New York Times Bestselling author Dani Shapiro will sign copies of her new memoir, Hourglass: Time, Love, and Marriage (Knopf, $22.95), at The Hickory Stick Bookshop on Saturday, April 15th at 4pm.
The best-selling novelist and memoirist delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds, and about the accretion, over time, of both sorrow and love.
Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning--a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become. What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves for all time when the self is so often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise--how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack? Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence.
"Compassionate, insightful, and powerfully honest, in Hourglass Dani Shapiro illuminates the deepest mysteries, contradictions, and consolations of so very much--love, memory, the people we used to be and the people we've become. In other words: life. I was absorbed by Hourglass and consoled by it, too. It's a beautiful book by a writer of rare talent." --Cheryl Strayed
"Dani Shapiro's prose is elegant and crystal clear, the perfect vehicle for her fierce intelligence and curiosity about things that lurk just out of view. Hourglass is such a lovely book." --Richard Russo
"Reading this book was like skating across a perfect piece of ice and then slowly noticing the cracks. Dark, cold water shows through. We can't see the depths. Be careful, Shapiro warns, be careful, but still she skates on in the fading light with remarkable beauty and grace." --Jenny Offill
DANI SHAPIRO is the author of the memoirs Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times and has been broadcast on This American Life. Shapiro has appearedas Oprah Winfrey's guest on Super Soul Sunday. She has also 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. Shapiro lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
This event is free and open to the public. If you are unable to attend this event, you may reserve a signed copy of Hourglass by calling The Hickory Stick Bookshop at (860) 868 0525. For further information about this event please email books@hickorystickbookshop.com