Devotion: A Memoir
Dani Shapiro, 2010
HarperCollins
245 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061628344
Summary
In her midforties and settled into the responsibilities and routines of adulthood, Dani Shapiro found herself with more questions than answers. Was this all life was—a hodgepodge of errands, dinner dates, e-mails, meetings, to-do lists? What did it all mean?
Having grown up in a deeply religious and traditional family, Shapiro had no personal sense of faith, despite repeated attempts to create a connection to something greater. Feeling as if she was plunging headlong into what Carl Jung termed "the afternoon of life," she wrestled with self-doubt and a searing disquietude that would awaken her in the middle of the night.
Set adrift by loss—her father's early death; the life-threatening illness of her infant son; her troubled relationship with her mother—she had become edgy and uncertain. At the heart of this anxiety, she realized, was a challenge: What did she believe? Spurred on by the big questions her young son began to raise, Shapiro embarked upon a surprisingly joyful quest to find meaning in a constantly changing world. The result is Devotion: a literary excavation to the core of a life.
In this spiritual detective story, Shapiro explores the varieties of experience she has pursued—from the rituals of her black hat Orthodox Jewish relatives to yoga shalas and meditation retreats. A reckoning of the choices she has made and the knowledge she has gained, Devotion is the story of a woman whose search for meaning ultimately leads her home. Her journey is at once poignant and funny, intensely personal—and completely universal. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 10, 1962
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education— B.A., M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College
• Currently—Bethlehem, Connecticut
Dani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Inheritance (2019) Hourglass (2017), Still Writing (2013), Devotion (2010), and Slow Motion (1998). She has also written severl novels including Black & White (2007) and Family History (2004).
Shapiro's short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, Oprah Magazine, New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and many other publications.
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. She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
In 1997 she married screenwriter Michael Maren. They have one child and live in Litchfield County (Bethlehem), Connecticut. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Shapiro is a thoughtful observer, and her writing is lovely. Some of her most vivid scenes are those in which she brings other people to life.
Juliet Wittman - Washington Post
Brave, compelling, unexpectedly witty.... Stunningly intimate journey.... Thanks to Shapiro’s excruciatingly honest self-examination and crystal clear, lyrical writing, the journey—as secular swami Steve Jobs once famously said—is indeed the reward. (4 out of 4 stars)
People
(Starred review.) Shapiro's newest memoir, a mid-life exploration of spirituality begins with her son's difficult questions-about God, mortality and the afterlife-and Shapiro's realization that her answers are lacking, long-avoided in favor of everyday concerns. Determined to find a more satisfying set of answers, author Shapiro (Slow Motion) seeks out the help of a yogi, a Buddhist and a rabbi, and comes away with, if not the answers to life and what comes after, an insightful and penetrating memoir that readers will instantly identify with. Shapiro's ambivalent relationship with her family, her Jewish heritage and her secularity are as universal as they are personal, and she exposes familiar but hard-to-discuss doubts to real effect: she's neither showboating nor seeking pat answers, but using honest self-reflection to provoke herself and her readers into taking stock of their own spiritual inventory. Absorbing, intimate, direct and profound, Shapiro's memoir is a satisfying journey that will touch fans and win her plenty of new ones.
Publishers Weekly
In the last few years, memoirs by women attempting to find answers to the big spiritual questions have become a genre all their own. The best of these books includes Eat, Pray, Love and much of Anne Lamott's nonfiction—and, make no mistake, Shapiro's Devotion ranks with the best. What makes such titles work is the authors' openness to a sampler approach to faith and a seeming lack of ego, which allows them to be simultaneously unflinchingly honest and self-deprecating. Shapiro, who has written both fiction and nonfiction, grew up in a Jewish household but drifted away from the faith after the death of her very devout father. During a crisis when her son almost died in infancy, Shapiro realized that she had internalized the idea of prayer but was unsure whether or not she was a believer. Age and time, paired with the questions of an inquisitive child and her own middle-of-the-night grapplings with anxiety, force the author to take a look at what spirituality means to her. Verdict: This work should appeal to readers who enjoy memoir, self-help, spirituality, and women's books. To reveal more would undermine the reader's pleasure of discovery. Highly recommended. —Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of Alabama, Florence
Library Journal
Approaching her mid-forties, novelist Shapiro... is pulled to understand and deepen her own personal sense of faith as a means to calm the uncertainty and chaos of everyday life.... [Her] journey is a deeply reflective one, and her struggles are as complex as they are insightful, philosophical, and universally human. —Leah Strauss
Booklist
A deeply self-reflective, slow-moving memoir about the longing for spirituality. At midlife, novelist Shapiro (Black & White, 2007, etc.) was anxious, sleepless and worried about nameless things, asking herself constantly, "Who was I, and what did I want for the second half of my life?" Having grown up in a religious Jewish household in New Jersey, the daughter of a kosher-keeping father and a spiteful, unbelieving mother, Shapiro found herself, by her mid 40s, still making peace with her deceased parents. Recently, the author, her husband and their young son, Jacob, moved from Brooklyn to a bucolic spot in Connecticut, enjoying the simple life, doing yoga and going on retreats-yet not unaware of sudden, inexplicable calamity, like the illness suffered by Jacob as a six-month-old baby. Although his infantile seizure disorder was resolved with medication, Shapiro felt plagued by the specter of mortality, or as she learned through her Buddhist practices, what the Buddha gleaned under the Bodhi tree: "the fragility of life, the truth of change." Befriending such well-known yoga teachers as Sylvia Boorstein and Stephen Cope, whose teachings grace this memoir, the author worked through her alienation from God. She found a neighborhood synagogue and started Jacob at Hebrew school, attended occasional services, donned her father's traditional garb for the Jewish Theological Seminary's first egalitarian service and found joy in visiting her aged aunt. In short, Shapiro recognized that the sacred can be found in the familiar and everyday. There is much pretty writing here, taking cues from the limpid prose of Annie Dillard and Thoreau, as well as a winning candor and self-scrutiny. Measured, protracted prose leads this affecting journey.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Devotion: A Memoir:
1. Briefly, and cogently, explain what Dani Shapiro is searching for? What is she afraid of? Does her quest resonate with you, do you identify with her? Do you think medications are called for?
2. Why does Shapiro feel so little connection to the Jewish Orthodox faith of her youth? What about you—have you continued to practice the faith in which you were brought up? Why or why not?
3. How did her parents shape, or at least affect, Shapiro's life, perhaps bringing her to the point where she is now? What was Dani's relationship to each parent? How have their deaths affected her? In what way is her struggle with her faith bound up with with her parents?
4. Talk about Shapiro's attitude toward ritual—the chants, prayers and observances. How does she define ritual and what role does she wish it to play in her life?
5. What is the difference between religion...faith...and spirituality? Can you have any one without the other two?
6. It is suggested in Devotion that while answers may not exist, asking the questions is important. Do you find that advice unhelpful, even a bit too pat? Or do you agree that asking questions is part of spiritual growth?
7. What does Shapiro's practice of Buddhist and Hindi rituals add to her life? Why does she turn to those faiths?
8. During her Master Level Energy Work with Sandra, Dani says she had "entered a place beyond belief." What does she mean by that remark? Has that ever happened to you?
9. What does Shapiro mean when she says that "there is value in simply standing there whether the sun is shining, or the wind whipping all around"?
10. In the course of this memoir, what does Shapiro learn or come to understand—how does she grow?
11. Pick out passages in the book that strike you as significant ...either personally, as they apply to your life, or generally, in a larger, metaphysical sense. Read them outloud and discuss why they are meaningful to you.
12. How much in this book did you find relates to you personally? How many times, if at all, did you go ah-ha! while reading? Do you feel a sense of connection with Dani Shapiro? Or do her experiences have little in common with your own beliefs and life?
13. Do you like the book's structure—it's short chapters that read almost like essays or meditations? Are there certain chapters you enjoyed reading most? What about the slow pace of the memoir...did you want it to move more quickly, or did you appreciate its slow, meditative quality?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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