Black & White
Author(s):
Dani Shapiro
Label: Anchor
Publisher(s):
Anchor
Studio: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter.
At age eighteen, sick of her notoriety as ?the girl in the pictures,? Clara fled New York City, settling and making her own family in small-town Maine. But years later, when Ruth reaches out from her deathbed, Clara suddenly finds herself drawn back to the past she thought she had escaped. From the beloved author of Family History and Slow Motion, a spellbinding novel that asks: How do we forgive those who failed to protect us?
Amazon.com
In Dani Shapiro's captivating new novel, a mother struggles to protect her young daughter from the dark secrets of her past. Haunting and insightful, Black & White explores the notions of family and motherhood, inspiration and obligation, and is sure to appeal to fans of Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve. Find out more about Shapiro's artistic practices and influences below. --Daphne Durham
10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Dani Shapiro
Q: What is your writing process like? Has it changed from book to book?A: As I was doing my usual flailing around before I began to write Black & White, I found that I had some questions in mind that I hoped to explore, if not answer--and those questions very much came out of my preoccupations as a writer and as a mother of a young child: is it possible to be as fully absorbed as one needs to be to produce good, strong art--and be equally fully absorbed in the raising of small children? What happens when that delicate balancing act teeters? And also, as someone who has written quite a bit of personal non-fiction, I wondered: where is the line--or perhaps it's less of a line and more of a murky gray area--when it comes to writing about the personal stuff when there's this little person who's involved, a person who will grow up and read it some day? These ideas began to really preoccupy me, and finally the novel started to form itself around them. When I begin the first draft of a book, I write longhand. I've become quite attached to these particular spiral-bound notebooks that can only be purchased in my in-laws' hometown, and so whenever they come to visit I ask them to bring me a pile. I think most writers indulge in magical thinking when it comes to the process, and many of us require talismans; mine are these notebooks. I used to only write on the computer, but I've found, in the last number of years, that I feel much freer to have no idea where I'm going when I'm writing by hand. There's something very neat--perhaps too neat--about the blank computer screen, and the ease of cutting and pasting, moving whole blocks of text around. For me, it's infinitely more satisfying to scribble and cross things out and make big sweeping arrows and asterisks as I'm working on drafts. It looks messy and complicated--it looks like what it is. On those early pages I feel like I can see a map, or a diagram, of my process.
Q: What author/s have inspired you?
A: In the big, enduring ways, as a literary backbone: Tolstoy, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley. And while I was writing Black & White, Alice Munro's stories in Runaway and Ian McEwan's novel Saturday were immensely important in my grappling with understanding how to create a close third person narrative without losing the periphery.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm trying to start a new novel. Viriginia Woolf wrote this great passage in her diary, after she finished The Waves: "I must hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again become pecking and wretched." I'm a much nicer person when I'm working on a book. When I begin I have so little to go on--a feeling, a sense, an image or two. It's like coaxing shadows out of the corners.
Customer Reviews
Too close to Sally Mann
I was intrigued by the subject matter of the complex and strange relationship between the artist mother and her daughter, who is her inspiration and who she exploits for the sake of her art.
While the writing is good and the book is impossible to put down, I found it unfortunate that the author used such obvious versions of Sally Mann's photographs when describing Ruth's. She (Ms. Shapiro)said in an interview that she was surprised when someone accused her of writing a damnation of Sally Mann. Why Ruth is nothing like her, she claimed. Then why described her photos as Ruth's? An artist's work is her own autobiography, really, an expression of her core being, so how can one describe one artist's work as anothers and then claim the two artists are nothing like each other? The closeness of Ruth's work to Sally Mann's was so distracting, It took alot away from the story for me.
The other part of this is that the book ends up doing to Sally Mann's children what Clara is so disturbed and haunted by: it puts them under a microscope and assumes damage when personal knowledge of the human beings behind the photographs is sorely lacking. (I will stand corrected if Ms. Shapiro held council with the Mann children and has written this book as their advocate).
This is the first book I have read by Dani Shapiro, and I might try another. She has moments that are real and raw and inciteful.
this novel is not black and white!
Loved the storyline and the many different emotions it uncovered yet I felt the characters lacked some development. There are so many issues this story touches on...sisters, marriages, exploitation, pornography, age of reason, etc that I thought if this were a book club book, we'd have to make it an extra long discussion.
As I said in my title, I loved the play on words in the book title, b/c all though the photos were in black and white...this story is positively grey on ethics.
Creepy but good
This idea that D.Shapiro created was very creepy in my opinion but how the story unravells was great. I really enjoyed this book very much in a dark kind of way, but couldn't put it down. I put myself in this girl's shoes and felt very emotional about the whole picture thing. If a book can make me feel like that than I would recommend it.
Very similar to another book....
First things first, I have not read this book.
I was at the library today and picked it up. While reading the inside cover, I was overcome with a "haven't-I-read-this-before type feeling." The premise of the book is alarmingly similar to Miranda Beverly-Whitmore's "The Effects of Light"...down to the famous photographer's first name. Too many similarities for my liking.
Characters Hard to Believe
The main character is not developed enough to generate any real sympathy for her. The plot is superficial; there is no great depth or substance to it.
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