I thought I understood my father’s sorrow. In this annotated passage from her memoir, Shapiro writes about how comparing two DNA tests led her to uncover a family secret that “flooded every corner” with the truth she had sought her entire life as a writer. She had examined her whole life via writing, but still did not know the truth about herself. Still, she writes in “Inheritance” that even after writing deeply about her father, there was something she “could never quite fathom” about her relationship with her parents. “When I discovered as a teenager that he’d had a wife I’d never known about…I always longed to know more about that time in his life,” wrote Shapiro. To make him proud, after the fact,” Dani told the PBS NewsHour about her father, Paul Shapiro.Īmong the works that Shapiro penned for the father who raised her was a 1998 essay called the “Secret Wife,” about with her discovery that he had been wed to a woman who died just six months after they married. That has been one of the driving forces of my life as a writer. “My dad died before he had a chance to be proud of me. But she had long sought to better understand him through her writing before that moment. Years after her dad died, Dani Shapiro found out he was not her biological father. Our March pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club “Now Read This” is Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance.” Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up for our newsletter.
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