there was Dani.
Dani Shapiro: I was very fair, sort of pink-cheeked and blue-eyed, and very delicate looking. And a lot was made of that all the time, both by my family and by other adults around me and by teachers and by other children. It really was commented on all the time that I didn’t look like I was Jewish and that I didn’t look like I belonged, and that somehow the message underneath all of that was, “You’re not one of us, and you’re from someplace else entirely.” You know, there was just this feeling of, like, complete and utter, being kind of alien, like an alien hothouse flower creature. I think what made it even more complicated is that I knew that it was meant as a compliment, but it somehow felt like an insult, because I adored my father. I felt very much like being part of his world and being part of his family was a tethering, kind of rooted thing. I very much wanted to feel that way. And I didn’t feel that way about my mother. I was not connected to her. Such a strange thing for a daughter to feel about a mother, but we really were kind of like a total mismatch. And I tried. I loved her. She was my mother. But I didn’t relate to her, and I didn’t feel that I was like her at all. I felt like I was like my dad, and I wanted to be part of his family. And so when somebody would say to me, “You don’t look Jewish,” or, “You don’t, you don’t look like your cousins or you don’t look like you belong in this group of people,” it would feel insulting to me or hurtful. But I did understand that what they were saying is, “Oh, you’re so pretty. Oh, you’re so fair. Oh, you, you know, you look like ….” you know, I mean, in Judaism, and it’s a really … it’s tricky territory, because there’s kind of a self-hating aspect of that. You know, there’s the realm of the shiksa is the word that is always used. And, you know, Jewish boys are raised to kind of stay away from but revere, you know, the shiksa goddess, you know, see: all of Woody Allen, see: Philip Roth. And that’s what I looked like. And that was something that I was supposed to be flattered by, but instead felt kind of that it was … I didn’t understand it, and it was hurtful to me in some way.
It is natural to want to fit in, especially when fitting in means fitting into your family and into your culture. And people who are lonely, who want to fit in, do not need to be told the ways that they don’t fit. And when it is pointed out, whether it’s that your shoes are the wrong brand or your hair is the wrong color, it wouldn’t be surprising if you wanted to throw your shoes in the trash or grab a box of hair dye. But when the thing that doesn’t fit is just YOU, in general, when there’s no way to chameleon yourself into the right form, that feeling can just boomerang back into you — THWAP! — and it’s your problem now.

And not fitting in is Dani’s problem.

Dani Shapiro: I absolutely internalized it and felt that there must be something very wrong with me. And that is something that I carried with me through my childhood, and, you know, I don’t know that I wore it on the surface. When I’ve encountered people who I went to grade school with or I went to high school with, they didn’t see me that way, which I find completely fascinating. They saw me as somehow confident or somehow, you know, are surprised by the degree to which I felt like I didn’t belong. I think I also had a pretty good, a pretty solid mask or, you know, a veneer. You know, I didn’t wear any of this on my sleeve. There weren’t the external things that sometimes happen with kids. You know, I didn’t show my anxiety. I didn’t have, you know, tics. It was all much more subtle than that. And I didn’t talk to anybody about it. I wasn’t somebody who spoke a lot about my feelings. I kind of buried them, and they just became more and more toxic to me. I found this whole box of many, many things that my mother saved, and it was, like, the most radioactive box. And there was this one list that my mother had clearly had me make, and I signed it, and it’s like a confession. It has a title, and the title is “Six Reasons of Why I Should Be Happy,” and I can’t quote you the whole thing. But on the list were things like: “I have a dog. I have a mother who drives me everywhere. I have everything I need.” And this was clearly an assignment that I was given, of, you know, coming up with reasons why I should be happy. And the thing that was so striking about them, and it’s like in a child’s handwriting, I couldn’t have been more than, you know, 6 years old, 7 years old. You know, “I have piano lessons.” And it just felt like I was almost being coached like. “Here are reasons why you should be happy,” as opposed to: Let’s understand what’s really going on.
Nora McInerny: Yeah. Let’s explore why you could be sad.
Dani Shapiro: Right. Right. But it was never OK to be sad, to be upset, to be angry. And so I think I really learned that veneer. I learned that there was a kind of composure that I could- and this wasn’t conscious. I mean, let me just be, you know, really clear. This was not something I sat down and thought, “How do I appear composed?” It was more like composure was survival, that if I could find a way to sort of move through the world and move through my family in a kind of composed way and not reveal my sorrow, my guilt, my fear, my anxiety, that that was going to be, you know, the the way through for me.
It is a way through, but not the healthiest way through. Because that sorrow, that guilt, that fear, that anxiety … they roil beneath her composed surface. Dani does all of the right things, in the right order, right up until she’s sent to college. And anyone who knew me at Xavier University from 2000-2005 can tell you that this is a period in life where many of us, many of us, try on different versions of ourselves, like paper dolls, trying to see what fits, what will stick. That feeling she’s different, that she doesn’t belong, it stays unsaid, and it leaks out sideways as she flails through her teens and twenties.

But Dani isn’t simply doing keg stands in the basement of a former morgue and falling out of a stolen grocery cart on the way home like some people on today’s podcast. She’s unraveling in a very New York City in the ‘80s kind of way. She has an affair with her college roommate’s married father. She gets into acting. Both of her parents die when she’s still in her early 20s, and then, she’s not alone like she was as a little girl in that big house in New Jersey. She’s alone.

Lauren Goff wrote in the novel Fates & Furies, “Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.” The death of Dani’s parents become the fuel that propels her out of that affair, out of acting, and back into college. And then grad school, into a career as a novelis, building worlds and stories and characters and finding the right place for every piece. Dani falls in love and gets married and builds a career and has a son, and together their family of three are their own universe, far from the world where she grew up feeling simultaneously pressed between the slides of a microscope and gazing through the lens at her community.

Here, in this stone farmhouse in Connecticut, many decades removed from the little girl who was forced to write a gratitude list, with a list of published books and essays and articles a mile long … she is home.
Dani Shapiro: I’m 54 years old. I’m a writer of many books, a professor of writing. I’m married for 20-plus years. I have a 17-year-old son and have really built a life I love and am genuinely content, to the degree that contentment is possible. There is always a sense that I have that somehow not everything clicks into place, not everything makes sense. There is some kind of subtle disconnect that I’ve learned how to live with. It’s just the way it is. But I am the happiest and the most fulfilled that I’ve ever been in my life.
We’ll be right back.
—
Dani Shapiro: I live in rural Connecticut in a house I love, you know, with my husband and my son and a dog. And my husband, who’s also a writer and a journalist and a filmmaker — he’s a former foreign correspondent, so he really has the journalistic instinct — and he’s also an early, an early adopter of technology, always kind of early to the party on all things technological.
Dani’s husband, Michael, is about to be an early adopter of at-home DNA tests. They’re ubiquitous now — I’m pretty sure you can get them at Target — but at this point, these tests are just gaining steam. And all across America, we were THRILLED to be able to prove that actually you SHOULD kiss me, because I AM Irish, or to finally know our heritage after a private adoption as a child, or to just, ya know, hand over our personal DNA to a giant data company! Whatever!
Michael and Dani already know everything there is to know about their own heritage, but it could be an interesting experiment, so Michael tells Dani, “Hey, I ordered some of those DNA tests. Wanna do one?”
Dani Shapiro: And I could so easily have said, no. To this day, I marvel that I said yes. It was just in the spirit of like, “Oh, what the hell?” You know, that the testing companies bring their prices down every year right around the holidays. And it was not a big ticket item. And I thought, “Well, you know, OK?” So he sent away for two of these tests, and they arrived, and as many people know, you have to spit into a plastic vial. They sat on my kitchen counter for weeks, actually, because they were that unimportant. And then at some point, one night after dinner, he, you know, opened mine and he told me to spit in the vial, and I did. And I felt sort of vaguely ridiculous and like, why am I doing this? And how much spit do you need? But I did it, and he sealed mine up, and he sealed his up and sent them back off, you know, to be evaluated. And a while later, I don’t know, six weeks, eight weeks later, one night we were watching TV after dinner, just sitting there, and he had his laptop sitting on his lap as he often does. And he said, “Oh, your results are in.” And I didn’t even know what he was talking about. It wasn’t like there was any sense I have had at all that I was waiting for these results. But he opened my results and started looking at them. I wasn’t even looking at them. I was incurious. And he was like, “Huh?” I was like, “Huh, what?” And he said, “Well, like, it says here, maybe I’m reading this wrong, but it seems to be saying here that you are 50 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi.” And I was like, “Well, that’s ridiculous. That’s not right. I mean, I’m probably 99.9 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi.” Both of my parents are from that background. And he’s like, “Yeah, it’s weird.” But I just thought, like, there were no, like, even faint warning bells. I just thought there must be some mistake — testing company must, you know, have mixed up my results or gotten it wrong, or maybe all people are a little of this and a little of that. And we’re just learning that now. I just had no … nothing. But it actually did for my husband. I think it set off a little bit of his journalistic kind of “Hhmm.” Also, science. I mean, he was like, “Yeah, the science of this is pretty clear. They don’t really make mistakes.” He didn’t say that. But when you take one of these tests, you can opt in, and most people do, to see other people that you share DNA with that you’re related to genetically. And almost everybody opts in. And I did. And a little while later, maybe a week later, Michael, my husband, I’m sitting there having tea with a friend, and he comes in to where we’re sitting and interrupts and says, “You have a first cousin on your Ancestry.com page.” And I was like, “Yeah, I have lots of first cousins.” And he said, “No, no, no. Like, you have a first cousin who isn’t your first cousin, I mean, you don’t know, who’s on here.” And he points to this icon. And I’m basically, my mood at that moment is irritated. He’s interrupting my tea date with this, like, what do you mean, first cousin? I want to just finish having my tea with my friend. And he points out this little blue icon. Blue for boys, actually, blue for boys and pink for girls.
Nora McInerny: Yeah, the only way we could possibly know.
Dani Shapiro: That’s right. That’s right. There’s no, you know, there’s no yellow or no lime green.
Nora McInerny: No, no, no.
Dani Shapiro: So there’s a little blue icon, and it only has initials on it. It doesn’t have a name. It just has initials. And it’s not somebody that I know. But I, at that point, I’m certain that the testing company has just simply mixed up my results with the results of somebody else, who is wondering why this first cousin isn’t appearing on their page, and there must be a mix-up. Still, no, no alarm bells, no danger, danger feeling at all. But my husband starts exploring this a little bit more, and he sees that there is a name connected to the first cousin, the first cousin’s initials. There’s actually a name. And he starts kind of digging into that name and he’s not really getting anywhere. And finally, he says to me, “You know who could really get to the bottom of this?”
Michael’s pitch is to reach out to Susie, Dani’s much older half-sister … her father’s daughter from an earlier marriage. The two of them had not grown up together, but Susie was someone that Dani had always admired. She was intelligent and sophisticated, part of a world that was wildly different from the one that Dani grew up in.
Dani Shapiro: I kind of revered her in a lot of ways. We had not been close for a number of years. Susie and my mother hated each other, which was something that always left me feeling of a very divided loyalty. And after my mother died, we hadn’t talked in a few years. But Michael said to me, “Why don’t you reach out to Susie? Do you think she’s done a DNA test?” And I remembered that she had told me years earlier, she being an even more of an early adopter adopter of technology than than my husband is, that she had done one of the early, like, back when it was pretty unusual DNA home tests, mostly for health reasons, wanting to know if she had any preexisting conditions or, you know, any genetic diseases that she could know about. So I sent an email. This is now happening very, very quickly. It’s nighttime. We had been out to dinner with friends. I had told them the whole story about how there’s this crazy thing with this first cousin. And the friends we were out with later told me they went home and said, “Dani doesn’t know what’s about to happen to her.” Because Dani really didn’t know what was about to happen to her. I still thought this is just kind of nutty stuff.
Nora McInerny: Yeah. This is your husband just like, chasing a rabbit hole. You’re like, “Are you bored? Are you between projects, bud? God, get a life.”
Dani Shapiro: Yeah, totally, totally. Just a feeling of like … this is, this is just too much. This is like a conspiracy theory, almost. But I did reach out to Susie. I sent her an email asking if my memory was correct, that she had in fact done DNA testing. And if so, did she have any information regarding that? And I heard back from her within an hour that, yes, she had done DNA testing, and that she was actually away — she was at a TED conference in Canada — but that she would look on her computer that she had with her to see if she had her results with her. And another email saying she indeed did. And there’s a site that exists that she knew about and that Michael also knew about that’s called GEDmatch. And GEDmatch exists entirely for the purpose of comparing DNA resultS. So you can upload a kit number, you know, your name isn’t on it or anything like that, just your kit number of your DNA results, and the number of someone else’s DNA results, and see how closely you are related. And that’s when everything went kind of at warp speed. So Susie sent her kit number. Michael knew about this technology. We were leaving the next day on a trip. I was upstairs packing and putting everything in its proper place. All of a sudden I hear Michael, like, running up the stairs with his laptop. And I think the moment that I saw his face, I began to hear warning bells, because he looked … that kind of wide-open look I’d only seen on his face a couple of times. I saw it on his face the moment our son was born. I saw it on his face I came home one day and my mother had been terminally ill, but like, he was standing on the porch, and I looked at his face and I knew my mother had died. I had seen it on his face in moments of like, huge before-and-after kind of moments. Good and, you know, the most beautiful and the most terrible. And what I saw on his face was that. And he sat down next to me and he pointed to this whole series of numbers on his computer screen. And I was like, “I don’t know what this means.” And he pointed to a line and he said, “Right there.” And there was a series of letters, a series of numbers. And I said, “What is that?” And he said, “That’s your most recent common ancestor with Susie.” And I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “You’re not sisters. You’re not related. You’re not related.” And I was like, “Well, what do you mean? Like, no kind of sisters?” Because, you know, we had always very studiously referred to each other as half-sisters, something that I’ve later discovered that in many families happier than our family people don’t feel the need to do. You know, you can be step-siblings, half-siblings. If a family is kind of healthy and intact and feels good about each other, you just are sisters or brothers, you’re siblings. It’s not like that. But it had always been like that for us. So I said, “No kind of siblings?” And he said, “No. You’re not related.” And at that moment, I knew what that meant. Like, all of the noise in my head, all of the … I guess one would have to say denial, all of that vanished, and I knew that it meant that if we did not share a father, that it meant that our father was not my father. I never entertained the thought, “Oh, well, maybe he’s my father and not Susie’s father.” I knew instantly, like in this deep way, like, “Ohhhhh, we don’t … my father wasn’t my biological father.”
Dani’s father was not her biological father.

Dani’s parents saw a fertility doctor when her mother was trying to conceive, and, as was the custom in the ‘50s and the ‘60s, the doctor mixed donor sperm — from a young medical student, in this case — with her father’s sperm, a way of preserving a patient’s ego while also giving them what their heart so desperately wanted. It is … not great! Not great! Not a great practice! Definitely wouldn’t happen now! But it happened then.
Dani Shapiro: I think my parents were both kind people. I think they are decent people. I think that each of them, in their own ways, were doing the best they could with what they had been given. But I think particularly my mother, when she looked at me, from the time that I was born, when she looked at me, she looked at a secret that she was keeping, or something that she was very afraid of. Something she didn’t want to think about. She was keeping, I believe, on some level, a secret from herself, that she buried so deeply. She so desperately just wanted me to be, you know, both of my parents’ biological child and forget that that whole thing ever had happened. But of course it had happened, and pushing it away doesn’t make it go away. And you know, I used to wonder why when I would look at my mother, her eyes — all my life as a child, I do remember feeling this way — her eyes were always darting. She had very jiggly eyes. I don’t know how else to put it. They were always moving very, very quickly, not like glancing from side to side, but literally like there was a little earthquake going on in her eyes, like a little seismic quality. And it always kind of disturbed me. And I didn’t understand it, but I think I do now. I think that that’s how she looked at me. It is that I was always kind of creating a little seismic explosion inside of her, whether she was aware of it or not.
This secret was one her parents had assumed would stay with them in their graves, not be resurrected by a science that was unimaginable at the time.

But the secret is out. And the secret — this whole time — was Dani. Dani, who thought she was 99.9 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi, is actually part English, French, German, Irish, and Scandinavian.

Dani Shapiro: There’s this beautiful Joan Didion line about feeling like she’s navigating the world on a borrowed passport. I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s one of my favorite of her descriptions, or her sentences, is because that was the feeling. It’s like, “I don’t have a right to be here.” And one of the things that I’ve thought a great deal about and I probably will think about for the rest of my life. And it’s something that a lot of people who have had experiences not unlike my own report feeling, which is, you know, people who have had a huge secret that has to do with their identity kept from them, is growing up with that feeling of like being having a borrowed passport. Of being an interloper. Of, you know, again, the not-belonging. And it’s something I think that is intuited, and that is kind of like, sort of a deeply buried feeling. But I think it also comes from the fact that there are parents, or a parent in some cases, who have kept that kind of magnitude of a secret from a child. So that in fact, the child becomes the secret.

This is a stunning, dizzying, absolute wrecking ball of a revelation. And Dani does what she has done for decades: She writes. She writes about this. She pulls it all apart and puts it back together and tries to make sense of it. And the full story is detailed in her best-selling memoir Inheritance, which you probably have read but if you haven’t, absolutely should, but … I’ve been reading Dani Shapiro since forever. Hers were some of the first memoirs to grab me by the throat and pin me to my chair until I was finished. I actually can’t overstate what reading Slow Motion — the memoir of her 20s — did for me in my 20s, when I was spinning out and wondering if I would ever just stop.

Dani has her own podcast, “Family Secrets,” which is … you’ll never guess what it’s about, actually! You’ll never guess! And she knows that every day, there are people having their past and their present and their future rearranged without their consent, learning truths that turn the puzzle pieces of their life into one of the boxes that’s always in rental cabins, where literally none of the pieces are from the same puzzle but you don’t realize that until you’ve spent three hours trying to find edge pieces and none of them fit.

Lots of people go through this! But most people aren’t writers.
Nora McInerny: What you have that other people don’t know is this record of your life. It might be … maybe the only good thing about being a writer is having so much documentation not just of what happened, but of how it felt.
Dani Shapiro: You know, people always ask me when I knew that I was a writer. And I think, I mean, I was always a writer. I was always. If a writer is someone who has the compulsion to write in order to figure out what she knows, to figure out what’s going on inside of her, that was always my tool for self-examination or self-illumination or understanding anything about the world that I lived in. I didn’t know that I could grow up and actually, you know, make books, write books, as what I do in the world. I had no idea that that was possible. But from the time that I did, from the time that I first started trying to tell stories that other people would read, from practically word one, my subject matter, my themes really so often had to do with secrets in a family. And I didn’t know why. It’s just what I did. I really didn’t look too carefully at my motivations for why I was writing what I was writing, because I was almost superstitious about doing that. It’s like taking a car apart and then suddenly the engine doesn’t work anymore. I didn’t … I was willfully not wanting to know why I was compelled or even obsessed to explore what I wanted to explore. And what I wanted to explore was almost inevitably secrets within a family, the corrosive power of secrets and what we do to each other in the name of keeping secrets or having secrets or having secrets kept from us. And, you know, earlier, when I said that there was this subtle disconnect that I always felt as a child, I think that the subtle disconnect ran directly along the fault lines of what was beneath those secrets. I mean writers, you know, we never want to revisit our earlier work. It’s like hearing your own voice or seeing, you know, seeing pictures of your … it’s like, it’s kind of vaguely embarrassing. It’s, you know, the self that wrote that book has long since been left in the dust and hopefully has been both cellularly and intellectually and philosophically and emotionally and psychologically evolved into the self that writes the next one. And then that self gets less left in the dust for the self who can write the next one. I mean, I think it’s- it’s true of writers. It’s true of all of us, that, you know, we are hopefully constantly evolving and that we are many different versions of ourselves over the course of a lifetime.
But Dani did go back. And so did I. To all of her previous works, except for her first novel, which she did not have a copy of, and neither did I, until I unearthed one in the depths of the internet long after we had this interview. Dani went back to see what she knew before she knew.

We’ll be right back.

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Dani Shapiro: I am holding in my hands the most, the most mortifying paperback of Playing With Fire, my first novel, which was first published in hardcover. But I don’t think I have any. So I am holding the sort of pale pink paperback of Playing With Fire.
Dani Shapiro [reading excerpt]: “I think of my Christmas card displayed across the nation, my 6-year-old Scandinavian self, my father receiving phone calls from friends in Boston, Richmond, Phoenix, Minneapolis. ‘Joe, do you know that Lucy is?’ They would trail off, not knowing what to say, as if it was some sort of sin. Daddy would laugh, ‘Wishing you a Merry Christmas?’ It was a story he loved. ‘Imagine,’ I can almost hear him say, ‘Jacob Greenberg’s granddaughter, a regular little shiksa.’” [End excerpt.]
Nora McInerny: And you didn’t know you’re Scandinavian when you wrote that.
Dani Shapiro: Nope.

That’s fiction, but the story of that Christmas photo is real. Little Jewish Dani was a model in a Christmas ad. A little taste of fame that her mother was exceptionally proud of. But even in her earliest memoir — written after her parents have died — there’s that sense she had in her childhood, the sense of not quite fitting, hints that now look like clues.
Nora McInerny: I have so much from Slow Motion underlined. So I’ve got the paperback from 1999 that, Dani, I bought from a library sidewalk sale when I couldn’t afford books in New York. I was so excited to have this book. OK, OK. If you go to page 70, at the bottom.
Dani Shapiro [Reading excerpt]: “I rummaged through her purse for a compact. Rummaging through my mother’s purse is nothing new to me. As a child, my desire to find out the real truth, which I also defined as whatever I didn’t know, began with my mother’s handbag. The romance of little slips of paper, contents of wallets, to-do lists, lipsticks.” [End excerpt]
Dani Shapiro: When I think of myself as a child, even though I can’t fully put myself back there, it was always as this sort of, you know, like Nancy Drew of my own life, constantly looking for clues. I mean, I rummaged through everything. I rummaged through her desk drawers. I rummaged through her papers. But there was something in, you know, she had beautiful clothes and she had beautiful jewelry, and a lot of everything, like a lot of, you know, it wouldn’t be a perfume bottle, like what I might have on my vanity. There would be dozens of them. And it was as if I could … as if I knew that she was holding something, that maybe these objects could clue me in or give me a sense of what was missing, what I didn’t know. But it was obsessive, and it was wordless. I wasn’t … I couldn’t have told you why I was doing it. It was like I was sleepwalking when I would do these things.”
Dani Shapiro [reading excerpt]: “‘My side of the family heals well,’ my mother tells me proudly. ‘Your father’s family scars like nothing you’ve ever seen, but we are survivors. We snap right back as if nothing’s happened.’ She tells me this as if I were not also my father’s daughter when the fact is I have inherited that particular trait from him. I am not as physically strong as my mother and I don’t bounce back as if nothing has happened. If I had been in the passenger seat of the Audi that night, I doubt I would have lived.” [End excerpt]
Dani Shapiro [reading excerpt]: “The room swims. All my life, I’ve felt like I’ve done something wrong. When I see a police car on the highway, even if I’m not speeding. I think I’ll be pulled over. And when walking through metal detectors in airports, I imagine that the alarm will sound, and a gun or bomb will be pulled out from my luggage.” [End excerpt]
Dani Shapiro: Doesn’t everybody feel that way? [laughs]
Nora McInerny: “Are you telling me … you’re telling me that that one’s just me?”
Dani Shapiro: Oh, wait! [laughs]
Dani Shapiro [reading excerpt]: “Many years from now, when my father is a skeleton in the ground, when my mother strides the streets of New York City with her arms swinging, when Lenny Klein is reduced to a colorful if painful story in my mind, there will occasionally be a day when I feel the fear. The knot inside me will unravel, and suddenly my heart will pound uncontrollably. My palms will dampen, and my ears will begin to ring. Wherever I am, I will be desperate to escape. The urge will be to run as far as I can as fast as I can away from my own body. Like a tidal wave, it will come out of nowhere, this nameless, faceless terror. I will try every so-called panacea, every cure, meditation, homeopathy, behavioral therapy, but nothing will make it go away. Not really. Sometimes I will be lulled into thinking that it’s gone for good. But then years will pass, and suddenly it will be there again, haunting me like an old lover. It will return to remind me that I am my father’s daughter, that I inherited his terror along with my mother’s will to survive.” [End excerpt]
Dani Shapiro: Ooof. You know, the … I feel in some ways, in many ways, like an object lesson in nature vs. nurture. And I feel such sadness and compassion for the young woman who wrote those words and the still a younger woman herself, you know, that she was writing about. Because I was always looking for reasons. You know, why did I have that terrible anxiety? At that point that I wrote Slow Motion, I was very much in that place. I believed that I came by it genetically. My father was an extremely phobic, anxious person who would suddenly, you know, in the middle of dinner, at the dinner table, check his pulse. I mean, his father dropped dead of a stroke, and I think he was always afraid that that was going to happen to him. And he monitored himself. He was acutely aware, sort of hyper-vigilant about his own heartbeat, literally. And I was laboring under false information. I mean, did I grow up to be anxious at that stage of my life because I grew up watching a father who took his pulse at the dinner table? Very possibly that that was part of it. But it was not something I inherited genetically from him. And yet that story, the story that I did, became important to me. Youknow, people who are raised in families where they are biologically connected to their parents never really have cause to unpack any of this or think about it, because it’s just the way it is, you know? You kind of understand, “Oh, I walk like that or I sound like that or, you know, I share this sensibility with,” or, you know, there’s like a wider net that actually really does have to do with biology and genetics. And then people who are born into families that are raised by families that they’re not biologically related to, but they know that, also, know, “Well, I don’t look like my father or my mother,” or, “I don’t have these traits in common with my parents who are raising me, my adoptive parents or my, you know, my social parents. But I know why.” I’m not saying that that’s easy, but I think it’s true that there is that knowledge and that knowledge becomes woven into identity. But when you don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know, then I mean, it’s become really interesting for me to have to go to doctors appointments now in the last five or six years, where I have to actually go, “You know, I need to revise my medical history. Father: living. You know? Family history, you know, pretty, pretty darn healthy.” As opposed to, I mean, my father died when I was 23 years old in a car accident, but not according to a physician’s interests. You know, a physician’s interest is: My father is living and 80-something years old and in good health. So it’s a very, very, you know, I read this and I just see the burdens that I was carrying and the desire to make narrative. You know, and I think to go back to the subtle disconnect, I was always trying to create narratives that would make sense of myself and would make sense of where I came from. And I was always coming up short, which I think is, in a way, a great gift, because it propelled me book after book to try to fill in the pieces of the puzzle that I didn’t understand, all the while not knowing that there was kind of this essential piece, you know? That I was sort of whistling in the dark in some way, which also is why I feel now, so … I mean, I don’t remotely disavow my earlier books. I kind of love them as like, artifacts of my unconscious. And I stand by them, and, you know, and I know people care about them as books in their own right. But I feel like I’ve been liberated in the last five years by knowing a much fuller truth, so that the kind of digging that I was doing, I feel like the world opened up to me, and I finished, in a way, a lifelong project when I wrote Inheritance because I finally, like, why the turn from novels to memoir? You know, you started reading me with Slow Motion. Most people did. But there were three novels before Slow Motion that were like, my baby novels that were my like, learning how to write in a public way. But there’s a reason why those books are out of print. They’re out of print because I was being led around, I was being, you know, when walk down the street sometimes and you see a dog walking a person. But the feeling in a literary sense, in a creative sense, that I began to have, and it’s why I wrote Slow Motion was the dog was walking me. My unconscious material was in charge of me, not me in charge of it, which, you know, any novelist will tell you, that’s tricky territory. You never want to be in full charge of your unconscious material because then you know, there’s no magic. But I was really, really not in control. And beginning with Slow Motion. I felt like I was beginning to be more and more in control. And I do think that that’s true. But I really veered into the territory of memoir as a writer, and I wrote two more novels that I think are good novels and where I definitely felt like I was writing in a more mature way and more in control of my material. But then I went back to memoir. I wrote my memoir, Devotion, and then I wrote, Still Writing. And all the while I kept on thinking, why? I didn’t set out to be a memoirist. Why did I return to the form again and again? And the image that I always have when I think of myself during all of those years is like I was literally digging, like, digging on my knees in the ground with a shovel, and I would dig, dig, dig. And I would make a nice, you know, some kind of nice, big hole with like, you know, inelegant metaphor, but like a pile of dirt, you know, it was kid of a pretty big pile. But I would not have hit, I would not have found the thing that I was digging for. I would have approximated finding the thing that I was digging for, but I hadn’t found it. And then one day, because of this random recreational DNA testing, suddenly I’m like there and I’m on my knees and I’m digging. And like, my shovel hits the fucking black box. My shovel just hits this metal thing. And inside it is like the story of literally my existence.
Nora McInerny: Everything that wouldn’t fit in your mom’s purse.
Dani Shapiro: Everything that wouldn’t fit in my mom’s purse. Exactly. Or in her jewelry box, her in her closet or in, you know, the rooms of the, you know, the home that I grew up in, that was like a kind of, you know, wax museum, where I’ve described it that way in in my writing where, you know, look too closely and it doesn’t add up. Or look too closely, and it’s not real.
In Dani’s second memoir — detailing her infant son’s diagnosis with a rare seizure disorder — you can sense Dani trying to look more closely, not quite knowing what she’s even looking for.
Dani Shapiro [reading excerpt]: “No wonder I had been running as hard and as fast as I could. Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me. Fear, anger, grief, despair and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students in the quiet and the extra hours. I was forced to ask the question and to listen carefully to the answer. I was lonely for myself.” [end excerpt]
Nora McInerny: Now, I’m not saying all of your writing — you deserve fear, anger, grief, despair over losing your parents and having your child be diagnosed with a very rare seizure disorder that he just through the eye of a needle, like, escaped from — but does that feel like something else to you when you read it?
Dani Shapiro: I think what I’m most struck by is the loneliness. Because all those other feelings I could explain as you just did. You know, I had experienced, you know, a great deal of maternal terror and, you know, a fair amount of of loss and grief and trauma in my life at, you know, at a relatively young age and certainly as a young mother, you know, the thing we are all you know so terrified of is, you know, something being very, very wrong with my baby. But the loneliness, that I think about now as something that had to do with not my connection with other people, but with my connection with myself, because, you know, I mean, I think in writing Devotion, I mean, Devotion was such a deep dove for me into it, like when I realized that I was, I was, I felt almost called upon to write this book. I saw the word Devotion before I started writing the book. And I realized what it meant and that I was going to write this book that had to do with my sort of early midlife, spiritual, existential crisis. And I just thought, “Oh shit,” it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do was delve into that, was dive into that, was tune out the world and get very, very quiet and try to tune into, my religious upbringing and what it had meant to me and, you know, and to just go wherever, like, the deep questions took me. And one of the places I think that I came to understand in writing Devotion, but not as deeply as I later understood, was that that feeling of loneliness was something that was kind of endemic to me. I would have diagnosed it at the time as a kind of spiritual malaise like, “Oh, what I’m missing is a connection to a, you know, a greater being, a higher power God.” And perhaps the reason is because so much of that was so much was made of that when I was a child, and it was our way or the highway, it was all or nothing it was believe in, you know, in this God in this way and in this very strict ritualized religious way or not at all. You don’t get to make your own path. So I think I attributed that sense of loneliness to that. But when I read it now, I and again feel sad for the Dani who felt that and who wrote that, because I think it was a deeper feeling. When the very essence of our identity is something that is kept secret from us. I mean, my identity, the stories that I was told from the time that I was a very small child about who I was and where I came from, were not true. They were hidden and secret and obfuscated and pushed into the remotest corners in the hopes that they would disappear. And I think that created in me a kind of void that couldn’t be filled.
Dani Shapiro [Reading excerpt]: “Lacuna geology: a large gap in the stratigraphic record. Lacuna amnesia: psychology, amnesia about a specific event. Petrovsky Lacuna Mathematics: a region where the fundamental solution of a differential equation vanishes.” [end excerpt]
This has been “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” I’m Nora McInerny. Our producer is Marcel Malekebu. Our team is me, Marcel, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Jordan Turgeon, Megan Palmer. Beth Pearlman is our executive producer. Our executives in charge are Lily Kim, Alex Shaffert and Joanne Griffith. We are a production of APM Studios at American Public Media. Our theme music is by Geofrey Lamar Wilson.
I recorded this in the coldest closet of my house. I am so cold.
Oh! If you guys wanna call in, leave comments, questions, concerns, compliments, you can call 612-568-4441 or email [email protected]. Thank you for listening to our show. We appreciate you a lot.
If you haven’t listened to Dani’s podcast, we linked that in the show notes. We also linked her books, including Inheritance, which is brilliant. All of her books are lovely, wonderful and oh my god, her voice. Don’t you want to take a nap in it? That’s what I’ve always said. I want to take a nap in Dani Shapiro’s voice. Okay, bye!