'Inheritance' Investigates A Family Secret, With Self-Discovery At The Core
Dani Shapiro, at age 54, is shocked to learn that the man she thought was her biological father wasn't a blood relative. Her memoir, a quest for the truth, reads like an emotional detective story.
Many literary memoirs involve surmounting hurdles or uncovering family secrets in pursuit of self-discovery.
Twenty years ago, Dani Shapiro's first memoir, fell into the we-shall-overcome group. At its core is the mid-1980s car crash that killed her father and seriously shattered her mother. The accident slammed into 23-year-old Shapiro at a time when her life had veered dangerously off-course: She was a coke-snorting, heavy-drinking college dropout, the "kept" mistress of a friend's stepfather. The tragedy galvanized her to clean
