But unlike writing a novel, I’m letting the reader know what I’m doing: fleshing out the things that happened, using what I know about the people and places involved. So when I portray my father on a train to Philadelphia, or I imagine my mother in the waiting room at the Farris Institute for Parenthood, which no longer exists, I’m imagining, not remembering, what the room looks and sounds and smells like, what the people in the scene are feeling and thinking and saying. I wasn’t there for many of the scenes that I depict in detail. That said, I employed the tactics of fiction as I have in my other nonfiction books. There’s nothing fictional about this book in any way. Which genre did you feel like you were working in with Inheritance?ĭANI SHAPIRO: I definitely did not feel like I was writing a novel. MEREDITH MARAN: Inheritance has been called a genealogical mystery, a detective story, a meditation on the meaning of identity, a lived novel, a memoir. Just before the launch of her multi-city book tour, in the midst of a deluge of pre-pub interviews with the likes of The Wall Street Journal and The Today Show, Dani Shapiro made time for an animated, forthright conversation with LARB.

Other difficulties, other complexities would certainly have emerged.

But we can never know what lies at the end of the path not taken. What if I had always known that the reason I looked different, and felt different, was in fact because I was different? It would be easy to fantasize that this would have been better. “If my father wasn’t my father, who was I? I felt cut loose from everything I had ever understood about myself.” By the end of the book, Shapiro has come to some measure of peace with her new reality. “ If my father wasn’t my father, who was my father?” she writes. In Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, her most powerful work to date, she uses those tools to survive - and share - the earthquake of her truth. In her writing, and in the workshops she teaches at schools and spiritual centers around the world, Shapiro fuses the drive to write with the drive for a spiritual home. The best-selling author of four memoirs and five novels, Shapiro’s life and work are fueled by a spiritual quest whose origins lie in her Orthodox Jewish upbringing. Since both of Shapiro’s parents were deceased, uncovering the mystery of her origins required rigorous sleuthing, as well as internal fortitude.įortunately, Dani Shapiro was well equipped for both.

Within days, Shapiro and her journalist husband had located the man who was - a man to whom her resemblance was as stunning as the revelation. In return, she received the shocking information that the adored man who had raised her was not, in fact, her biological father. IN 2016, ON A WHIM, Dani Shapiro spit into a vial and sent it to a DNA testing service.

Inheritance dani shapiro reviews