Thus, “Inheritance” can be viewed as a kind of crisis management of the Dani Shapiro brand. The soldiers would have given you extra bread.” In her second memoir, “Devotion,” she refers to herself as “the blond sheep” of her family. In her first memoir, “Slow Motion,” Shapiro recounted how her Holocaust survivor neighbors in New Jersey would tell her, “We could have used you in the camps, little blondie. That Judaism is matrilineal seems, in Shapiro’s case, to take a back seat to the fact that Shapiro, over the course of her memoirs, has not been shy about positing herself as a Jewish person who doesn’t look Jewish (she is blonde and Californian-looking). (Coincidentally, in New York magazine last month, Elizabeth Wurtzel recounted her own recent discovery that her birth father was famed photographer Bob Adelman.) After blithely submitting her DNA to a genealogy website in 2016, Shapiro discovered that her father - son of the founder of the Lincoln Square Synagogue, brother of the former president of the Orthodox Union - was neither her biological father nor Jewish.
Writer Dani Shapiro’s upcoming work, “Inheritance” - her fifth memoir - can be classified in the repudiation or correction category. Harrison said she had not been planning to write “The Mother Knot.” “‘The Mother Knot’ is typical,” she said, referring to her fourth memoir, in which she achieves equanimity over her long-troubled relationships with her parents by sprinkling her dead mother’s remains in the sea. Though Harrison’s agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban, will sometimes try to coax her client into writing something for commercial reasons (on the heels of Josephine Hart’s novel “Damage,” Urban tried, “How about a little book about adultery?”), Harrison said she needs to be thinking about, if not obsessing about, a topic in order to take it on. Of the two main camps of serial memoirists described above, Harrison falls into the former. Augustine started writing his “Confessions” in 397 at the age of 43, but that this early example of memoir can also qualify as serial: each of the 13 books was composed as a discrete unit (meant to be read aloud, each taking about an hour to perform.) Kennedy said in 1961 at the age of 43, “I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age - too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.” But if we take a broader view, we see not only that St.
“Whether I serve one or two terms in the presidency,” John F.
Their lingua franca is candor.Īt first blush, the phrase “serial memoirist” seems distinctly postmodern: Before the self-empowerment boom of the 1960s and 70s, writing a memoir was thought to be the province of a reflective senior citizen. If the searing emotionalism found in the work of most repeat memoirists (Angelou, Augusten Burroughs, Mary Karr, Jamaica Kincaid, Joyce Maynard, Frank McCourt, Lauren Slater) would seem to have been generated by forces other than those fueling writers who, at the end of, or well into, their careers, tack on a few autobiographical works to their oeuvres (Diana Athill, Gore Vidal), one quality unites all these writers.
“When he found out I was a writer, he said, ‘You must be here because of Shirley MacLaine.’ It was so insulting! I was not looking for my past lives!”Ī different combination of motives and inclinations prompts every serial memoirist to return repeatedly to the keyboard’s well-worn “I” button. At one point during her walk, Harrison had fallen into conversation with a British man who was offering refreshments on the side of the path. with it.” But Harrison then recounted walking the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage in northern Spain which is the subject of memoirs by both Harrison and MacLaine. Harrison, who has also written seven well-regarded novels, two biographies and a book of true crime, but who is best known for “ The Kiss ,” her controversial memoir about her four-year consensual romance with her father, replied, not uncheerily, “I’m O.K. How do you feel about being in that company?” “Typically, when people hear the phrase ‘serial memoirist,’” I said to Harrison recently, “they think of Maya Angelou, who wrote eight memoirs, or Shirley MacLaine, who has written 11. Kathryn Harrison’s recently published book, “On Sunset,” in which she describes being reared by her wonderfully eccentric grandparents in Los Angeles in the 1960s, is her fifth memoir.
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