What I Love: Dani Shapiro
WHAT I LOVE
Dani Shapiro’s Provident Move to the Country
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
What I Love | Dani Shapiro: The author and her husband left the city for Connecticut and found a more spiritual life.
By DAN SHAW
Published: October 24, 2013
Dani Shapiro, the novelist and memoirist, has awesome real estate karma. In the 1980s and 1990s, she lived in three of the Upper West Side’s most storied landmark buildings: the Ansonia, the Dakota and the Hotel des Artistes. When she and her husband, the screenwriter and director Michael Maren, decided to move to Brooklyn in the late 1990s, they bought a town house in gentrifying Prospect Heights right before yoga studios arrived and prices escalated.
Related
A few days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Ms. Shapiro, now 51, went for a walk in Park Slope with her toddler son, Jacob, and rolled his stroller into a real estate office. Impulsively, she put her house on the market without even consulting her husband or having a plan for where they would move.
The Sept. 11 attacks were a tipping point. “I had already fallen out of love with the city,” she said. “I had never really felt settled in Brooklyn. I think it had to do with growing up in New Jersey and being someone who her whole life wanted to live in the city, and the city meant Manhattan. Having to go over a bridge to get to the city didn’t feel good to me, and yet since we’ve moved to Connecticut I have never once had that feeling.”
Sitting in the airy library of her center-chimney colonial on 10 acres at the end of a meandering driveway in a tiny Litchfield County town, Ms. Shapiro explained that she and Mr. Maren had ruled out moving to the suburbs and wanted to be no more than two hours from Manhattan. They looked in Sag Harbor and the Hudson Valley, then discovered northwest Connecticut, which felt “familiar, safe and inspiring.”
They had no friends who lived in the area, but they were aware that Pulitzer Prize-winning writers — Arthur Miller, Frank McCourt, William Styron — would be their neighbors. “I never thought we would know any of them,” she said. “But this is a very welcoming community and within a year, without trying, we were sitting at dinner with the Styrons.”
Ms. Shapiro marvels at the domino effect — both personal and professional — of her move to the country. “If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live — the way you live — then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art,” she said. “I never would have written ‘Devotion’ if I still lived in New York.”
Published in 2010, “Devotion” is a memoir about her search for a meaningful spirituality. Having grown up in a modern Orthodox Jewish household that kept kosher and observed the Sabbath, Ms. Shapiro had rebelled, eschewing organized religion since her college days at Sarah Lawrence. When Jacob was in grade school and started asking questions about God, she decided she needed to come up with answers for him and for herself.
Without access to a smorgasbord of synagogues and the myriad distractions of the city, she was compelled to look inward. “I had to find out what I believed and learn to articulate my own life,” she said.
Buddhism and yoga became essential to her quest, and her favorite place to stretch and meditate is on a mat in front of the wood-burning fireplace in her bedroom. A serene space painted pale green, the room has a mantel — an altar, really — lined with bottles of chakra oils and antique blown glass from Israel that belonged to her difficult mother, whom she wrote unflinchingly about in her first memoir, “Slow Motion.”
The small study where she writes is adjacent to her bedroom. The walls are lined with bulletin boards and framed mementos, including the original illustration that accompanied a “Family Album” essay that she wrote for The New Yorker about her father. A small chaise longue upholstered in an antique Tibetan blanket holds her laptop and neat stacks of other writers’ galleys awaiting blurbs.
Her preferred spot to read is a leather club chair in the library downstairs, with its wall of windows overlooking a meadow. “The bookshelves were already here,” she said, “and that really sold us on the house along with the antique mantels, the people-size rooms and the wide-board floors.”
A favorite picture book sits proudly on the coffee table: a self-published tome documenting Jacob’s bar mitzvah, which was held in 2012 in a 19th-century white clapboard Congregational church in the nearby town of Washington. “It was the happiest day of my life,” she said.
Two lesbian rabbis officiated at the unorthodox service. Ms. Shapiro played the piano while her son played his ukulele. The reception was held at Club Hall on the Washington Green, where guests were met by a taco truck on arrival and a Good Humor truck as they departed.
The bar mitzvah was the epitome of the new life she had made for her family in Connecticut. Flipping through the album, she pointed out her new country friends, including Stephen Cope, the executive director of the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living in Stockbridge, Mass., whom she had met at a fund-raiser for a local library and is now one of her spiritual gurus.
“If I hadn’t met Stephen,” she said, “I would have never gone to Kripalu where I met my Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein. I would have never become a teacher at Kripalu and I would have never met Oprah.”
A few months ago, Ms. Shapiro flew to Chicago to spend a full hour being interviewed for Oprah Winfrey’s “Super Soul Sunday” program (which is being rerun on Sunday at 10 a.m. on OWN). “It was surreal with all those lights and cameras,” said Ms. Shapiro, who was as nervous about the interview as she had ever been in her life. “One of the producers said, ‘Just be yourself,’ and I thought, ‘Being yourself is hard, hard work.’ ”
So is sitting alone at home all day in front of a computer screen, according to Ms. Shapiro. It is the topic of “Still Writing,” her new book, which is a paean to discipline and solitude. She still craves the hubbub of the city, and she makes frequent day trips to Manhattan, where she gets her hair cut and shops for clothes. “What can I say?” she said sheepishly. “I’m an urban person who loves living in the country.”
No comments:
Post a Comment