Last year, I read Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance the week it came out. In it, Shapiro finds out through DNA testing that her father was not her biological father, and that she was conceived via artificial insemination using a sperm donor. The book deals with the fallout, as she grapples with issues of identity, truth, and the ethics and implications for donor-conceived children.
Shapiro has been one of my favorite writers since I read Still Writing the previous year and loved her take on the writing life. Her perspective is to play the long game, to take the ebbs and flows of writing because you’re in it for the long haul. As someone who’s been writing for a long time but not necessarily making a lot of outward progress, I find that comforting. There are still many days ahead, plenty to time left and plenty of words.
Maybe that’s what drew me to read more of her work, that her approach wasn’t one of scarcity but one of abundance. What I have is enough: enough time, enough talent, enough love. It’s enough.
That message, the one of enough, gets twisted and corrupted. I’ve immersed myself in the scarcity mindset, convincing myself that time is running out and I’m wasting my life. The last thing I want is to not live up to my potential, to have squandered my days without really doing anything (though, of course, I’m using my potential every day, just not always in the ways I want to be).
I want to believe I have enough in a never-enough world. Shapiro’s voice is a port in that storm, one I return to again and again.
I picked up Inheritance again last week when our library reopened for pickup. Not only did I want to reread purely for the comfort of Shapiro’s voice, but I also wanted to break down how she wrote it. My question: how exactly did she structure this book and her other memoirs, Hourglass and Devotion? I remembered her style being nonlinear with shorter chapters, dipping in and out of topic and time. But to have my hands on it, I knew I’d do more than recall something I read more than a year ago. Reading a book is one thing; studying it is another.
I flipped through to get a sense of the book’s structure: 250 pages, four parts, fifty chapters. Then, chapter by chapter, I kept track of where she was in time and what topics each chapter addresses.
For creative nonfiction writers who write narrative nonfiction, the writing is held together by three threads: scene, summary, and reflection. Scene is immersive, creating a physical world for the reader to inhabit. Summary gives relevant backstory. Reflection allows the writer to ruminate, make connections, and process what’s going on. Any narrative writing includes all three of these elements, but in creative nonfiction, the focus is on the “I” who is telling the story. Not only is the story true, but the lens through which it’s told is personal.
What I learned pretty quickly is that Inheritance, though an interesting book and inquiry into the world of DNA testing and donor-conceived children, reads more like mystery than memoir. The reader learns what Shapiro learns in real time, side by side, which makes for a fascinating read but wasn’t an example of the type of writing I want to do. This is a very particular book written in a very particular way.
In fact, a quick internet search gave me some insight into Shapiro’s process in writing this book, which even she found to be remarkably different from her other memoirs. Initially, she wrote 200 pages that she ended up throwing out because, as she says, she was writing from inside a trauma. Again and again, throughout Inheritance, she quotes Dr. Bessel vander Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.” The revelation about her origins traumatized her and, as she started to write, she found it didn’t hold together as a story. She was still too close to it.
A conversation with her editor led Shapiro back to Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir about her husband’s death and the aftermath. The writing in that book is restrained, crafted. Not impersonal, but from a perspective slightly removed from the center of Didion’s trauma. When Shapiro gave the writing a second go, she took that to heart, creating the same sense of cool, emotional control even as she wrestled with questions of her own identity, family, and past. She managed to bring the reader into a weighty and painful situation without her emotion and pain spilling everywhere.
Which I suppose is what all good memoirists do—invite the reader to walk beside them without overwhelming them. It’s a craft, a practice, something that requires diligence and attention.
As I continued to read Inheritance, what became more and more obvious to me was Shapiro’s examination not only of what she knew but what she didn’t. Mary Karr says the hallmark of memoir is the writer’s willingness to look at things from different perspectives. We each have our own perspectives, different from what others often see or experience, but even our own perspectives—the stories we tell ourselves—can be muddied and one-sided. We look back and tend to recount things the same way, again and again. But to look back and think about the past from a different perspective? That’s a whole other ballgame.
On three sticky notes, I wrote my main takeaway from rereading Inheritance: What was said? What was unsaid? What was implied? It’s hard enough to tell a story, but these questions add a new layer, a new way of seeing that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
What if the stories I’ve been telling myself, that I’ve rehearsed and replayed over and over, aren’t really my stories but are instead someone else’s interpretation of what happened? What if the old versions of these stories need to be rewritten, cast in a new light? If I spend time rewriting them, is there new life for me personally, a new way forward?
The answers, of course, point to yes. By taking a closer look at Shapiro’s writing, I’m able to see something new about my own writing, but more importantly, about my own life. Somehow, I have to pin it to paper to make it real to me. If I want to look back and reframe old stories, I have to start with the page. Which takes great courage and a leap of faith. Maybe right now I’m just trying to muster it.
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