The first ”lightning bolt” came from the pandemic itself. (He is now cancer-free.)Īnd then, during the early days of the pandemic, Shapiro was cleaning out her office closet, trying to restore order among “trash bags and piles of paper,” when “something made me sit down and reread this unfinished manuscript.” Instead Shapiro was dealing with the whims of fortune, good and ill: the bounty that came with “Inheritance,” which led to a podcast about “ Family Secrets,” followed by the calamity of the cancer that afflicted her husband, filmmaker Michael Maren. You could blame it on the pandemic, except the pandemic hadn’t happened yet. Shapiro wrote about 120 pages and then shelved them. Over time, Waldo becomes enmeshed with a neighbor family, the Wilfs, who are still coping with a fatal crash on their street decades earlier. Shapiro had an idea for her next novel - the core story of Waldo Shenkman, which begins around the turn of the 21st century. The toughest part of reaching the end of a road is not knowing what comes next.

This month Shapiro releases her first novel in 15 years, “Signal Fires.” This development is sure to excite the diehard fan base she has built with her bestselling memoirs - from 1998’s “ Slow Motion” to 2010’s “Devotion” and, most recently, the transformative “ Inheritance” (2019), in which she tries a DNA kit as a lark, only to discover that her beloved father was in fact not her biological dad. And yet, as she soon confesses, she had to ditch her writerly compass to break the longest dry spell of her career - at least in fiction. Weaving deftly between novels and memoirs, publishing essays on craft, teaching at home and abroad and even - why not? - running a podcast, the author seems to move with frictionless grace between worlds and mediums while the rest of us squint at our creative lives and wonder where we’re going.

Shapiro has been making things look easy since her debut novel, “Playing With Fire,” was published in 1990. “We appreciate you, thanks for your patience.” Despite our communication glitches, the author is unfazed, ready to work with my messy schedule. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.Īs my spouse navigates bumpy, rainy backroads in upstate New York and I try to keep my smartphone pointed in the direction of the greatest number of bars, writer Dani Shapiro appears on my tiny screen, composed and serene in the upstairs study of her Connecticut home, with its shelf of books, colorful chaise and artfully chaotic pinboard.

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