Review by New York Times Review
DANI SHAPIRO has a problem: Things are going really well. After two failed marriages, she has a husband she adores. Her son, who suffered from a rare and life-threatening seizure disorder, is fine at 10, saved by early medical intervention and his parents' unstinting care. She has the acclaim she's sought for years, a Connecticut home straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie and, in her mid-40s, a delicate, undiminished beauty. She is a wreck. She wants to know why. So do we. In her absorbing novels, articles and well-received 1998 memoir, "Slow Motion," Shapiro has written movingly about the tragedies that shaped her life. She grew up in a tense Orthodox Jewish household where her parents were deeply divided about religion. Her observant father became addicted to painkillers; her mother resented her faith and seethed with rage, much of it directed at Dani. Shapiro often felt like the black sheep - or, as she puts it, the "blond sheep" - in her own home. She rebelled, drank too much, dropped out of college, became mistress to her best friend's stepfather, a wealthy married lawyer, in a spectacularly ill-advised affair. Then a car crash, in which her father was killed and her mother broke 80 bones, altered her life forever. Shapiro became a student of life's fragility, the inevitability of loss. Her fortunes have drastically improved since her mother's death, her third marriage and her child's recovery. Yet these past years have done little to reassure her. She seems as anxious as in the days after 9/11, when she picked up her family and fled to rural(ish) Connecticut. "Deep within my body, the past is still alive," she writes. "Everything that has ever happened keeps happening." An osteopath tells her that her body reacts to inconsequential events as if there's a state of emergency. Some of us might reach for the Xanax. Shapiro reaches for a higher state of being. Her crisis, she feels, is not medical but spiritual. "Everything I had ever done had led me here - and while here wasn't a bad place at all, it also wasn't enough." At a certain age (heading-into-middle) and level of income (upper middle), Americans are prone to ask themselves, in the tradition of Peggy Lee, "Is That All There Is?" This tendency has spawned a subgenre of Seeker books - like Kathleen Norris's "Cloister Walk," Anne Lamott's "Traveling Mercies" and, of course, Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." With "Devotion," Shapiro joins their ranks. (Sort of: her tone is cool and arm's-length, rather than, say, the "Let's go, girlfriend!" bonhomie of Gilbert.) In short, lyrical bursts of prose, Shapiro explores various flavors of belief that exist, she says, "on the other side of logic": "energy work" with a woman who channels spirits by the laying-on of hands; the spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which in her 20s Shapiro attended for years, though she did not really think she was an alcoholic; a form of Judaism that is loving and comforting, unlike what she perceives as the punishing, judgmental Orthodoxy of her youth; the Brahma Viharas, the key virtues of Buddhism (loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity) - is it possible for any human being to consistently practice them? Shapiro is a gifted chronicler of frayed nerves. At one point, her child now healthy, she writes: "I was still shivering in the shadow of Jacob's illness. . . . I had trouble trusting that it was really over. . . . Motherhood was still new for me - and I had barely known it without stomach-lurching fear. . . . I had begun to feel - and it was a bitter feeling - that the world could be divided into two kinds of people: those with an awareness of life's inherent fragility and randomness, and those who believed they were exempt." Yet after a while her anhedonia becomes less understandable and more exasperating. Alone in her house with her espresso machine and her "bottles of gourmet vinegar, bee pollen, truffle oil," she reflects, "I've been having trouble maintaining a sense of solitude." And while she goes on to explain what she means ("the kind of silence inside of which one can transact some private business with the fewest obstacles, in Thoreau's words"), one finds oneself thinking, perhaps ungenerously, that this pondering is a luxury of the privileged. The searching seems to bring Shapiro nothing but more tsoris. "At times I was convinced that I had made a huge mistake, delving this intensely into spiritual matters. Was I becoming one of those earnest, humorless people?" (My marginal note, I confess: "Yes.") Shapiro's meditations are interwoven with stories from her past, the backdrop to her anxiety and doubt Memories of her son - the terror in the first year of his life when what stood between him and irreversible brain damage was an experimental white powder - are harrowing for anyone who's ever had a sick child. But also memorable is a scene in which, in an effort to reconcile with her mother, Irene, Shapiro decides they should go to therapy together. In their last session, Irene brings a manila envelope with the results of a scan confirming that her cancer has metastasized; before they can discuss it, she leaves in a fury, because, Shapiro thinks, the therapist was siding with her. I've no doubt Shapiro's mother was angry and self-centered, perhaps monstrously so; earlier, Irene had been remarkably absent when Shapiro's own son was ill. Still, just reading this story, where the mother doesn't get a chance to discuss news of her fatal disease, you wish Shapiro had a moment of sympathy or forgiveness. Shapiro quotes Anne Sexton, who says that "pain engraves a deeper memory." True. But while Shapiro talks about being free of pain, she also clings to it; it seems too much a part of her identity to let it go. We are 195 pages into a 240-page book, and no amount of meditating and visits to rabbis has stemmed the rush of sentences like "Every thought led to bleakness and despair" - followed by a recitation of all the things that could go wrong in her life. Intermittently Shapiro hints at wisps of wisdom she has gained. But her searching doesn't seem to allow her to break out of her own angst, to stop looking inward. There is a Hebrew expression, tikkun olam, which means "healing the world": one of the central tenets of Judaism is that you're here to finish God's work of creation while you're on earth. Religion, spirituality, however you define it - let's call it an alertness to another dimension of being that is not empirically provable - helps you connect more lovingly and fully to your family, your friends and the world. A search for meaning must lead to a reaching out; if it doesn't, where does it leave you? By the end of "Devotion," Shapiro does conclude that while she believes we are all connected in some way, she will always have doubt about God. That's fine, and honest. But I couldn't help wishing that two years of spiritual searching would bring her out of her funk; that perhaps 1 could lead her to the Congregation of Cher, where instead of everyone chanting "Amen," they'd shout: Snap out of it! 'At times I was convinced I had made a huge mistake, delving this intensely into spiritual matters.' Judith Newman is the author of "You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 21, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Approaching her mid-forties, novelist Shapiro (Black and White, 2007) finds her life dominated by a seemingly unending list of to-do's and a constant feeling of anxiety over which she has no control. Much of her unease comes from the effort to make sense of certain events in her past including her father's death and a frightening health condition that affected her infant son along with struggling to understand the turmoil that defined her relationship with her mother. While her childhood had been infused with religious tradition, Shapiro doesn't consider herself a believer or a nonbeliever. Yet, she is pulled to understand and deepen her own personal sense of faith as a means to calm the deep-rooted uncertainty and chaos of everyday life. In doing so, she seeks out a variety of different experiences and practices, such as yoga and silent meditation retreats, along with visits to the local synagogue and her Orthodox Jewish relatives. Shapiro's journey is a deeply reflective one, and her struggles are as complex as they are insightful, philosophical, and universally human.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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. (Feb.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
Review by Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 retreatsyet 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
