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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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I Was Formed by What I Didn’t Know: The Millions Interviews Dani Shapiro
In the spring of 2016, Dani Shapiro received one of the biggest shocks of her life when she learned, through an Ancestry.com DNA test, that she and her adored, deceased father were not biologically related. She had taken the test on a whim and wasn’t expecting to discover anything new. In fact, she thought she had pretty well excavated her family history in two of her previous memoirs: Slow Motion and Devotion. But the results of the test forced her to revisit mysteries she thought she had put to rest:
There had always been something more—something I could never quite fathom. An invisible live wire stretched between my parents and me. Touch it, and we might up in smoke. I knew this, too, thought I couldn’t have articulated it. I had turned away from fiction, toward memoir, as if a trail of words might lead me there.
Inheritance, her latest memoir, is the remarkable story of how, with just a few clues, Shapiro discovers both that she was donor-conceived, and the identity of her donor. With her mother also deceased, there are many unanswered questions, and Shapiro finds herself delving into the early history of sperm donation, and interviewing the remaining friends and acquaintances of her parents. But she’s most powerful when she writes about the strange memories that have never left her, memories imprinted with a mystery she couldn’t recover.
After reading Inheritance, I was very curious about how she went about writing this story, which is so different from her recent memoirs, but at the same time, speaks directly to them. I spoke to her over the phone last week, and as in her book about writing, Still Writing, she was very good at describing the different stages of her writing process. Our interview has been condensed slightly and edited for clarity.
The Millions: When did you know you would write about this experience?
Dani Shapiro: Very, very quickly. I’m a writer who has mined my own life and attempted to shape my experience into stories for my entire writing life. And then this massive wrecking ball of a story came into my life. I can’t even say it’s a story; it’s a revelation about what has always been true. It never occurred to me not to write about it. Somebody actually wrote to me on social media today—how do you think you would have written about this story if your parents were still alive? I wrote back, that’s a big question, and I’m not going to start responding to it on social media, but the fact that my parents were gone, and I was left with this massive mystery, and the only way I’ve come to understand anything about myself or about life is by writing about it, by following the line of words. And so I began jotting down notes very early on. Just fragments. Part of it was that I thought I wouldn’t remember the very early feelings and thoughts because I was in such shock. And the other reason was because I was aware that anything I might learn about the truth of my origins and the culture and the time and place that made me, those people who might know something about that, were very old if they were still living. I felt this urgency to put my reporter's hat on and learn as much as I possibly could. I did not have the luxury of thinking, I’m going to write about this five years from now, after I’ve processed it. And, also, some books require distance, but this one felt like it required immediacy.
TM: It’s interesting that you realized right away that the clock was ticking in terms of the research you could do, and the interviews you could do.
DS: I think I would have felt that way whether I was writing the book or not. Writing a book sometimes gives you the excuse, the permission to pick up the phone and call people. I’ve always felt that way, whenever I’ve done a journalistic piece—a personal history piece—it’s always been spurred by what I really want to know but I don’t have permission ask. And if I have an assignment, then I have permission. So, there was something of that.
TM: When I was reading it, I thought it was so lucky that you are a writer—and also you had a journalist husband who could help you with your research. I just felt you had a good way of processing it, but I wondered if you felt that way, too?
DS: Initially I was just in it. I was in the fog of it; I was just doing anything I could, whatever I could. I felt that my emotional future well-being required that I at least try to turn over every stone that I could. I didn’t know what I would discover. But one of the things I figured out very quickly is that, if you have to find out that you’re donor-conceived, I had a miraculously good story. I had almost eerily so, just enough clues. My mother had once let slip, just in one brief conversation with her, certain vital clues: the word “Philadelphia,” the word “Institute.”
And then, let’s start with the fact that I did the DNA test at all. Because I easily could never had done that. It was a very random thing to decide to do, and it was only because my husband was doing it, and the prices have come down, so I thought, Sure, why not? It was so casual, and then the incredibly fast time that it took from the moment that I realized that my dad hadn’t been my biological father to finding my biological father. It was crazy, it was 36 hours, it was a domino effect, one thing leading to another, and a kind of hypothesis, and a couple of clues, and a couple of educated guesses, and the fact that my first cousin was on my page on Ancestry.com, and the fact that we could figure out who he was. It wasn’t hard. There was a certain amount of journalistic chops that were required; I think when my husband figured out that the name associated with my first cousin wasn’t first name-last name, but last name-first name, that’s the kind of thing that maybe somebody who is not an investigative journalist might not have gotten to as quickly, but it did happen in this way that, when I look back on it now, was miraculous.
I’ve heard a lot of stories now of dead ends, of donors who don’t want to be disturbed, or who don’t come around, and don’t respond. I just recently heard a story of a woman who is nearly 80 who just found out that her father had not been her biological father. What do you do with that when you’re 80 years old? I feel like the when in my life when I found out, was probably when I had the most stability, the most time and space, to actually be able to truly, deeply go on this journey. I wasn’t too young and I wasn’t too old. I write about this in the book, but when I was told about donor-conceived people who tattoo their donor numbers on their body, I get that. I had 36 hours, which is nothing, of feeling like I may never know who my biological father was. It felt like I was walking with a void underneath me. Like I had been uprooted—the roots that I thought that I had were no longer my roots. I might never know the facts of my identity.
TM: Did you know the structure of the book right away? And did the writing of this book feel different from writing previous memoirs?
DS: I started writing right away and I thought that I was writing the book. It’s funny, because I’ve taught writing for many years, and I’ve written a book about writing, and every once in a while I come up against something where I think, I know I would tell a student that this is impossible, but it’s not going to be impossible for me...
I learned something important to writers, regarding writing from experience. I have written directly from experience before. In my memoir Devotion, and in Hourglass, those are both books written like the present is a laboratory, and writing from the center of experience, but what was totally different about embarking on writing Inheritance was that those earlier books were not being written from a place of trauma. In initially trying to get what was happening to me down on the page, I was writing from the center of trauma. There’s that moment in my book when I quote from Bessel van der Kolk’s—I don’t have the quote exactly right, but it’s something like, “It’s the nature of trauma that doesn’t allow a story to be told.” It’s the reason why people who are in a traumatic state repeat themselves, and need to keep telling the same story over and over again. But that does not make for good literature—although I want to interject and say that I do think there is one literary form in which you can write directly out of trauma, and it’s poetry.
I wrote 200 pages of a draft. And I was already under contract and I was feeling actually pretty good about what I had on the page at that point. But then I had to go on tour for Hourglass. And I went on the road and I had to go on this mode of really not thinking about it, because I couldn’t think about it and be talking about Hourglass, which was a book that I felt so proud of, and wanted to be promoting. So I was on the road, and I think it must have been about two months that I didn’t touch the manuscript. And I sort of settled in, and I took myself to a local café where I like to read, and I started reread and my heart just completely sank. It had some passages that worked, but as a whole, it simply was not the book I wanted to write. And I was in despair. I went home and told my husband, I know that this is productive despair, I would tell any writer telling me this story that it is productive, and that this is going to end up being a good thing, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like despair with a capital D.
And then I went back and I reread The Year of Magical Thinking. Because my editor and I had spoken about The Year of Magical Thinking before I had even started writing. She brought up that book as something that had within it a sense of immediacy. And yet at the same time, a powerful coolness to it because that’s what Didion does. In my memory of the book, she was writing from the center of her husband’s death. But when I started rereading it, I realized she actually found a place that is slightly removed from, that was outside the sphere of direct shock and trauma. She was writing from that spot, which allowed her to move back into the immediacy but also away from it in a way that allowed her to tell a story. And so I understood that I hadn’t known what that was. So I spent a couple of months exploring what that place was from which to tell the story, that was on the one hand still unfolding. But the actual breathless 36 hours of that story was very much in the rear view mirror for me when I sat down in earnest and was writing.
[millions_ad]My job as a writer was twofold. One was the opposite of what writers need to do—I had to really slow it down. It’s a runaway train of a story, and I had to really think about how to give it the ballast and the weight that it required. The other way that it was different was that I was aware of the outsized details, the sheer strangeness of the story itself, and the uniqueness of it. I mean, I know it’s happened to a lot of people, but most people haven’t experienced it. Yet I wanted to write a book that people would be able to read and find for themselves what’s universal in it. In my memoir Slow Motion for example, my parents had been in a car accident. Even if your own parents haven’t been in a car accident anyone can emphasize and imagine what the person might feel like.
When I’ve written a couple of times about my son when he was little and he was sick, anyone, whether they’re a mother or a father, can put themselves in the shoes of this person telling the story. And I was aware that discovering in midlife that my father was not my biological father, I was going to have to a) help the reader understand what that feels like and b) write a book that took those experiences and took the strange, later-in-life journey that I found myself on, and really made meaning about what is this teaching me about human nature, about personhood, about identity, about family, about love, about what makes a family, about what makes a father, about nature and nurture, about all these huge ideas that I was suddenly grappling with on a deeper level than most people ever have to, and certainly than I had ever done before.
TM: The experience you describe of being able to see your biological father online, giving a video presentation, was just so stunning—I mean, the fact that we are even able to do that, first of all, but also the way you could recognize him. It just must have been so bizarre. You did a great job of describing it, I felt like I experienced it, and it made me think about how we look like our relatives, how my children look like my grandparents, or whomever, and I take it for granted, I don’t really think about it.
DS: Yes—or, if you know that you’re not biologically related to your parents, or one parent, then you know that and that also becomes part of your identity. And that’s a point that I find that I need to make, because it’s not an obvious one. People who are adopted or people who are donor-conceived, who have always known this, or parents who have donor-conceived kids, or adopted kids, who have always disclosed to their children their origins, that is a completely different story from mine, or from the many people these days who are discovering that a secret was kept from them. If you grow up knowing that you don’t know something, then that lack of knowledge becomes part of your identity. But if you grow up believing something that isn’t the case, and something about it just doesn’t make sense—that was the story of my life, and I think it’s actually the reason for all those memoirs.
TM: I actually had the same thought while I was reading. I found myself wondering if you would continue to write memoirs after this?
DS: I very much doubt that I will ever write a straightforward memoir ever again. Hopefully I’ll write fiction and I’ll write nonfiction. I was moving in a direction before I wrote Inheritance that was kind of a more fractured narrative, and away from traditional narrative, which is hilarious to me and ironic because then I had this story land on me, that was like a story with a capital S that could only be written in a straightforward, linear way. I hadn’t written in a linear fashion in a decade or more. So I have no idea what’s next for me, but I really do believe that my writing life has been formed by not knowing and always searching for what I did not know. There are clues all over all of my books. There are clues in my first novel, there are clues in my second novel, there are clues in Slow Motion, there are clues in Still Writing, and there are certainly clues in Devotion; there are clues in all my books except perhaps for Hourglass, which is really a book that is about marriage and time and memory and kind of steered clear of some of my other obsessions, but I was formed by what I didn’t know.
TM: I think Inheritance is also, in a way, a book about writing. Because you write about looking back on your old books—on what you’ve written before—and I also appreciated the amount of textual analysis you applied to the emails from people, and to what people say to you, and what you said to yourself.
DS: I love that, you’re the first person who has said that to me, and I was aware that I was parsing Ben’s emails—he used this word or he made this Freudian slip—and parsing the language that was used at the time of my conception. The word “treatment,” the word “boost.” And all the ways in which euphemism was used, to create a cloud of unknowing, that parents could find themselves wandering in a fog for the rest of their lives about what they had done—if they wanted to, they could do that. And also, I really do feel like everything I've written has led to this. My husband, early on, I think he felt bad that I had made this discovery, and it was his fault because he had asked me if I wanted to do the DNA test, but I have never had a moment—not even at my most destabilized—of feeling like I haven’t known. Because my life, in particular, as somebody who has been relentlessly exploring identity, my dad, my relationship with my dad.
It’s taught me a lot about stories and the narratives that we tell ourselves—all of us, not just writers. It’s how we all understand ourselves through storytelling. My narrative about both of my parents had to be reconsidered in light of this new information. I have a shelf of books that supply reasons for why they were the way they were and all of that is still true, but it’s not the whole truth. I was missing the biggest bone. The part that puts it all into complete dimensionality had eluded me until I made that discovery. And then it made everything make profound sense. Almost instantly. It didn’t make it less painful. It was very hard to digest. But I knew absolutely that I was looking at the truth and I had never seen the truth in my life.
TM: One last question—I was wondering if you have read Proust?
DS: I have read Proust, I have taught Proust—why do ask?
TM: I felt like the theories of memories you write about are similar to the ones in In Search of Lost Time, especially the idea that the memories that survive childhood, the deep ones, are the ones that have the truth in them and you have to kind of deep dive to find them.
DS: And to return to them. Why did that conversation with Mrs. Kushner stay with me my whole life? Because I don’t have a good memory of my childhood, but that—I can tell you what the leaves on the tree looked like, and the glasses of iced tea, and what Mrs. Kushner looked like. It was seared into my memory. And that was also true of the conversation I had at Sarah Lawrence with my mother, and on the car ride home. And what’s Proustian about all that is that we don’t know that those moments are becoming recorded in a way, but they are, because somewhere within us there is this very subtle recognition of their importance.
When I taught In Search of Lost Time it was in a graduate writing program at The New School, and I was teaching the literature of autobiography. I made my own syllabus, and I chose books that I wanted to reread. I think I taught that class for 10 years. And I would end every year with Proust. What was drawing me again and again to thinking, to the way he thought about memory? That’s part of what I mean by it all led to this. My friend Hannah Tinti, who is one of the people that I told pretty early on, she had one of the best reactions: She burst out laughing, first of all—laughing at the incredulity, and also like, of course. She wrote to me the next morning and said I had been in training for this my whole life. And I thought, what is it to be in training for something my whole life and have it happen? Or was I in training because of it? It haunts me that I could have possibly have never known this, because I would have missed my mark.
The Pleasures And Perils Of Writing About Writing: An Interview With Dani Shapiro
I first met Dani Shapiro in 2011, at One Story magazine’s annual debutante ball, where she was being honored with an award for her mentorship of younger writers. I interviewed her that night about her teaching career and in the course of our conversation she told me that she tries, above all, to teach patience. When I asked how one goes about teaching patience, she offered a piece of advice that has stuck with me since. She said, “Immersion in the work creates patience.” And then she paused and reconsidered: “Or maybe it’s that patience creates immersion in the work.”
Both formulations, I think, are wise; but it was the fact that she had the presence of mind to pause and rethink her answer in the midst of a crowded party that struck me as the real object lesson in patience. You can sense that same calm in Shapiro’s new book, Still Writing, a writing guide that is partly advice gleaned from years of teaching, and partly a memoir of Shapiro’s own growth and struggles as a writer. It’s a book that focuses on process more than craft, and in particular, the importance of routine. Shapiro is candid about her own habits of procrastination, as well as the rituals that have helped her to overcome her worst impulses.
I interviewed Shapiro in late September, just before her book was due to hit the shelves. She spoke to me from her home office in Connecticut, which she describes in detail in Still Writing, including the antique chaise lounge where she often sits to read and write.
The Millions: So, I feel like I know exactly where you are because I’ve read all about your workspace in your book.
Dani Shapiro: Ha, yes, I’m not on the chaise lounge, but I’m looking at it.
TM: And were you writing this morning?
DS: The irony of Still Writing being about to come out is that I’m not getting any writing done at all. I’m doing the stuff that writers do when we are about to get a book into the world. It becomes over-stimulating at a certain point. I’m not remotely able to always practice what I preach. For me when I’m working on the book, I pretty much just work on the book. There’s the writing and then there’s the talking about the writing. And I feel like they occupy really different places in a writer’s life.
TM: When does this stage of nervous expectation come to an end in your experience? When will you be able to write again?
DS: You know, one of the things that I increasingly understand over the years — not that it makes the process easier, not that I understand it better — is that so much goes into a book — giving it everything we’ve got, holding nothing back — so that when a book goes out into the world, it’s like watching your toddler making its way across the highway during rush hour. It feels like a defenseless and vulnerable newborn and it requires a lot of support. And also, nothing is ever enough. I don’t know a writer who actually feels, "Oh, excellent, I got that great Times review." I have a friend who got a beautiful Times review for his debut novel and I was so pleased for him. And he called me up and the feeling was more of relief than joy — of crossing that thing that you had been so worried about off the list. And, I’m just going to be really honest here, in the last five minutes before you called me, I saw on Twitter a really lovely review of Still Writing and in the same five minutes I also saw that an essay that I had written for Ploughshares, one that I hoped would make it onto the list of notable essays in Best American Essays, didn’t make it onto the list. And so there you have it. I would like to be the kind of person who appreciates kind words from a friend rather than looking for my name on some list. I mean, who even reads the list of notable essays except for people who are hoping to be on it?
I bring up that example because this is a noisy, noisy world we’re all in. That’s not going to change. And I think for writers and for anyone in a solitary profession, there’s always this Pavlovian response to want to know more and to want to know what’s going on. And there’s such a danger in that. And when I’m writing I really do shut it down. I actually wrote an essay about this called “#amwriting.” There’s this hashtag on Twitter, #amwriting, and I started looking at it and thinking "No, you’re not!" And so I wrote this essay about it on n+1, about trying to do the work. For writers, the Internet really is like crack. Almost every writer I know struggles with it or has found a way to really shut it down. We require all these tools and rituals, whether it’s a different computer or whether or it’s writing by hand, which is what I do when I’m starting something new. There’s such freedom in a notebook. And there’s this great program Freedom, which allows you to work on your computer without going online.
TM: Yes, I actually just reinstalled after reading your book. I had it on my old laptop and recently I’ve been really distracted. It has to do with trying to balance childcare with writing time. So I realized I had to start using Freedom again.
DS: For me new motherhood was a very conflicted time. The feeling of carving out the time to write and feeling like somehow it was a luxury or frivolous in some way. Like it was not something I needed to be doing. Which is ridiculous because I support my family with my writing. But somehow if I’d have to put on nice clothes and go to a law firm and have a boss it would be — well, women in that position are conflicted, too. But with writing you have to make it happen and you can’t just show up for it. And I think that’s where the Internet comes into play.
TM: Being on the Internet can feel very productive.
DS: Yes, it can be in the name of research, it can also be email. I feel it in my brain, I can feel when it’s been a few hours since I’ve gone into my inbox. When I go online my brain feels like it’s sizzling. It’s not a good way to think for someone who needs to make intuitive and imaginative and memory-based connections. Someone who is operating at a different frequency.
TM: What inspired you to write this kind of book, a writing guide for writers?
DS: Well, I first of all never thought I would write book-length nonfiction after Slow Motion. But in 2008, 2009, I was in that state of being in-between, which I talk about in Still Writing. It’s never comfortable, no matter how many books I write, it always feels like this time it’s going to be different, this time it’s going to be over and I won’t have an idea. But then Devotion presented itself as the next book. And it wasn’t the book I would have picked. It was another memoir — and a spiritual memoir, my god! And so I wrote Devotion and that really ended up being a life-altering journey. And I had to get past my own resistance about it because I had a job to do. And just as when I wrote Slow Motion I had a feeling that it was going to change my writing life. In my novels before Slow Motion my obsessions were leading me around, and in my subsequent novels I think I have been a bit more in charge. Writing Slow Motion gave me a new lens, a different way of entering my imagination because I had taken care of writing that memoir. And so I had the sense that when I was writing Devotion that it was changing my lens again. But when I was working on Devotion, I also started working on a novel. Which I never do. And I started talking about it, which I caution people not to do. I wrote myself right into a wall. It was some of the best writing I’ve ever done, it was fragmentary, a collage, a hybrid fiction that employs nonfiction within it. A gray area, blurred boundaries. It’s something I’m very interested in right now. But it’s very tricky territory. And for the first time in my writing life I put a big chunk of writing in the drawer.
And in the meantime, for the last number of years, I’ve had a blog. Initially I had a blog because everyone told me to have a blog. And when I started, I thought what can I regularly blog about that feels like a deep enough well? And the answer was: the process of writing. The creative process itself. What it takes to do the work, what are the pitfalls and the joys, the struggles and the privileges. We do what we do alone in a room. Yet we’re struggling with the blank pages. People call it different things. It’s a leap of faith or lunacy that makes you feel that what you are going to fill it with is something that’s going to connect with other people. And so I started this blog and over the years I got tons of notes and it was from such a range of writers. And they always said the same thing: “This is what I needed to hear today.” I never thought about turning it into a book — even when people wrote to me and asked if it was going to be a book. And finally, it was in that space of finally putting a big chunk of a novel into a drawer that I thought, well, maybe this is the book I’m supposed to be working on.
I sold Still Writing based on the fact that I had a blog. But I didn’t look at the blog when I wrote Still Writing. I really wanted to start from square one and find a way to structure a memoir hybrid that would hopefully be useful and so that it didn’t feel like assembled material.
TM: It’s interesting that the book springs from that experience of getting stuck. Did you feel as if you were writing it for yourself, in a way?
DS: One of the things that I felt was that the minute you really think you know something, you’re in trouble. I remember I was being interviewed for a literary magazine as I was working on the novel that I put in the drawer. And they asked if I had ever had to put a novel in a drawer. And I said no, I’d been lucky that it hadn’t happened to me. But I was thinking to myself, That would never happen to me. And meanwhile I was working on the very thing that I ended up putting in a drawer.
In Still Writing, I was thinking more of, what do I need to remind myself of? I think that’s one of the reasons I love teaching. There are these moments when I teach when I say something and I realize it’s true and I hadn’t thought of it in that way before. And that’s when teaching is at its most alive. And I think this book came from my teaching self as much as from my writing self. I think it comes from the twenty years of teaching and especially the kind of teaching that I do, which really has a lot to do with trying to help people find courage.
Speaking of moments when I say something that I realize is true: years and years ago I was teaching an MFA course and I remember saying that I thought voice was practically synonymous with courage. And when I said it, I thought, that’s right — you can’t find your voice without having that sense of courage. It’s not confidence. It has nothing to do with confidence, it has to do with moving past fear, embarrassment, mortification, shame. It’s knowing where you’re writing from.
TM: How aware of the genre were you when you began? Did you read other writing books or look to any others as a guide?
DS: I went back and I looked at a lot of them. Because I had to ask myself the question of why do we need another book on writing? I went back to the ones that I found most illuminating, the one I could just dip into always. The one that was model for me and that I felt I could add to in some way is Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. It’s pure wisdom. It doesn’t instruct exactly. It goes very deeply into the head of a writer. And there’s nothing sugarcoated about it. It’s not saying everyone can do this. And I’ve come to this recently lately, this idea that there are two kinds of teaching now when it comes to teaching writing. There’s writers who are coming to the workshop or a retreat because they’re trying to get it right with every fiber of their being. And then there’s this other world of writers who will go to a workshop or a retreat because they’re trying to get it down. And getting it down and getting it right are two different things. For some writers getting it down is enough. And I think that has more to do with writing as a kind of therapy or catharsis. And getting it right has nothing to do with that. With Dillard, you see the absolute clarity and wisdom of her intention. She says a good book takes ten years. And I feel like reading that to my students who want to have a book deal by the time they graduate.
Stephen King’s On Writing I owe a debt to because the first half of that book he writes in bits and pieces — not in any kind of narrative way — about what formed him as a writer. A light bulb went off for me. I saw I could incorporate memoir, and it gave the book the chronology of beginnings, middles, and ends. It was a little scary to look at my process, because it’s a Pandora’s box, the question of what am I going to find? What did it mean to be an only child? What did some of the painful or difficult life lessons that I learned early in my life, what did they have to do with forming my subject matter?
Bird by Bird by Annie Lamott was also an influence. Another book, one that I actually didn’t know if it would still speak to me, was Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones. Goldberg has a kind of spiritual cast to her writing and she’s someone who has a spiritual practice.
As I read them, I felt like what I wanted to do was different enough. It didn’t feel like that’s been said, that’s been done. And the reason I’m saying that is because in writing every other book I’ve had the feeling that I had to write it. Still Writing didn’t feel like I had to write it.
TM: I was wondering about that, because in Still Writing, you describe how your books announce themselves. And I wondered if this one had announced itself.
DS: Other people kept announcing it to me! It was one of those moments of realizing that there was something that I had apparently been doing for a few years without consciousness of it, something that was striking a chord. I can’t imagine approaching a piece of fiction that way.
TM: So, may I ask — knowing you do not like to talk about work in progress, and knowing that you are currently in a state of nervous expectation — if you are working on something new?
DS: I will give you a very reserved yes. But I have a piece of short fiction coming out in a couple weeks that Electric Literature is publishing. I’ve mostly been working on that short story, “Supernova.” Actually, it’s about two of the characters from the novel that is in the drawer. Because I really, really was and am attached to the characters and even though it was in the drawer, it had a heartbeat. It was alive. So I pulled them to see what would happen if I gave them a life of their own away from the larger work surrounding it. Aside from that short story there is the strangeness of...well, I taped an hour with Oprah!
TM: I was going to ask you about that — I saw a notice on your website. What show is it for?
DS: It’s called Super Soul Sunday and it’s on her network. It’s amazing in terms of the company. She interviews people like Elie Wiesel and Maya Angelou. And she actually has Annie Lamott coming on. And this great Buddhist teacher called Jack Kornfield. And Karen Armstrong who has written some of the best spiritual biographies. It’s about what she loves to do, which is to have a deep conversation about how to live a meaningful life. It’s what she’s interested in. I couldn’t believe it when I got the call. It was very instructive to get that phone call because obviously I wasn’t expecting it. And around my house we’re pretty regularly waiting for phone calls. But it’s a law of nature that the phone never rings when you’re waiting for. The day I got the call from my agent about Super Soul Sunday I was shocked. I’ve been shocked before by bad news. I didn’t know good news could shock you in the same way. The next morning I said to my husband, "Did I dream that? I really think I may have dreamt that." The good news can also emerge out of the ether, out of the blue. Anything that has ever happened to me hasn’t been when I was waiting for it.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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