Painfully and carefully, Dani Shapiro steps us through her days and nights with candor. Written with novel-like care and leaning against the elegant wall of poetry, Shapiro's story stays with her reader long after the reading is over. A remarkable rite-of-passage story Slow Motion is the best of the best memoirs I've read in. This item: Slow Motion by Dani Shapiro Hardcover $3.05. Only 4 left in stock - order soon. Ships from and sold by WYEMART USA. Family History by Dani Shapiro Hardcover $14.45. Only 1 left in stock - order soon. Sold by Wish Accessories and ships from Amazon. Slow Motion Dani Shapiro on Amazon.com.FREE. shipping on qualifying offers. Dani Shapiro’s memoir Slow Motion was the perfect choice for Project Brave Woman that was sitting right under my nose for months. I had become interested in Shapiro’s writing after learning about her from my mother, Monica, and after hearing interviews with her on two of my favorite podcasts, Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday and MarieTV. Dani Shapiro's new memoir dramatizes the dizzying ways a lifetime passes, loops around, speeds up and sometimes seems to stand still. Slow Motion, recounted how, as a young woman, Shapiro.
Dani Shapiro’s memoir Slow Motion was the perfect choice for Project Brave Woman that was sitting right under my nose for months. I had become interested in Shapiro’s writing after learning about her from my mother, Monica, and after hearing interviews with her on two of my favorite podcasts, Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday and MarieTV. I read her memoir Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Lifeduring the first few months of 2019. Because it was a library book, I couldn’t underline my favorite passages like I normally do, so I took to writing down sentences and paragraphs I found essential in a notebook. Considering how many pages I filled with her words, investing in my own copy of the book and underlining may have been the smarter choice.
Dani Shapiro Bio
Dani Shapiro Mother
Slow Motion Dani Shapiro
At the same time I was reading Still Writing, I was also struggling to choose a second memoir for this project. I had already chosen A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel for its examination of female childhood and its proximity in location/community to me, as it was set in a small Midwestern town not far from Muncie. I knew that I wanted my second book to contrast completely from this choice while also fulfilling the core requirement of relating to the cultivation of female bravery and authenticity during transition as related to community. I was only familiar with Shapiro’s recent memoirs, which included volumes on marriage and faith, and had thus dismissed her writing as an option. In Still Writing, however, she referenced her first memoir, Slow Motion, which discussed her experience of helping her parents through a debilitating car accident. Further research showed that Slow Motion, while separate from my life in terms of factual situation and geographic location, was exactly the book I was looking for.
On its surface, the events of Slow Motion may seem too extraordinary in terms of circumstance to be relatable. When she’s only 22, Dani Shapiro’s parents are involved in a devastating car accident, forcing her to come home to confront not only her parents’ mortality, but her own struggles with alcoholism, drug use, and an abusive affair with a married middle-aged man. While there’s no denying that these circumstances are not common to most women who are coming of age, what is remarkable about Shapiro’s memoir are not the scandalous surface events but the deep internal struggle depicted within the main character. Much of Dani’s struggle comes from her own internal treatment of her self, which ultimately leads her to realize that change must come from within, regardless of outside challenges. Her transformation from lost and adrift mistress to hardened but mature adult on her way to recovery makes for a remarkable case study on how to overcome internal and external challenges to achieve a life of authenticity.
The questions that Shapiro’s younger self grapples with in the memoir are many of the universal questions at the heart of this project: How do you pull yourself out of a place of inauthenticity and disconnection to one of self-reflection and honesty? How can the outside influences of family, friends and community both help and hinder the search for authenticity? How much of our struggles come from internal or external forces, and how does recognizing this ratio inform the ways we choose to move forward toward healing and growth? It is Shapiro’s laser-sharp focus on this transition from naïve young person to wizened adult that most interests me and is most helpful in thinking about transitions concerning female bravery and authenticity. Shapiro pulls no punches, but the harshness within her narration of her younger self is laced with compassion and empathy, as well as a desire to show readers how hard it is to become an authentic, autonomous woman when so many external forces and expectations pull women in different, equally harmful directions.
Slow Motion By Dani Shapiro
Linked below is my analysis of Slow Motion as a text, and located on the “Lessons Learned: Memoirs” page is my personal reflection on what the text taught me about female bravery and authenticity amidst transition.