I know plenty of people over the years, students even, who haveīeen gifted but not obsessed. Shapiro: I have thought a lot about that. GAL: If you had been told the truth as a child about your conception do you think you would have still found your calling as a writer? It was not something that I ever thought in the back of my mind, “Well, maybe my father.' No, never. And yet it was a stunning, shocking discovery for me. I don’t have to wonder if I knew this on some level. One of the things that I think is unique and interesting too on the level of the unthought known and what the unconscious is conscious of, is that my work serves as breadcrumbs. I attributed great meaning to those discoveries, more meanings than I think they ultimately deserved because I was looking for reasons for why it felt there were secrets hanging like dust motes in the air. I knew about my father's first marriage because I had a sister but been married to a woman who had died. I discovered that my mother had been divorced before my mother married my father. My parents behaved like people who had secrets, and I knew what some of them were. theme of the coercive power of family secrets, and I understood that there were secrets in my family. There was a sense that I was trying to uncover something that I couldn’t get at. I think that is true in all of my work even my first unpublished work of really bad short stories that sit in my basement. I typed that exact paragraph from Still Writing into an email to my editor, like 'oh my God.' was the unthought known writ large on the page. But I did read through some of my previous books while I was thinking, exploring and writing Inheritance.

I don’t think any writer is you do so at your own peril. What have you learned about the impact of keeping a secret for an entire lifetime?ĭani Shapiro: Wow, I am sitting here, smiling and shaking my head because I am not in the habit of going back and rereading my earlier work. You clearly grew up with a powerful sense that something wasn’t quite right in your family and you wrote memoir after memoir trying to uncover the truth. They tried to protect me from themselves, from their own histories.”. Though I couldn’t have expressed it, I knew with a child’s instincts that life was seen by both my parents as a teeming, seething, frightful hall of mirrors. Every word spoken by my parents contained within it a hidden hard kernel of what wasn’t being said. In Still Writing you wrote: “Secrets floated through our home like dust motes in the air. Girls At Library: Your previous memoirs share a theme of family secrets and lies.

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