It's worth prefacing that Signal Fires isn't a pandemic novel, at least in that sense. I needed that space and time, and of course the small portion of the book that takes place in 2020 would never have taken place before." "It was like a lightning bolt, and I knew what to do. She quotes a line from the memoir that sums up that period: "I always knew there was a secret, but I didn't know the secret was me." As Shapiro read through those decade-old pages, the words, as they say, started flowing. She was fresh off a year-plus of touring to promote Inheritance, time she spent immersed in her own thematic material. Then in the early days of quarantine, a Marie Kondo-esque urge to purge hit and she discovered the discarded manuscript. She published several more books, continued to teach at the Italian writers conference she directs, and signed on to adapt Sue Miller's Monogamy for the big screen. Something I love to do in all of my books is play with the way different periods of time bump up against each other." "If you're going to upset chronology, you should really upset chronology. "I had originally thought that I would tell this story backwards in time, but there's a reason why it's next to impossible to tell stories that way," Shapiro tells EW with a laugh. A horrific accident that involves the death of a young woman provides a troubling secret for the family of the driver responsible, and the characters become haunted by what they choose to ignore. Signal Fires, which will publish next fall, follows a constellation of characters through three influential moments in their collective lives: New Year's Eve 2000, on the precipice of Y2K December 20, as the coronavirus pandemic is about to descend. (It was also the catalyst for her podcast Family Secrets, which boasts more than 20 million downloads.) Now she's returning to her signature subject matter and a (relatively) long-lost form with her first novel since 2007's Black and White.
Her 2019 memoir Inheritance became an instant New York Times best-seller and has moved nearly 200,000 copies to date. Through her particular blend of breathtaking readability and introspection, she has collected legions of devout readers. To start any announcement of Dani Shapiro's work without discussing her reign over the world of literary family secrets would be, quite frankly, to miss the point.
0 kommentar(er)
