“Devotion” by Dani Shapiro
I was so moved and engaged by Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, that I sought out books she referred to in it by Jane Kenyon, and her earlier memoir, Devotion, about her tangled quest for clarity in spiritual matters.
Shapiro skillfully weaves together pieces of her past and present. Her observant Orthodox Jewish father, her atheist and difficult mother, her own practice of yoga, her son’s infant near-death experience, and her own attempts to…I’m not sure what to put here. Figure it all out? Make meaning of it? Because really, her spiraling, back-and-forth, round-and-round memoir does not acknowledge the kind of meaning or comfort usually found in devotional memoirs. Her memoir is ambivalent, in the true meaning of the word, pulled in many directions.
We can’t see what’s coming. We can’t know it. All we have is our hope that all will be well, and our knowledge that it won’t always be so. We live in the space between this hope and this knowledge. (239)
I loved this book, the writing, the stories of her life, and her struggle to make meaning and acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of any meaning that does become clear. I think I’ll be going back to all Shapiro’s books, from the beginning, and working my way back up to these. If a mark of a good book is one that makes me think, and want to learn, these two short books pack a substantial emotional and intellectual wallop. (I may come back to edit this last poorly constructed sentence. It’s not elegant and mellifluous, but it says what I mean.)