On the recommendation of a fellow mother/writer BFF, last week I tucked into “Devotion,” by Dani Shapiro. A memoir of a 40ish woman with fulfilling family and career lives, she struggles with conquering extreme anxiety and questions of faith. The book poses a quandary familiar to me: how exactly, do you stop the racing? How do you feel content and not afraid that something terrible will happen to you and the ones you love?
Guided by a writer of gorgeous prose, who is also a blonde, a mom, a Jew and a yogi, (I am least four of those things), I hoped for some light and self-knowledge in terms of my own similar fears and questions about belief.
“Devotion” is nostalgic, deeply personal and edgy. Dani seems like someone I know, or should know. An enviable writer who has found the discipline and balance to produce beautiful books, she has succeeded beyond the difficult relationships of her past, and is struggling to really know herself as a mother to her son and a wife to her husband. But she is someone who searches obsessively for meaning, worries about not living up to her own expectations, or knowing what the f she’s doing.
Yes, that sounds familiar.
It felt like she was inside my head at times – or maybe that I was inside hers, while she struggled with reconciling her Orthodox Jewish background with her more recent interests in Eastern philosophies and her New England WASP hometown. And oy, the anxiety she has at the onset of the book, especially about things happening to her loved ones. What wrestling and twisting and angsting and obsessing – it felt like my brain!
This really resonated:
“Just a few months ago, Michael and Jacob had been driving home late at night from a baseball game when someone threw a glass bottle of salad dressing off an embankment. The bottle hit the roof of our car and shattered. One fraction of a second earlier, and it would have hit the windshield.
Salad dressing, I thought to myself, when Michael told me what happened. I never considered salad dressing.”
I’m having my own waking up in the middle of the night with heart palpitations situation these past few years, often drowning under the idea that this life I chose, with family, with work, with all the things I’m certain I want, is one merely of striving, of stress and of lists, big and small, of things to check off. There are moments in my day that are a constant struggle to breathe, and the desire for a free moment to just think a clear thought and make sense of all the (self-imposed) constant activity is overwhelming.
This book made me a little stressed out while I was reading it (more ways to think about bad things that can happen, yay!), but ultimately, her honesty and guidance played the role of a smarter, slightly older and definitely more established writer and cool mom person I’d like to kibitz with. One who admits, in print, “It’s cool. This is some big stuff and I’m totally freaking out too. Let’s have a book club.”
When I think about her writing in terms of being a mother and having to compartmentalize her brain into action (to-do lists!) and later reflection (making sense of it all), it made so much sense that she would search her soul, looking for religious or spiritual guidance that would provide a framework for daily life. Her writing sounds like her own therapy, and it is, but it’s so thoughtful and sharp and wistfully funny that it could never be called indulgent or self-helpy.
Dani shares her past in such a specific and intimate way, with poignant memories of her late parents in the context of belief and faith, melded with the sweetness and of her present life as a parent to her own son. There’s a nostalgia to the way she writes about her current family life that I recognize too. Sometimes when I tune in to watch myself with my children it feels like a movie or a short story I’m recording or writing for posterity. I feel hyper-awarene all the time of how sweet and fleeting raising children is, even as I try to drink in every moment with every photo, every hug, every inhale of their little children smell.
This piece I found on Dani Shapiro’s website is really relevant to the idea of what it means to be a writer and to get to a place of truth. And what it means to be a mother, and how at odds these forces can be. How honesty and working out your schpilkes on paper or online can take on a new dimension when the kids start Googling.
http://danishapiro.com/all-titles/the-me-my-child-mustn%E2%80%99t-know/
So thing is, I would like to be like Dani. She has the discipline and the doggedness to ask difficult questions of herself, and then write a beautiful book as she struggles to answer them, as she “climbs inside the questions.” When I think back on reading this book at this time in my life, I’ll conjure an image of her sitting at her computer and forcing herself to write every morning, and it never ever getting easier to begin. I’ll think of her doing her yoga and going to workshops and trying to sit every day. I’ll think of her trying to find a community that makes sense for her as a modern Jewish woman and an intellectual and to look for meaning in the rituals of daily life.
Dani, you’re a MILK.