THE WD INTERVIEW Dani Shapiro
Dani Shapiro is that rare kind of writer whose novels and memoirs are doors that lead into the deepest rooms of readers’ own lives. Her most recent work is the instant New York Times bestselling memoir, Inheritance, which has garnered such high acclaim from both critics and readers, it’s becoming increasingly rare to meet anyone in the book world who hasn’t read it.
I first met Dani at The Lotos Club in New York City for tea and to chat about life and writing. Inheritance has challenged Shapiro in myriad ways, not only as a memoirist but also as a person. In 2016, after submitting her DNA to a genealogy website, Shapiro learned that the late father she loved so much was not her biological father. This is where Inheritance begins.
I admire how you shuffle between your life in the present day, and the past—as though attempting to settle everything with the reader as a sort of witness. Was this a conscious structural choice? How do you actively and so generously include the reader, and why do you think it’s important?
It has been my instinct for my last few books to actively include the reader. In Hourglass and Devotion, I used white space very consciously as a way of allowing readers to make connections themselves, to be given the satisfaction, even pleasure, of discovering meaning, rather than it being handed to them. I want the reader to invest, to work a little—though there’s a fine line between working a little and working too hard. I don’t aim to frustrate the reader. I aim to reach out a hand and say, “Come with me. Trust me.”
In thinking about [the book’s] structure (after, I should say, writing an unwieldy first 200 pages which I threw away completely and started
