Slow Motion: A True Story (Harvest Book)
Author(s):
Dani Shapiro
Label: Harvest/HBJ Book
Publisher(s):
Harvest/HBJ Book
Studio: Harvest/HBJ Book
Manufacturer: Harvest/HBJ Book
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $11.20
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Similar Items:
Family History
Black & White
Picturing the Wreck
Girls in Trouble: A Novel
Things Unspoken
Fugitive Blue
Nineteen Minutes
Playing with Fire
How to Be Lost: A Novel
Songs Without Words (Vintage Contemporaries)
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Dani Shapiro, a young woman from a deeply religious home, became the girlfriend of a famous and flamboyant married attorney-her best friend's stepfather. The moment Lenny Klein entered her life, everything changed: she dropped out of college, began drinking, and neglected her friends and family. But then came a phone call-an accident on a snowy road had left her parents critically injured. Forced to reconsider her life, Shapiro learned to re-enter the world she had left. Telling of a life nearly ruined by the gift of beauty, and then saved through tragedy, Shapiro's memoir is a beautiful account of how a life gone terribly wrong can be rescued through tragedy.
Amazon.com Review
Dani Shapiro was rescued by tragedy. At the age of 23 she is a wreck. A Sarah Lawrence college dropout, she is living as the mistress--one of many, she would later find out--of her best friend's stepfather, Lenny, a high-profile New York City lawyer. It is the height of the excessive '80s, 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 modeling career and actively pursues her drug dealer, who delivers cocaine to her door. She is at an expensive spa in California--at a far remove from the middle-class, orthodox Jewish home in which she was raised--when, one snowy night, her parents' car careens into a highway median. When she returns to New Jersey, to her parents' hospital bedsides, she begins the journey to discover and mine her 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 undergrad at Sarah Lawrence.
Shapiro, who is the author of three previous novels, writes sparely and lacks 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.
Customer Reviews
Inaccuracies re orthodox Judaism
I enjoyed this book, but was troubled by apparent errors regarding orthodox Judaism. Perhaps the author just forgot, but it troubled me. Did anyone else find this?
Fantastic read
Dani Shapiro takes the reader on a roller coaster ride in her memoir of post-college years. After her parents are in a terrible car accident, Shapiro reflects on her life and what she has become. A privileged, beautiful 20-something, the reader wants to scream at her "Why are you doing this to yourself?" Her affair with a wealthy, powerful, well-known attorney is sexy, tumultuous, dirty and lucrative leaving the reader disgusted and infatuated at once. The book forces you to wonder if you'd have the will to walk away. You do not pity Shapiro but you want to save her all the same. Fantastic read.
Some disappontment after reading "Family History" - try her personal webpage instead
Family History, by the same author, was one of the best fiction I've read lately. So I decided to go for the autobiographical one Slow Motion, trying to grasp some information on how the author got her act together to be such a good writer. Fact is, no answer was found in this book. First, the real life character is shallow and so much less interesting than her fictional characters. Second, the book doesn't even touch the issue of fiction writing. You just get the facts: the author went to school, dropped out, went back and then went to graduate school. Lucky of her, at graduation she had a book soon to be published.
For me particularly, the question remains: what happened after graduation that made her so good to write Family History? Where are the insights, what are the relevant people that get her fiction going? Does she seat on a cafe and think about her writing before doing it? Does she get inspiration from her current husband? From having a child? These issues were utterly untouched, and made me research further, so I went to her personal homepage, where there is so much more information about her family and three marriages (one that occurred before she wrote the book and seems to have ended before she started going out with her married boyfriend - I thought it was astonishing that this marriage was not even mentioned in the book). Still, I could find no answers.
"Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year" and "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life", both autobiographical books by the writer Anne Lamott, are much better at explaining how to get everything together and writing it down.
Squabbling relatives - oh my!
A disclaimer at the outset: I skipped over virtually ever scene involving Lenny as he seemed so creepy from the get-go.
So, who's to like here? Maybe the father, but he's largely a flashback character. The mother? She had potential early on as being frustrated in the Orthodox life she came to regret; by the end she's rich, bitter and well ... not much else. The older sister? Close, but she expresses enough bitterness herself to be out of the running. The rest were not really significant enough to have mattered much to me - and, yes, I did get confused between "Shirl" and "Shirley Sugarman". To keep the alliteration, the author should've gone for Sandy or Sadie for one of those two women.
The dust jacket makes mention of Hillside as an "Anti-Semitic" suburb. I kept waiting for examples; mention of vandalism is covered in one sentence near the end. That's pretty much it.
I gave it a second star because the author is actually a talented writer (except as noted above). Too bad she wasted it on the story of a shallow, self-centered, self-pitying, materialistic brat.
Poor (beautiful) me!
An interesting thing happens when people write memoirs of terrible things that happened to them: readers are afraid to say anything bad about the books themselves, because it looks like they're being unsympathetic towards the tragedies described. I felt for Dani Shapiro when her father died, but without that incident, this reads like the work of a self-obsessed rich b*tch who epitomizes solopsism: nothing in the world matters to her but her own experience and what people think of her. It is very important, by the way, that you think she is beautiful, as she reminds you constantly throughout the book. That, to me, is the quality of someone who hasn't quite worked out her own problems--someone who is sadly aware of how she acts and says and what you think of her as a result--and someone who is probably not completely honest with you, dear reader, because the ugly parts of her--the ones for which you won't feel sorry for her--are most likely omitted.
PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT SOME OF THE CONTENT THAT WE MAKE AVAILABLE TO YOU THROUGH THIS APPLICATION COMES FROM AMAZON WEB SERVICES. ALL SUCH CONTENT IS PROVIDED TO YOU "AS IS." THIS CONTENT AND YOUR USE OF IT ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND/OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.
Powered by PNAmazon © 2003-2007 ttgapers.com
