10 Minutes with Dani Shapiro
ANASTASIA STANMEYER
It’s no secret that Dani Shapiro, bestselling novelist, memoirist, and host of the podcast Family Secrets, is an expert at writing about—you guessed it—secrets. Her sixth novel, Signal Fires, a riveting story about a family secret, came out last year. Her fifth memoir, Inheritance, which uncovers her own family secret, was published in 2019. Shapiro has taught at Columbia and NYU and will lead a popular annual writing workshop at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge from December 1 to 3. She and screenwriter husband Michael Maren live in neighboring Litchfield County in a large, inviting, light-filled home filled with—you guessed it again—piles of books, everywhere you look.
How did you discover Kripalu?
I did an author event in 2007 at Hotchkiss Library in Sharon, Connecticut. My memoir Hourglass had recently been published, and I had begun to write Devotion. Sitting next to me was author Stephen Cope. Oh my God. I had been reading his Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. It was in my bag. He was doing a weekend retreat at Kripalu with Sylvia Boorstein—author, psychotherapist, Buddhist teacher—who I hadn’t heard of at the time. I had always wanted to go to Kripalu, so I went. At lunch that first day, I sat next to a woman and said, “Hi, I’m Dani.” She lifted her nametag, which read “Eating in Silence.” Okay, all right, we’ll eat in silence. Feeling burningly uncomfortable, I heard a voice say, “Is this seat taken?” It was Sylvia. Over the course of that weekend, I found my person in Sylvia Boorstein. Our relationship has become one of the most important in my life.
How did you transition from the academic world to Kripalu? If you had told me then that I would be teaching there, I would have thought, “No, I don’t know this kind of teaching.” I’m not a meditation teacher. But I do have a lot to say about the intersection between writing and meditating. Thirty people signed up for my first workshop at Kripalu in 2010. I developed a way of teaching with generative work prompts with sprinklings of meditations designed to enhance the creative process and create a sense of safety and permission. It could be 30 people or 300 people, it will have the same impact. You can feel the energy of all these people in the room, from published authors to those who just want an adventure. It’s a wonderful experience as a teacher.
You also cofounded the Siren-land Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Yes, in 2007. For one week every spring, we take over the spectacular Le Si-renuse hotel. People come from all over the world and form a real community, friendships, marriages, multiple marriages. Some people come to Kripalu, then apply to Sirenland.
The 10th anniversary edition of your book, Still Writing, The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, just came out. Have the perils and pleasures changed for you over the years? A mistake was made on the title page in the original edition, inverting Perils and Pleasures to Pleasures and Perils. I remember thinking, “That is so perfect.” Sometimes the perils are winning, and sometimes the pleasures are winning. But have they changed? They’ve deepened. The pleasures have deepened, and the perils feel like they’ve sort of softened.
You said, “Everything I learned about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.” What is your daily practice? When I’m working on a book, I wake up, make myself a cappuccino, and meditate for around 20 minutes. I don’t look at my phone or emails; I try to keep the outside world at bay for as long as I can so that I can sink into the work without a lot of static. Once I have a foothold in the work for the day, then I can be interrupted.
What would you say to someone who wants to write a memoir but isn't sure how to begin, or if their life is memorable? Memoir is not the story of a whole life, but rather, an inquiry into some aspect of lived experience. Often the desire to write a memoir comes from the need to figure something out, and often that something is painful and confusing. Writing memoir offers the opportunity to shape that experience, to attempt to make a story out of it.
What do you say to people who might be anxious about how others will react to what they write? To worry about how others will react before setting a word down on the page is an act of self-censorship. Write the book. Discover what it is that you know. Until a writer goes into her room, closes the door, and embarks on the process of literary excavation, it’s all merely conjecture. Once you have a manuscript in your hands, it’s time to consider how others will react, and that’s where revision and editing come in.
Is fiction or memoir more important to you? I love working in both genres. One isn’t more important. I wrote my first memoir after writing three novels and thought that’s the only memoir I will ever write. When thoughts started pushing me again in the direction of memoir, no one was more surprised than I was. When I look back now, after having made the discovery that I made, I think I was always digging, in both my fiction and my memoir. From the very beginning, I was writing about secrets and identity and the corrosive power of secrets.
The discovery being that the man who raised you was not your biological father? Yes. He died when I was 23. In 2016, I took a DNA test as a lark. My mother was gone, and people who might help resolve the mystery were elderly. The clock was ticking. My memoir Inheritance tells the story of the discovery as it was unfolding.
What inspired your podcast, Family Secrets? Back to Sylvia Boorstein, who was an early reader of Inheritance. When she told me the story of a family secret of hers, I thought, “I wish there was a way of sharing this.” I pitched the idea of a podcast about family secrets to my publisher, and in 2018, Sylvia and I recorded the first episode in my basement. It’s amazing to me that I’m finishing the ninth season, that’s 90 deep-dive conversations. And I don’t feel that the show has ever repeated itself.
—Laura Mars
Dani Shapiro is leading “The Stories We Carry: Meditation and Writing” on December 1–3 at Kripalu. The program also has a livestream option. kripalu.org