Disappointments and fears, however, are set aside for another time. Toward the close of this charged memoir, Shapiro describes an evening where she and M sit before the fire talking about writing - the vocation that binds them and also stirs up such anxieties in the marriage.
But, of course, no one can always "take care of it." That's the mundane, but, nonetheless, raw recognition at the core of Hourglass: that we're always bound to fall short on our promises to one another. Shapiro admits she and M have "First World problems." But she's also ruthlessly clear about the trade-offs they unknowingly made in following their literary ambitions: She tells us they work seven days a week and have no savings, no retirement plans, "nothing to fall back on, but each other."Įver since they first met, Shapiro says, M has reassured her with the phrase, "I'll take care of it" - whether the pesky "it" be a woodpecker or an electric bill. In addition to its many other virtues, Hourglass underscores the tightrope tension of trying to support a middle-class lifestyle on writing. But Hourglass is different: It's less an account of catastrophe than it is a clear-eyed inspection of the slow cracks certain to develop in a long marriage. Her other memoirs have explored the terror of coping with her then-infant son's life-threatening illness and her parents' deaths. Her first and most celebrated memoir, Slow Motion, recounted how, as a young woman, Shapiro dropped out of college, became the mistress of a friend's stepfather and grew estranged from her Orthodox Jewish parents until a devastating car accident transformed her into her mother's caretaker. You might imagine Shapiro witnessing that scene and joking, "It's come to this."īut Shapiro isn't replaying that memory for laughs as a writer, she is known more for ruthless self-interrogation and a tough, taking-it-on-the-chin tone. Shapiro's husband was once a foreign correspondent, accessorized with a gun and bulletproof vest when he ventured into war zones but in that wintery moment of reckoning, he's more Elmer Fudd than Ernest Hemingway. Now pushing 60, he is standing in the driveway in his bathrobe, his pale legs stuffed into galoshes, aiming a rifle at the woodpecker, who for months has been jackhammering holes into the side of their house.
How?ĭani Shapiro's new memoir, Hourglass, opens on a scene from a marriage: On a winter's day, Shapiro looks out a window of her old house in Connecticut, and spots her husband.
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