Dani Shapiro

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Danny Shapiro, best selling author of three memoirs and five novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, tin House, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times,

and has been broadcast on nprs This American Life. Her newest book is Our Glass, Time, Memory Marriage. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you feed dot net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to five of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out

these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed dot net flash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Danny Shapiro. Hi, Danny, welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, great to be with you. I'm excited to have you on a couple of different reasons.

One is Jonathan Fields, who's a friend of both of ours, recommended you, and uh, you mentioned that you're also a listener of the show, so that's always wonderful to have somebody on. And now, after reading a couple of your books, I'm even more excited to have you on. So I'm glad you're here me too. So let's start off like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves that are inside of us, that are

always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work

that you do. Yeah, I love that parable so much, you know, when I think of, you know, feeding the inner wolf. Part of where I go with it is the way that in my life in the past, when I was quite a bit younger, I I think I've fed the bad wolf a whole lot more than I fed the good wolf, and very particularly in terms of the fear part. So much of the choices that I made were based on fear or anxiety, fear based decisions,

and fear based choices. All the while I had very very good and strong instincts that I wasn't really listening to, or I listened to them in some ways. In my life and and not others. In terms of my writing life, I tended to listen to my instincts, but in terms of other aspects of my life, not so much. And one of the things that really changed enormously for me was probably about a dozen years ago, when I was

writing my memoir Devotion. I began to really feel in a very powerful way the way that we human beings are all internally very much the same in terms of really what drives us, and that sense of a partners and a loneness and danger. Uh, and fear really just kind of practically disappeared, and in its place where all the gifts of the good wolf. Yeah, I think fear

is a big one. And reading your books, I can definitely see a strain of fear or you know, you could call it Jewish worrying, right, you know, that sort of threads itself through your books. And I was kind of curious since Devotion was written, Uh, you know, it's been a while, how you were you know with the Devotion is really your exploration for a spiritual life, I guess I'll call it, and trying to reconcile your modern life with your Judeic history and trying to find a

modern approach to spirituality. So I was just kind of curious, what does that look like for you a decade later. One of the things I think that happened with Devotion is that the publication of Devotion fundamentally changed me. I mean, usually and always the writing of a book changes me in some way. But in the case of Devotion, the writing of it deepened me and was a tremendous learning experience.

But the publication of it also was because while I was writing Devotion, as you said, it's a book about trying to reconcile the extremely religious upbringing that I had, coming from an orthodox Jewish family, and having fled that and finding yoga and finding Buddhism and honestly a creative life, that that was and is very much a spiritual practice

for me. I was worried when I was writing the book that I was writing a book that no one would read, because it felt so idiosyncratically me Um, and it felt like you'd have to be Um, you know, a little bit Jewish and a little bit Buddhist, and you know, daughter of a difficult mother and a mother of a of a baby who had been sick and a wife and mother who moved from New York City to rural Connecticut. You have to be all those things to identify with devotion. And I really thought, now I've

really gone and done it. I've I've told such a personal story that no one will relate. And instead, what happened was pretty much from the day Devotion came out and people started reading it, I started receiving letters and emails and invitations from people of every walk of life of you know, um, every religion, every creed, every color, every age, both genders, all genders, you know, like just just everybody, uh seemed to be connecting to it. And what they all were saying to me was, You've told

my story. And I thought, well, how have I by telling my story in the deepest possible way that I know? How how is it that I've all so told yours? And that was a profound shift for me. I stopped being afraid of public speaking, truly. I was cured of it, which is a good thing because I do it all

the time. And it used to feel like, you know, a heart attack, you know, every time I did it, or I would have to medicate myself or I would have to you know, just do so many things in order to feel okay getting up in front of an audience, and since two thousand and ten, when Devotion came out, I can get up in front of an audience of any size, thousands of people and feel really truly at at ease. And it came from that sense of, oh,

we are connected. What I'm saying, if I am really true to my own authentic experience in all of its complexity, if I'm really true to it, it is going to

tug on your heartstrings as well. And that was huge. Yeah, it's an incredibly powerful book, and I do think it does touch on a particularly modern malady I guess I would say, which is, as we go on in life and we start to look for meaning for a lot of us, if we look back to the way we were raised, that it brings up a lot of questions that aren't easily answerable, right It if just with what we know with science these days and with what we

were told as children, and immediately create some sort of conflict. So we look there and we're a little bit drawn that direction. And then there's all this other spiritual stuff. I think spiritual but not religious might be one of the largest, you know, identifications of people these days. So you tapped in perfectly into a very modern malady that I think more and more people and you know, that's what I'm doing with this show, and I think more

and more people are kind of going through that. Yeah, for sure, I think I had spent years of my life and the time that I really fled Orthodox Judaism, it felt to me that if I was fleeing that, if I was fleeing the music I know, you know, and the rituals I know, and that we're you know ingrained in me, you know, that we're almost part of my DNA, that if I did that, then I wasn't entitled to have anything. And I spent a lot of years, all of my twenties into my thirties, with that sense

of um, all or nothing. I have to be in the world that I came from and was brought up in, or I don't have a right to anything else. And and that was you know, it was okay for a while. I mean, I think their phases in life where a spiritual life doesn't necessarily feel front and center or the most essential. But then reaching my mid thirties and getting

married and having a baby. And you know when my son was born, about six months after he was born, uh, he became very very ill, uh in a in a very terrifying way, and we were not at all sure that he was going to recover from this rare disease

that he had. And I found myself constantly praying, constantly, you know, every moment when I was rocking him to sleep at night, I would be praying, and these Hebrew words would fly into my head and um, it didn't even have anything to do with believing them or even understanding them, but it had to do with the sense that I that I had to pray, but I didn't know who or what I was praying to, and there was no form for it anymore. And and I think that that was really the beginning for me. My son

did recover, Uh. I don't think it was because my prayers were answered. I think we staggeringly fortunate. But it left me with that feeling of anxiety terror. Uh. Having a window into what can happen that is so scary. I think if you're a parent, probably the sense of um, potentially losing your child or losing your child is the worst thing that can happen to any human being. It's like, one of the only things I feel like I know for sure is that that's the worst thing. Any other

loss is not that loss. And so having been used with that, then this sense of what do I believe? And then when my son started reaching an age where he could ask those kinds of questions, he started asking them, do you believe in God? What do you think happens when we die? You know, those kinds of questions, and I felt like I had to address them. I grew up with answers, right the people surrounding me had answers

for how to live. And I didn't buy that um, and I didn't buy the US and them mentality of most organized religions. But I did feel that it would be a very beautiful and very important thing to live inside the questions and really explore uh spiritual wisdom UM, and open myself up for the first time to other wisdom UM, and not only to the language of my childhood or the religion UM that I was born into.

And you know that I am I mean, I am Jewish, But does that mean that I can't read Thomas Merton or Tick not Han or Pama children or uh, you know, the list goes on and absorb the magnificence of their wisdom. Are they off limits to me because they're not part of the religious canon? You know? I think? I think no. So that was all very very present for me. Yeah, I think oftentimes the religion of our childhood is often

the hardest to hear for us. Sometimes it's the hardest to turn back to when things are difficult, and conversely, sometimes it's the easiest. I like what you said about all or nothing. I actually pulled that out of the book, as as something that you had mentioned. You were talking about buying, and I don't know how to say the words, so I'll ask you to help me with the word. But missus masusas, you were buying masusas, and you couldn't

just buy one. You suddenly felt like if you were going to get one, then you had to follow all the rules and get one on every single door in the house. And I really relate with that all or nothing thinking, and I think moving away from that has been probably one of the most healing things I've done in my life, is to start to recognize that tendency and moved to the middle for myself on things. Yeah, that was such a revelation for me. Uh that moment where I was with my family, we were in Italy.

We went to the Jewish ghetto in Venice, beautiful place, and there was this store that was selling you know, beautiful judaica, beautiful artifacts and religious symbols and yet a missussa. For people who don't know what it is is it's considered like a protective object that is placed on the doorpost of your home to protect the people inside the home from harm. And it's a lovely idea. But the way that I grew up, there were missussas on every single door, not just the outside doors, but all of

the inside doors as well. And then so there I was in this store and I was about to do this lovely thing of buying this one missussa from my home and you know, adopting one small piece of the traditions that I was raised in. And then what stopped me was, Oh, I can't do that. Wait, what's the blessing? I don't know the blessing. Do I need a Rabbi to come to bless the mississa? Do I need to buy them for all of the doors of my house?

And the feeling that I had at that moment was all or nothing has always led to nothing for me. If my only two choices are all or nothing, I'm going with nothing. And then so where does that leave me? So so much of the exploration, not just in writing Devotion, but in the years following Devotion have had to do with what the Buddhists would call the middle way. Or you asked me before what the years after Devotion and

and spiritual practice have been like? And you know, one of the things that happened when I finished that book was I really just wanted to continue writing that book for the rest of my life because I got to do nothing but stare out the window and think about spiritual matters and practice yoga and meditate and and get paid for it. Like I was, I was just living and you know, read great spiritual texts. I was living just an absolutely magically powerful spiritual life during the years

that I was writing Devotion. And then I finished it, and there was you know, kind of a now, what how do I continue now that I'm not writing this book? Because I didn't. I didn't go on the journey to write the book. I wrote the book so I could go on the journey and you know, that's a that's a real distinction between certain kinds of books. Um, this was something I needed to do. And as a writer, the way that I do, the way that I find a way to do the things I most need to do,

is I write about them. And so after Devotion came out, my son was reaching an age where if he was going to be bar Mitzvahd, we were going to have to get on that. Uh. And I had been trying, and I write about that in the book. I had been trying to find a synagogue where we would feel comfortable. And it was like a comedy of errors, like it just wasn't one. I could not find my home. I could not find a home for our family. Nothing worked.

It was either too religious or too ecstatically weird or boring, or just nothing felt right. And and finally, one day when he was about eleven and a half, so children are bar mit sad at the age of thirteen, so time was really you know, ticking, and Um, I had this thought, and the thought was, I have been complaining about how this doesn't exist, and I can't find a synagogue anywhere within an hour and a half of our home.

I've tried, it just doesn't exist. And the thought that I had was, how about stopping complaining about this and feeling victimized and bad about this, and how about building it yourself? Um, if it doesn't exist, you know, why not make it happen. And as soon as I thought that, I had become friendly with a lot of rabbis and

a lot of spiritual leaders of different faiths. While I was writing devotion and I sent an email to one of my rabbi friends, one of my new rabbi friends, and I said, how would I go about finding a rabbi who maybe would come to my home once a month or so and I would gather whatever kids around that I could find, Just shake the bushes and find whatever Jewish kids or half Jewish kids, or kids who were interested in Judaism or whatever, and just have a

really smart and fun rabbi come to my house and do something with the kids. And this was my friend Rachel, who's a rabbi. And Rachel said to me, well, what about Surrey. Surrey is Rachel's wife, and Surrey is also a rabbi. And it turned and I hardly knew her

at all. And it turns out that Surrey was a middle school teacher and had raised a number of kids and bar mitzvad them herself of her own kids, and she was like, if you had looked in the dictionary for a perfect person for this job, there she was. And all it took was one email. It's that. It's that beautiful quote from Gerta. I don't know if you know it, but Gerta once he said or wrote, UM, if you want to do something, begin it, because action

has magic, grace and power in it. And it's all I had to do was begin, and it all unfolded, and within a year and a half I had created this thing that was really meaningful to a whole bunch of families, Um and from my family. When my son Jacob was barmitzvat the barmitzva happened in a old meeting hall on the village Green in our town in Connecticut. You know, one of these like Puritan um meeting halls that certainly had never seen a barmitz But inside of

it it was too lesbian rabbis performing the service. And the reason why that's important is because when I grew up, women were not allowed to touch the torah. Certainly not to become rabbis, never to read from the sacred text. All of that. Um, there was music. My son's a musician, and so am I. We sang Leonard Cohn's Broken Holla Uya, and you know, I played the piano and he played the ukulele. And there were readings that friends gave from Cole Ridge and Hannah Aren't and um. And it was

the most beautiful day of my entire life. I felt that day like I had somehow broken something open for myself, where I had found a way to do something that felt genuinely meaningful, um, religiously rigorous in terms of my son actually learned the Hebrew and he read from the Torah. But it was also spiritually inclusive and rich. And I had people coming up to me after his barmits was saying with tears rolling down their faces, saying, I've never

been to a barmitzva like this. But it was the permission that I gave myself, finally, after a huge struggle, but that I gave myself to open it up and allow for that all or nothing thinking to just go away. Hey, everybody, before you hit that fast forward button, I want to tell you about another book giveaway contest we're running. This is the last week for it. We're giving away Tom A. Sucker's book I Am Keats, which has been signed by him.

So we've got five copies. So I will draw at the end of this week five winners from the pool of people who have donated at any level, and I will send you that book. Go to one you feed dot net slash support to enter the contest and to

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I want to change direction because I could talk about devotion for the next four hours. But you have a new book called Our Glass Time, Memory and Marriage, and it's really a memoir about your marriage to your husband, which is a beautiful marriage from the sounds of it. And I want to ask you some questions from that book that I think are related to some of the

things we've been talking about. One of the things you mentioned, I thought this was a concept that is useful for marriages in particular, but I thought in relationships in general. And you talk about this idea of a third thing, you say third things are essential the marriage is what is a third thing? Oh, you honed in on one of the most important aspects of our glass for me.

I think when I came across this idea, it originated in an essay by the great poet Donald Hall, who had had a really magnificent marriage to another great poet, Jane Kenyon, who passed away tragically quite young. Don was much older than Jane, and he's been left widowed, and

you know, and elderly. He's in his late eighties now, and he's been alone for it almost as long as they were together now, And he wrote this essay that I stumbled across, and in which he described the third thing being something that needs to be central to all marriages, all long partnerships. And the idea is that there's something outside of the two of you, something that both of your gazes can look upon and share uh, you know, a passion, um, a shared interest. And Donald Hall and

Jane Kenyon did not have children. He had children from a previous marriage, but they didn't have their own children. And um, he he allows as to how children can be a third thing. Um, but I have I have some thoughts about that that I would share. But he what he what he's talking about is he says, keats uh Dutch interiors. Um, you know uh bach you know he's he talks about the idea of training your gaze at something that is beyond you, that's in the world.

And I found that to just be immeasurably beautiful. And I started thinking about couples that are in my life who have been together a very long time happily, um, and they all have third things. I was thinking about my friend. Actually I mentioned her in the book, not by name, as my eighty year old Buddhist friend, but it's definitely Sylvia Borstein, the great Buddhist teacher. And the only reason I didn't mention her in Our Glasses because I didn't use any names in our class. It was

such a delicate little book. But Sylvia I sent an early copy of our glass too, because she's been married sixty years and she completely resonated with this idea of the third thing. She and her husband have traveled the world listening to performances of Wagner's ring Cycle, like that's

a thing of their's. Another thing of their's are bicycle trips that they've taken for years and years and years, and and also bicycle together even into their eighties when their home in northern California, And and I was thinking about other couples, my in laws who had a beautiful marriage of of um sixty years I believe so sixty years, who m owned a real estate company together, and so in many ways, work was their third thing, but they loved it, and it was both of them and sort

of outside of them, talking about houses, talking about the people who were they were selling houses to, talking about developments, all of that, and and so, but in terms of children, you know, this is something I was really thinking about because I see it around me all the time because our son now is a year a year away from going to college, and so we're surrounded by our peers of people who are getting ready to send their kids

to school. And the thing about your kids being your only third thing is they're going to graduate, um and they're going to move away, and and way too often I see people then in that situation kind of looking at each other going, well, now what you know, we've raised this family, we've lost ourselves and our own passions in the process. How do we And then some people come together at that point and some people fall apart at that point. But that that sense of of the other,

of um, the beauty of that. And in terms of my husband and myself, I think in many many ways, it's been writing. We're both writers, and so we talk about writing and reading and what we read, and we share our work with each other, and so even though it's of us, it's also outside of us and something that we're sharing and we're looking at together. Yeah, I

think it's a wonderful thing. And the other challenge with children, at least can be sometimes there's differences in thoughts on exactly how to parents, so the children become a source of stress in certain cases, not a true third thing. There's not a lot of stress about how you appreciate John keats together in the same way, right, But it can also be an enormously bonding thing. I mean, I

think in our glass. One of the things that I thought a lot about was because I was really thinking and writing the book about what it means to walk alongside another person over time, like how do how do how do we do that? How do we? You know, we we grow at different rates, We don't always see eye to eye, you know, so forming ourselves sort of towards and against and alongside and away from this other human being was a completely separate human being, but you

know you're sharing this this journey. And one of the things for me to go back to that moment when our son was very sick as a baby, is I was so aware at that time that it could have meant that we fell apart. We were very newly together. We had a child within a couple of years of being together, and he was critically ill, and I remember at the time thinking, in almost a clinical way, like this is a statistic that I once heard somewhere, thinking

marriages often don't survive something like this. And instead what happened was we really did come together in a very profound way as a team, and we we really truly never disagreed about what course of action to take. We never blamed each other, and there was a tremendous amount of kindness toward each other during that time, and that period of time is actually something that I think has sustained us during other more difficult times in our marriage.

You know, you know as the years went on, where there that was something that we shared so powerfully that it became like a glue, really strong bond. You can definitely tell that through the book, the bond that you guys have, and it was really it's a beautiful thing to read to see how two people can come together and how how a marriage can work. It's not all

roses and wine. But but I think what I was struck by most was kind of what you said was the coming together when things were challenging, was was really true. There's a scene in the book where you are in the car with Um that's your your husband in the book, and you guys are driving and I'm just going to pick up the scene. There's there's been something going on with you guys, and you say, I don't ask what's wrong or if everything's okay, I don't fill the car

with chatter. I know that everything is both okay and not okay. I'm so glad that you brought up that moment, because that's another really important moment. That idea, it's uh. Actually to go back to Keats, it's Keats talks about negative capability, the idea of holding contradictions in your hands. It was so important to me to attempt to tell the truth from inside a yes, contempted but also real marriage.

So the disappointments, the challenges, the losses, the you know, the sense of you know, great imperfection, you know, two imperfect people trying to build a life together. That's that's I think a definition of absolutely every one who ever

walks down the aisle. And so that sense of things being okay and not okay, sitting with that, you know, sitting with that discomfort of or maybe even a comfortable discomfort like yeah, this is this is where we are right now in this car as we're speeding home in the darkness. Is complex and that's okay. Yeah. I love that idea of things being okay and not okay. I don't know if I could really explain it, but I

do understand that feeling. I think it's not okay is in the thing that's happening right now is I don't like or in even worse than that, In a lot of cases, the thing that's happening now is a awful thing, and yet underneath it there's a deeper sense that everything is okay. And I was really struck by that, And I was also struck by the fact that you had the wisdom in that moment to sort of, you know,

allow him to be where he was. I think that the way you're describing that is exactly my tension and an eloquent expression of that, because that sense of almost as you were saying that, what I envisioned was it's like a sea, like a sea of history and a kind of solidity, even though that's not a good metaphor with ce, but like a sense of a woven net of a backdrop of okayness that can therefore tolerate the moments, the times, the passages of time, even of things not

being okay, or you know, the smaller not okay against the larger okay. Yeah. And I often think to me, that's what the spiritual search in the spiritual life is about, to a large extent, is finding that broader background okay while the vicissitudes of the world kind of happened and they are going to happen. And you talk about and devotion a lot the you know, the Buddhist teachers are always talking about you know, gain and loss and sorrow and joy and we all get all of it. And

I think that's for me. What what has always appealed to me, particular about Buddhism, but a spiritual life in general, is how do I how do I have that background everything is okay, even though the moment to moment may not feel that way. I love that. And actually I'm as you're saying, that I'm making a connection between devotion and our glass that I hadn't really made before, which which has to do really with you know, in devotion, that sense of that I had had when I began

writing that book, that doubt wasn't okay. You know, that doubt meant that I wasn't doing it right somehow. That spiritual journeys are spiritual enlightenment whatever that is, means that one doesn't experience doubt. And then I started reading all the great thinkers, and all the great thinkers wrestle with doubt, and I came to understand that doubt was an element

of faith, that that faith is a struggle. And then you know, in thinking about our Glass, this whole idea that we have of you know, that's perpetuated by just the culture and the media and all that of like happily ever after, Happily ever after is about as real

as faith without doubt. Um. A young person who was interviewing me recently said, I feel like Our Glass is a book that every mother of the bride should give her daughter, you know, before she walks down the aisle of like like almost a window into the realness of what a marriage, a good marriage really is like over time, you know. And yet you know, we we so often sort of waltz into these things with this feeling. And I look, I know that because I did that earlier

in my life. I've waltzt you know, with with very little thought of, um, you know what it really what it really means to walk down that path. But walking down that path with someone really does mean that you're going to have periods of time of disc comfort and and maybe even of doubt right right inside of it. But that's okay, too. Brings to mind a line you have and I think it might end our Glass, but

I could be wrong. So I won't swear to that, but it's a beautiful line and I thought it summed up so much of the book very well, and it was we understand that suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. Tonight we will stay at the edge of the dark forest until together we are brave enough to go back inside. Yeah. That's another really really powerful moment for me, of that awareness that you know, that sense.

There's a there's a moment in the book. Well, there's multiple moments in the book that really form the shape of our glass for me that M says to me early in the book about something insignificant, like a household thing, I'll take care of it, And it becomes this motif you know, my loving to hear M say I'll take care of it. Uh, Like, who doesn't want to hear someone else say I'll take care of it? Really um.

And then way later in the book there's a moment where he's a leap and I'm looking at him up late at night and it's a rough moment for him, and I'm looking at him sleeping, and I think to myself, I'll take care of it, And I felt like I had arrived at something important and true, not just about

my marriage, but maybe about marriage in general. In that moment of two people who are passing this sense of you know, I can carry us for a bit now, like back and forth between them over time, you know, and then those moments where there's someplace deeper to go and they join hands and yeah, walk back into the dark forest because there's more that needs to be uncovered or more that needs to be figured out. So it's moments of individual bravery and then moments of joined bravery

as a couple. Yeah. I think that's beautiful, and I think that speaks to relationships in general. I that idea of sometimes it's me being the strong one, sometimes it's you being the strong one, and that over any good relationship, over a period of time, friendship, marriage, whatever, you will

see that happen. And I often think it's the inability for those roles to change that causes a lot of problems in relationships where one person always has to be the strong one er I'm always the one that's in crisis exactly, and it seems to me that's where things

fall apart. Another part in our glass. You're referencing a children's book that you used to read to your son, called Fortunately Unfortunately, and it is a mirror of one of my favorite parables of all time, besides the Wolf parable about a farmer and a horse and his horse runs away and everybody says it's bad news, and it comes back it's good news. Tell me a little bit about that book, because it's just another variation on that that's even more fun and playful than a farmer and

a Horse. I loved sort of arriving at that as many of the best parables are, and many of the best children's books are, uh, you know, it's about so much more than the you know, the simple story that that it seems to be about. So unfortunately, unfortunately, this little boy sets out to go to his grandmother's house. You know, Unfortunately there's a storm, but fortunately he has an umbrella and he jumps off the cliff and the

umbrella saves him. But unfortunately there's you know, I'm kind of making it up here because unfortunately there's an alligator.

But but fortunately he lands on top of the alligator and the alligators, you know, and then he gets to his grandma's has fortunately, but he's lost whatever he was going to bring to his grandmother unfortunately, but they are together, and so there's this sense of you know, we never know and you know, Actually, as we're speaking, I'm sitting in my office in my home in Connecticut, and there is this piece of art that I have on my wall by my friend Debbie Millman. I don't know if

you know Debbie. I was on her show once, which was a deep honor to me. So yeah, Design Matters is another another awesome podcast, and Debbie is also an artist and she has and of all of her work, the one that I have hanging in my office is like a big piece of note paper and in her handwriting in the upper right hand corner of the notepaper, it says this, just this, I am comfortable not knowing,

and that's everything to me. Like I I look at that, and I'm comforted by that, probably to any times a day when I forget and I think I know best and I think I'm in charge, and I think I know what's right and how it's supposed to happen, and you know, look, there's there's a moment in devotion where, um, I'm I'm asked by a man who I don't know, perfect stranger, a reader of mine, to meet with him because he wants to talk to me. Is very very

urgently wants to talk to me. And it turns out that he was the last person to leave Windows on the World on nine eleven before the plane hit, and he he literally like got in the elevator and everyone who was in the restaurant obviously perished, and he he wanted to talk. I finally understood that he wanted to talk with me about this very idea really of you know, of fortunately unfortunately, of of this sense of you know, why was I saved? And now what am I supposed

to do? What am I supposed to do with this you know, staggering gift that I've been given the idea that there's you know that what he was putting together very much was the idea that there was causality or um, you know, that he was saved for a reason. Um, I mean, I realized I'm kind of going slightly off

off topic. Just felt to me like this idea of you know, you missed the plane, you know, or you don't go to all those people on nine eleven who didn't go to work that morning because they were taking their kids to school where they had a doctor's appointment, and you know they were saved. I quote a passage from a poem by the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Shiamboska in our Glass. It's my favorite poem. I teach it

all the time. Uh. And it begins it's called could have And it begins, it could have happened, It might have happened, It happened nearer farther off off it happened, but not to you. You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last. It goes on, and I always teach it and have my student all my students right as a prompt about what could have happened but didn't. And it's, of course

this incredibly rich assignment. Nobody hesitates to begin to write when the assignment is right about what could have happened but didn't, because we all are always leading these lives where we understand that if we turn left or we turn right, it's going to actually affect, you know, the course of our day or our hour or maybe even our lives. And yet if we thought about that all the time, we'd be completely paralyzed. So we we don't.

But you know how to live with that sense of it actually underscoring the beauty and the fragility of life, the beauty because it's fragile, and the kind of seizing of the moments precisely because we don't know what's going to happen next. In devotion, you talk about certain you know, bromides that people say, you know, like just to be comforting, and more of them is everything happens for a reason,

which is one of my least favorite. Also, the other version of that is I've heard you know, good things come out of everything, or everything happens, you know, for the better. And there's a turn on that that I like, which is that you know, we can make the best

out of everything that happens. And that works for me a whole lot better than believing there's some grand plan that orchestrates it, but believing that in every moment and everything that happens kind of like you were just saying, is the seeds of the next moment, and what are we going to do with that? Precisely, this idea of making meaning and we can make meaning out of the most painful and difficult moments, it is shaped my entire

adult life. My father died when I was twenty three, and I was a complete wreck of a of a young woman at that time. I was you know, I was drinking heavily, I was um doing a lot of drugs. I was in a relationship with an older married man who you know, was just um. It was all like a catastrophe um and and my parents were in a terrible car accident. My father died and my mother had a shattered body um and was not expected to live. And she did survive, and she recovered. But and I'm

their only child. And so it was a moment where I was either going to rise to that occasion and like shocked, you know, like shocked to my system, get my life together and take care of my mother and bury my father and mourn him. We were very very close, and I was a college dropout at that point. I had left Sarah Lawrence, and I was just kind of traveling the world as essentially the girlfriend of this married,

very powerful guy. It was, you know, if if all that hadn't happened, if my parents accident hadn't happened, I'm not sure I would have survived. I don't know. I mean, it's it's it's a neat and tidy idea. But I really do wonder. But what I did know instantly from that moment on was that the only way that I was going to survive was going to be making meaning out of um, the loss of my father, the the the loss of you know, uh so much in terms

of my family. And it made me a writer. It sent me back to college, It kept me in college and then in graduate school. It wrote my first novel, you know, and my second novel. It it enabled me to for once and for all, break up a relationship that was you know, he was he was also kind of very much a stalker, was very very hard to get away from him. It gave me the strength to get away from him, to do everything that I've done in my life, every single thing began with that sense

of I'm going to make meaning out of this. Not it happened so that I would become this person, oh um, but it happened and I became this person. Yeah, I agree. I mean I think for me getting sober, um you know, from being a heroin addict and really close to dying, that was the moment for me. That was sort of the transformative moment that everything has kind of built from

there and and making meaning out of that. Well, I could do this all day, and I've got about forty more questions, but we are at the end of time for this episode, so we will have to agree to do this again because it has been fun. I'd love it. I really enjoyed it. Well, thank you so much. Your book Our Glass Time, Memory and Marriage is available now,

as well as Devotion. They're both great. We get a lot of people on this show, and most people have written a book, and you can you can always kind of tell when it's somebody who is a researcher or does something and then they write a book about it versus somebody who's a truly gifted author. And you are in that latter category. The books are beautiful to read. Thanks Eric, thank you so much. Okay, we'll talk again soon. Okay, alright,

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