Interrogation: Dani Shapiro
Blood & Whiskey interview with the author of Signal Fires
[This interview first appeared in Blood & Whiskey #19, in December of 2022]
As a writer who’s dabbled in memoir, I’ve long been a fan of Shapiro’s first-person and deeply personal storytelling. Her previous book, Inheritance, was a gut-puncher and if you’re a writer you should have her Still Writing on a shelf.
Shapiro started her writing life as a novelist and with Signal Fires she returns to fiction, the story of three teens in a car at night and the wreck that ripples through the lives of two families. It ranks among my favorites of the year so I decided to reach out to Dani with a few questions…
You write often, and movingly, about family - in memoir and fiction. Family dramas are as old as storytelling itself (the bible and all), but why do they never get old?
The ecosystem of family — how we love each other, wound each other, protect each other, grieve each other — is such rich terrain, and it’s terrain we all inhabit no matter our circumstances. We all come from a mother and a father, whether we were raised by one of them, or both of them, or neither. We all are products of history.
In Signal Fires, we spend a lot of time looking up - at the stars and galaxies that are Waldo’s obsession and comfort. Did that require research on your part, or are you star-literate? Either way, what do the heavens above represent for you?
I was not star-literate when I began Signal Fires. I had moved from the city to the country, away from all that light pollution, and became curious about constellations. I discovered an app called StarWalk that traces constellations using whatever coordinates you plug in — time, date, place. I found that to be such a beautiful, poetic idea, that it’s possible to know what was happening in the cosmos during a particular moment in the past. The character of Waldo emerged out of my fascination with the app, and imagining it in the hands of a brilliant, eleven-year-old boy who finds comfort in the stars. As for what the heavens above represent for me, I find the vastness of that cosmic blanket comforting, as does Waldo.
I think many of us have those moments from our teens that stick with us and resonate ever after, for better or worse. How did you latch onto the moment that changed and rippled through the lives of every character in this book?
When I first began work on Signal Fires, I did not yet know exactly what that moment was, though in retrospect it felt inevitable. I was (and am) particularly interested in the way that a tragedy can be absorbed by a place, over time. Signal Fires opens with a terrible accident that takes place on a summer night in 1985, but most of the book takes place in the decades that follow. Families move into the neighborhood who have no idea that a tragedy occurred there — so does this somehow erase what happened, or does something linger? Certainly it lingers within the characters who experienced it, and whose lives are forever haunted by what happened, and also by the secrets they keep. So many of us — too many of us — have a moment in our teens during which our innocence is stripped away from us, and those moments do stick with us, even if our relationship to what happened is only tangential. Because we’re so young, we absorb it. But in the case of the teenagers in Signal Fires, it’s a burden they carry that shapes their adult lives.
A theme that seems to repeat throughout the book is something like: everything is happening everywhere all at once. I hear variations on that in yoga and meditation. It’s a powerful idea, a suggestion that we (like stars) never entirely cease to be. Is some version of that something you believe and practice in your life?
On my best days, this is something I believe. My whole adult life has been informed by the early loss of my father, and his sudden death certainly nudged me in the direction of thinking metaphysically, especially in my initial grieving. But that said, I have felt him with me countless times. If energy cannot be created nor destroyed, where does it go when it changes shape and form? I poured a lot of these ideas into the characters of Waldo, and also Dr. Benjamin Wilf — they’re each philosophers, in their own way, though on the opposite ends of the spectrum of life.
Can you briefly describe the emotions associated with coming back to fiction? And, if you’re working on something new… fiction, memoir, other?
Oh, it was pure joy to come back to fiction. I always assumed I would return to fiction, and yet these memoirs kept tapping me on the sternum, demanding my attention. When I made the discovery that lead to my last memoir, Inheritance, I finally felt that I had completed a particular body of work. Not to say that I won’t write memoir again, because I likely will — but that body of work, in which I was excavating, as it turns out, the very facts of my own identity? That work is done. Right now, I’m working on a few film projects. I’ve adapted Sue Miller’s last novel, Monogamy, as a feature film and the magnificent Holly Hunter is set to star in it. And I have my podcast, Family Secrets, which involves a fair amount of writing and storytelling. But my main focus right now is writing the television pilot for Signal Fires, which is in development. It’s thrilling to be able to continue to live with these characters and expand their lives beyond the pages of the book.
What books lately have wowed you - especially anything dark or crime-y?
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is fantastic, and quite dark, perhaps in its own way crime-y. I loved Richard Powers’ Bewilderment, and I am very eager to read two novels coming out this spring: Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street and Ann Napolitano’s Hello, Beautiful.
What one book (new-ish or old) should we all read in the new year?
I think we should all look at videos of puppies snuggling with babies. Oh wait… that’s not what you asked. How about a novel that slays with its quiet majesty: Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
I often cry over my own writing, and I feel terrible that I chose this profession that fills me with such dread. Inevitably, though, I have a day where I want to shout, I love to write!
Read more Blood & Whiskey author “Interrogation” interviews: HERE
Thanks for reading.
-Neal
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