Slow Motion - Softcover

Shapiro, Dani

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747543747 ISBN 13: 9780747543749

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1999

Synopsis

At 23, Dani Shapiro had drifted far from her New Jersey roots and family. Then an accident on snowy roads left both her parents critically ill in hospital. This memoir traces Shapiro's journey back to the world she left behind, where she was faced with the task of taking care of two people who needed her desperately.

About this title

Review

Dani Shapiro was rescued by tragedy. At the age of 23 she was a wreck---a Sarah Lawrence college dropout, living the high life as the mistress (one of many, she later discovered) of her best friend's stepfather, Lenny, a high-profile New York City lawyer. It is the height of the excessive eighties and Lenny goes to extravagant lengths to keep his woman, putting her up in a large downtown apartment, draping her in furs and flashy gems and spiriting her away by Concorde to Paris for weekend flings. When she isn't with Lenny, Shapiro leisurely courts an acting and modelling career and actively pursues her drug dealer, who delivers cocaine to her door. She is at an expensive spa in California--far removed from the middle-class, orthodox Jewish home in which she was raised--when, one snowy night, her parents' car careers into the central reservation. Her return to New Jersey, to her parents' hospital bedsides, marks the beginning of a journey of discovery for which she will have to mine all her reserves of inner strength. She succeeds, and though the process is as arduous as it is painful, Shapiro finds within herself the power to nurse her mother through nearly 100 broken bones, to survive her father's death, and to reset the course of her life. Slow Motion ends where its subject's troubles began: with Shapiro, newly single, re-enrolling as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence.

Shapiro, who is the author of three previous novels, writes sparely and avoids the excessive self-consciousness that plagues some memoirs. She develops her story carefully, drawing readers ever closer into her most intimate thoughts and fears. This honest and sometimes brutal account of loss and recovery is an inspiration. --Amazon.com

Review

"A page-turner."-Mademoiselle "No doubt to regroup as rapidly as Shapiro does requires brutal honesty and a well-honed sense of humor-elements she wields artfully in her short, fabulous history. . . . She's driving with the top down. Bright Lights, Big City-the chick version."-People "Absolutely heart-rending . . . a great piece of writing and an inspirational tale . . . Slow Motion illuminates the rocky road to integrity and maturity in graceful but wrenching steps."-Salon

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0747543747
• ISBN 13: 9780747543749
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256