- Used Book in Good Condition.
In Dani Shapiro's captivating new novel, a mother struggles to
protect her young daughter from the dark secrets of her past.
Haunting and inful, Black & White explores the notions of
family and motherhood, inspiration and obligation, and is sure to
appeal to fans of Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve. Find out more
about Shapiro's artistic practices and influences below. --Daphne
Durham
10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Dani Shapiro
Q: What is your writing process like? Has it changed from book
to book?
A: As I was doing my usual flailing around before I began to
write Black & White, I found that I had some questions in mind
that I hoped to explore, if not answer--and those questions very
much came out of my preoccupations as a writer and as a mother of
a young child: is it possible to be as fully absorbed as one
needs to be to produce good, strong art--and be equally fully
absorbed in the raising of small children? What happens when that
delicate balancing act teeters? And also, as someone who has
written quite a bit of personal non-fiction, I wondered: where is
the line--or perhaps it's less of a line and more of a murky gray
area--when it comes to writing about the personal stuff when
there's this little person who's involved, a person who will grow
up and read it some day? These ideas began to really preoccupy
me, and finally the novel started to form itself around them.
When I begin the first draft of a book, I write longhand. I've
become quite attached to these particular spiral-bound s
that can only be purchased in my in-laws' hometown, and so
whenever they come to visit I ask them to bring me a pile. I
think most writers indulge in magical thinking when it comes to
the process, and many of us require talismans; mine are these
s. I used to only write on the computer, but I've found,
in the last number of years, that I feel much freer to have no
idea where I'm going when I'm writing by hand. There's something
very neat--perhaps too neat--about the blank computer screen, and
the ease of cutting and pasting, moving whole blocks of text
around. For me, it's infinitely more satisfying to scribble and
cross things out and make big sweeping arrows and asterisks as
I'm working on drafts. It looks messy and complicated--it looks
like what it is. On those early pages I feel like I can see a
, or a diagram, of my process.
Q: What author/s have inspired you?
A: In the big, enduring ways, as a literary back: Tolstoy,
George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Saul
Bellow, Grace Paley. And while I was writing Black & White, Alice
Munro's stories in Runaway and Ian McEwan's novel Saturday were
immensely important in my grappling with understanding how to
create a close third person narrative without losing the
periphery.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm trying to start a new novel. Viriginia Woolf wrote this
great passage in her diary, after she finished The Waves: "I must
hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again
become pecking and wretched." I'm a much nicer person when I'm
working on a book. When I begin I have so little to go on--a
feeling, a sense, an image or two. It's like coaxing shadows out
of the corners.