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Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, by Dani Shapiro
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The best-selling novelist and memoirist delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds, and about the accretion, over time, of both sorrow and love.
Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning--a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.
What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves for all time when the self is so often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise--how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack? Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence. Artful, intensely emotional work from one of our finest writers.
- Sales Rank: #1858 in Books
- Brand: KNOPF
- Published on: 2017-04-11
- Released on: 2017-04-11
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .80" w x 5.20" l, .64 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 160 pages
- KNOPF
Review
Praise for Hourglass
“Compassionate, insightful, and powerfully honest, in Hourglass Dani Shapiro illuminates the deepest mysteries, contradictions, and consolations of so very much—love, memory, the people we used to be and the people we’ve become. In other words: life. I was absorbed by Hourglass and consoled by it, too. It’s a beautiful book by a writer of rare talent.”
—Cheryl Strayed
“Gorgeous, stunning, extraordinary— life-changing.”
—Will Schwalbe
“Rilke reminds us that “There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them.” And how do we, moment after elusive moment, marry then continue to change and grow yet still accommodate these multitudes in one another? This is just one of the piercingly compelling questions Dani Shapiro explores in her masterfully rendered new memoir. Written with erudition, hard-earned wisdom, and sensual grace, Hourglass is a fearless and lovely mosaic of those very fragments that make life worth living, the only one we get. I adore this book.”
—Andre Dubus III
“Dani Shapiro’s prose is elegant and crystal clear, the perfect vehicle for her fierce intelligence and curiosity about things that lurk just out of view. Hourglass is such a lovely book.”
—Richard Russo
“Reading this book was like skating across a perfect piece of ice and then slowly noticing the cracks. Dark, cold water shows through. We can’t see the depths. Be careful, Shapiro warns, be careful, but still she skates on in the fading light with remarkable beauty and grace.”
—Jenny Offill
"Poignant... Timeless... Brutal honesty is the bread and butter of the marriage memoir, yet Shapiro still manages to make her husband sound quirky and tenacious in the manner of the best romantic comedy leads. And her prose has a way of making even mundane disappointments feel portentous and universal...by the end of her short book, we want to know what will happen next."
—The New York Times Book Review
“In this touching and intimate memoir… Shapiro beautifully weaves together her own moving language and a commonplace book’s worth of perfect quotes from others.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“To write openly about an enduring intimate relationship requires courage and tact… In this compelling account of her 18-year marriage, Shapiro carefully exposes the vulnerabilities that have subtly begun to surface within the relationship…The narrative demonstrates Shapiro’s finely tuned, poetic skills as a writer… A sharply observed and frequently moving memoir of marriage.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"These memories form a reality that is as diaphanous, fragile and as surprisingly resilient as a spider web. Hourglass is not only a profound and moving reflection on Shapiro’s marriage, but on all marriages."
—Bookpage
"[Shapiro] has never written anything as raw, dark, or brave as Hourglass... a penetrating meditation... Hourglass is a stalwart witness to the erosions of time’s tides that, in being stalwart, it also wishes to stand against.’’
—The Boston Globe
"A meditation that’s intimate, wide-ranging, funny and smart."
—Portland Press Herald
"Dani Shapiro presents a sharp look at the realities of marriage. She does so in delicate strokes, never seeming self-conscious. With a combination of engaged storytelling and what remains carefully unsaid, Shapiro creates an abstract intimacy that allows the reader into her experience... It is the very book that should be given to a young couple at the beginning of their relationship."
—Interview Magazine
"That delicate, ferocious act of unsweeping ourselves from the river of time and unplundering its instants is what Dani Shapiro explores with uncommon elegance in Hourglass— at once a memoir and a quiet manifesto for how, despite the cavalcade of losses and the exponential narrowing of possibility marking the passage of the years, it remains possible to have an expansive and creatively invigorating existence. In Shapiro’s virtuosic hands, time compresses and expands — an accordion playing the sorrowful yet redemptive melody that is life."
—Brain Pickings
"Shapiro’s honesty and devotion to her craft are impossible to detangle from her love of family....This potent memoir is a graceful meditation on the fragile balance of time, love, and loss. It’s an excellent entry point for Shapiro’s poignant and personal oeuvre. So start with this latest, and take it from there."
—Signature Reads
About the Author
DANI SHAPIRO is the author of the memoirs Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times and has been broadcast on This American Life. Shapiro was recently Oprah Winfrey’s guest on Super Soul Sunday. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, the New School, and Wesleyan University; she is cofounder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Shapiro lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hourglass
Time, Memory, Marriage
From my office window I see my husband on the driveway below. It’s the dead of winter, and he’s wearing nothing but a white terry- cloth bathrobe, his feet stuffed into galoshes. A gust of wind lifts the hem of the bathrobe, exposing his pale legs as he stands on a sheet of snow-covered ice. His hair is more salt than pepper. His breath makes vaporous clouds in the cold. Walls of snow are packed against the sides of the driveway, white fields spread out to the woods in the distance. The sky is chalk. A rifle rests easily on his shoulder, pointed at the northernmost corner of our roof.
So. He bought the gun. I take a long sip of coffee. Our two dogs are sleeping on the rug next to my desk chair. The old, demented one is snoring. There’s nothing I can do but watch as M. squeezes the trigger. Bam! I start, and the dogs leap up. The windows rattle. The whole house shakes.
The woodpecker had arrived the previous fall. Once he chose our house he seemed quite content, settled in, as if he had every intention of staying a while. At first, I had no idea where the noise was coming from. Rat-tat-tat. From my study, it sounded like a loose shutter banging, though we had no shutters. It was almost a city sound –– like a faraway jackhammer –– out of place in the quiet of the country. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Of course, it seemed possible, too, that the infernal banging was entirely in my mind. “My head,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “is a hive of words that won’t settle.” I couldn’t hold a thought. It was as if an internal axis had been jarred and tilted downward; words and images slipped through a chute into a dim, murky pool from which I could not retrieve them.
Finally, I spotted the woodpecker from my son’s bathroom window. Perched on a drainpipe just below the wood shingled roof, he was a small, brown bird with a tiny head and a pointy beak that moved back and forth with astonishing speed as he hammered away at what was already a sizable hole in the side of the house. Rat-tat-tat.
It had been a time of erosion. I’d begun to see in metaphor. We’d lived in the house for twelve years, and things were falling apart. The refrigerator stopped working one day. The banister warped and the spindles on the staircase loosened and clattered to the floor. An old, neglected apple tree on our property split in two, its trunk as hollow as a drum. The house needed painting. The well needed fracking, whatever that meant. The front door was cracked, and on winter days, a sliver of wind could be felt inside.
Late that same fall of the woodpecker, as I sat reading at the kitchen table one afternoon, two large, mangy creatures loped across the meadow. One was grey, the other a pale, milky brown, they were otherworldly, terrifying. My spine tingled. I grabbed my phone to take their picture, then texted it to M., who was in the city that day.
Wolves?
No.
Sure?
Yes.
Coyotes.
Not coyotes. I know coyotes.
The basement regularly flooded. If the wind blew in a certain way during a heavy rainfall, we could count on a half inch of water in the workroom where M. kept projects in varying states of half-completion. On a long table, he had hundreds of photos cut into stamp-sized pieces. These, he planned to assemble into a photo collage. A finished one from years earlier hangs in our guest bathroom. I never tire of looking it: our now-teenaged son as a toddler, hoisted on the shoulders of a friend, a smiling, radiant man whose daughter will later fall to her death from a Brooklyn rooftop; my mother in a hat to cover her bald head, months before she died; my mother- in-law before Alzheimer’s set in; the three of us –– my little family and I ––on the steps of our Brooklyn townhouse; then older, on the porch of our house in Connecticut. Alive. Dead. Lost. Like the names I refuse to cross out in my address book, I catalog those I have loved.
“Honey!” I called downstairs, keeping an eye on the woodpecker who, if he noticed me, didn’t seem to care. “I need you!”
M. peered at the woodpecker through the bathroom window. “Little fucker.”
“I know.”
“We’re going to have to replace all that siding.”
“Let’s put it on the list.”
The list included pressing items such as painting the house, fixing the front door. We really did need to install a generator, replace the heating system. The list had once included items like redoing the bathrooms, building an addition. I’d stopped keeping a list.
“I’m getting a gun.”
“I don’t want a gun in the house.”
“Not a real gun. A pellet gun. Nail the fucker.”
I did some research. All the while, the pecking continued. More holes were hammered into the side of our house. A friend recommended a brick of suet, hung from a tree. Another suggested a porcelain owl placed atop our roof. M. is not fond of home remedies. The weather grew colder. Leaves on the trees turned russet, deep yellow, bright burgundy. Families of wild turkeys strutted across the front meadow. My mind was on fire. Each day, I sat in my second floor office and heard rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
I’ll take care of it, M. said. A familiar refrain, one I have always loved and long to believe. This longing – my longing – is part of our marriage. We have been together for nearly two decades. The woodpecker, the mangy creatures, the hive of words. The creaky house, the velocity of time, the accretion of sorrow. The things that can and cannot be fixed. I’ll take care of it.
M., before I knew him, owned real guns. He had been a foreign correspondent working out of Africa, in territory that required bodyguards and weapons. He kept a Kalashnikov stored in a locker in Mogadishu. On occasion, he wore a bulletproof vest. It hangs on a hook in our coat closet.
Now, he is having a tete-a-tete with a woodpecker as I stand holding one quivering dog while petting the other. He hadn’t listened to me. When had he snuck a gun into the house? Where had he bought it? Walmart? Bam! The sound echoes off the roof. His hair is standing on end and he looks not unlike Einstein. A small dark speck against the white sky as the bird flies away, and I can almost hear its laughter, a cartoon bubble: you can’t catch me!
We have recently embarked on a massive housecleaning after reading a popular book about the Japanese art of tidying up. It falls into the department of things we can control. The author instructs readers to empty the contents of every single household drawer and closet and lay it all out: the old sneakers, balled up work-out clothes, tangled necklaces, single earrings, gift soap still in cellophane wrappers. The report cards, paper maché art projects, baby bjorn. The boxes of heating pads from a long-ago bout with sciatica. The pregnancy test displaying the pink line. The electric ‘smores maker, a housewarming gift, deposited unopened in the back of the coat closet.
I found these old journals of yours. Just yesterday, M. handed me two thin, spiral-bound notebooks. One is red, the other blue. They don’t look familiar. I open the red one. Dated June 8, 1997, the entry reads: Day one. Arrived early in London and bought books at Heathrow (paperback ed.of Angela’s Ashes.) Arrived in Paris in the early afternoon (Orly) and took a taxi to the Relais St. Germain. D. unpacked. Loved the room, great big bed, fluffy towels. My handwriting looks to me like a letter to my future self, a missive launched forward through time. If you had asked me if I’d kept a journal on our honeymoon, I would have told you with certainty that I had not. And who the hell writes about herself in the third person in her diary?
Today we ventured across the Seine only to discover that the Beauborg was closed. Went to Agnes B. where M. bought two nice shirts. Walked through the Marais, went to Ma Bourgoune, where a pigeon shat all over the back of M.’s new Agnes B. shirt. D. went upstairs and washed it off in a public restroom.
We weren’t all that young when we married. I was thirty-five, M. forty-one. As I read my entries, I feel time collapsing on itself. It is as if I can reach out and tap that blissed-out honeymooning not-so-terribly young woman on the shoulder, point her away from the fluffy towels and café and shitting pigeons and direct her toward another screen, a future screen. As
she walks into a shop on the Place Vendome (D. finally ended her search for the perfect watch to go with her beautiful new wedding band) I want to suggest to her that life is long. That this is the beginning. And that it may be true, at least in poetic terms, that beginnings are like seeds that contain within them everything that will ever happen.
On the highest shelf in my office closet, five boxes filled with reams of pages are stacked along with several cloth-covered volumes from the years I kept journals. Keeping journals was a practice for me, a way of ordering my life. It was an attempt to separate the interior from the exterior. To keep all my trash –– this is the way I thought of it –– in one place. Into the journals I poured every thought, each uncomfortable desire. Every petty resentment, seething insecurity, unexpressed envy that would be boring to all the world except –– perhaps –– to me. I continued the journal practice for years after becoming a writer, because I thought of the journals as the place where the detritus would be discarded, leaving only the essential ––somehow the process itself would determine which was which –– for my real work. I never imagined that a soul would read the journals. I would have been horrified, mortified if anyone had seen them. So why are they still on a shelf in my closet? Why have I kept them?
The red and blue notebooks are, I believe, the last journals in which I wrote. After we returned from our honeymoon, that practice, which had accompanied me all through my teens and twenties and into my thirties, disappeared. It was disappearing even as I wrote in them, I becoming she. Interspersed in those thin notebooks were other things: lists, thoughts, ideas. But that still doesn’t explain why I haven’t burned them. They aren’t there for posterity. Nor for reference. I don’t believe the young woman who wrote them has anything to teach me. What does she know? She hasn’t lived my life.
After breakfast we drove to Massaune, home of the best olive oil in France. Picked up three bottles. Then left St. Remy and took off for the Cote d’Azur. While in the car, D. ended up getting bitten by a nasty unidentified flying insect and jumped into the back seat where she remained crouching until the car stopped. After determining that the insect was not a bee and D. would live, we detoured to Aix-en-Provence for lunch (M.’s idea.)
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Favorite Book of 2017
By Katherine Devine
"Change even one moment, the whole thing unravels. The narrative thread doesn’t stretch in a line from end to end, but rather, spools and unspools, loops around and returns again and again to the same spot. There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present."
Never before have I finished a book, then immediately returned to page one to read it through again...and still looked forward to the third read. This spare, exquisite memoir moved me to laughter and tears, and its lyrical prose still rings in my ears. Five stars isn't enough for this gorgeous book.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
This slim, exquisitely-written book packs a powerful punch
By Laura Zinn Fromm
This slim, beautifully-written book packs a powerful punch and make a terrific Mother’s Day present. Shapiro provides a sharply observed, intimate and exquisite look at the underside of her marriage. At times, you feel that she and her husband are standing naked before you, the view is that close-up and personal. Candor is her strength and anyone who has been in a decades-relationship with a significant other will recognize much of what Shapiro describes here: The longstanding love, the frequent frustration, the occasional competition, the demands of aging parents and sick children, the mutual dependency, the financial vulnerability, the tenderness, the lust, the commitment to keep showing up for each other, and the grace that comes with the gradual acceptance of imperfection and knowledge that your lover is trying his or her best, By describing in candid detail the tiny cracks in her marriage, Shapiro illustrates that these cracks don’t add up to damage, but rather to strength---an art that the Japanese call “Kinsugi” (golden joinery), in which cracks in pottery are repaired with gold, silver or platinum, so that breakage and repair are considered part of the vital history of a piece rather than something to hide. (Thank you Wikipedia.) There are some gorgeous sentences in this book. Here are some of my favorites:
“Where does hope go when it vanishes?”
“At 40 my mother died. And then a long, merciful stretch of ordinary days.”
“There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.”
“It was not the education I wanted, but it was the one I got.”
“The more dangerous the situation, the slower his pulse.”
“We were struggling contented, bewildered, joyful, full of longing, grief-stricken, fearful, searching, at peace.”
“But I can no longer say to M. that we’re just beginning. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. That solid yet light thing---our journey—is no longer new. He identified my mother’s body. We took turns holding our seizing child. We have watched his mother disappear in plain sight. We have raised Jacob together. We know each other in a way that young couple couldn’t have fathomed. Our shared vocabulary—our own language---will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made again and again.”
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
The author weaves back and forth in time effortlessly, ...
By lisali
The author weaves back and forth in time effortlessly, interspersing quotes from other authors all while being present in her story. This book is a gem.
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