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04/05/2017 07:00 AMAfter having published three memoirs and five novels, Dani Shapiro found herself circling around the notion of time, the effect it had on her memories and her ideas about who she was, and how she got to be the way she is today.
“Was the woman I am visible in the teenage me? And if she was, is the 17 year-old still alive in me today? All of these things were swirling around,” she said in a recent interview. “The part that became clear and so terrifying is that what I really wanted to write about is marriage.”
Why terrifying? Is it because her own parents had three marriages between them before they met? Or that she herself had been married once, then twice, and then a third time?
Not exactly. Those are facts that inform her memoir, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, and are very much a part of the stories included in this slim volume that, at times, reads more like thoughtful and thought-provoking poetry than prose. No, part of what was terrifying was instead that this third marriage of hers is a quite contented and happy marriage.
“What I really wanted to explore is what is it to form oneself alongside another person, a person you intend to be with for the duration? What does it mean to do that when people grow at different rates and in different ways? That came with a lot of apprehension with me because I was trying to write about something I was very much inside of,” says Shapiro, who will kick off her book tour with an appearance at R. J. Julia Booksellers, 768 Boston Post Road, Madison on Thursday, April 13 at 7 p.m.
Despite it being quite a contented and happy marriage, Shapiro admits that she struggles with uncertainty when it comes to the relationship.
At one point, she turns to stories about the marriages and work of other literary couples.
“Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell; Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne; Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall,” she writes. “Some of these did not end well.”
She explains Hall’s theory of a “third thing.”
“Third things are essential to marriages, [they are] objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture and contentment,” she writes. “Later in the essay he adds: ‘Sometimes you lose a third thing.’”
Love and Its Limits
She examines the psychology of love and its limits. A Cornell professor tells her that psychologists estimate a couple can stay in love for only 18 months. After that it become something else, but that’s when the dream dissolves.
“In a life made up of fortune and its flip side, M. [as she calls her husband in the book] and I have never had a plan. We’ve made it up as we’ve gone along, and for the most part, we’ve made it work. But what if it stops working? What if we run into a wall too high to scale?” she writes. “What if life throws something at us that we can’t solve with the sheer force of our wits and wills?”
In the book, she outlines the couple’s fortune and the flip side. She says during the interview that the process of examining her marriage, and the effect that time has had on it, and her memories of it, were ultimately rewarding.
“I think I gained a really powerful understanding of the resilience of it. That, you know, that the hard things and the disappointing things are so completely balanced and outweighed by the joy, and humor, and the loyalty, and the devotion, and the being parents together, and the shared experience of what it is to go through a life together.”
So what does she characterize as success, when it comes to marriage?
“The triumph of love over time,” she says. “The thing that comes to mind, in a way, what forms a lot of the shape, the delicate aspect of this book, is that early in the book, I write that my husband says ‘I’ll take care of that.’ That’s a part of the relationship I love and long to believe,” she says.
‘I’ll Take Care of It’
It’s a mantra repeated often in the book, sometimes when Shapiro is confident that it is true, that he will take care of it. And it is repeated other times when she is certain that she is the one who must take care of it.
“I’ll look at him while he is sleeping and think ‘I’ll take care of it,’’ she says.
A Buddhist friend of Shapiro’s, someone who has been married for 60 years, read an early draft, and said she loved that part of the book.
“What she said was that ‘I thought it was so wonderful’; she really responded to the moving back and forth of that. Between the taking care of things. Two people moving back and forth. Over the course of a lifetime, that is what happens, the person capable of ‘taking care of it’ at any given moment takes care of it.
“That always has been, seamlessly, in little ways, part of my marriage,” she says. “Half an hour before this phone call, I was booking college visits with my son. It’s straining at the edges of our time. And energy. And my husband says, ‘Text me dates and I’ll book flights.’ I started to say, ‘You do hotel. You do hotels and I’ll do flights.’ But flights are easier for him. He washes. I dry. When he goes away, I forget to take the garbage out.”
In marriages that work, she says, “I think there’s an understanding of what each person is doing. So that there isn’t a sense of resentment...You’re a team that’s pulling together.”
Shapiro says that notion seems to have resonated with many early readers of the book, along with Donald Hall’s “third thing.”
“So many people who read this book, even early readers, have talked about how it makes them see their own relationship and think about their own relationship. It’s almost like a Rorschach test. When I discovered the Donald Hall essay, I found myself thinking about couples I know and admire. And they have this way of going through life, not staring at each other, but staring outward into the world together, and it’s such a meaningful and actionable thing to do,” she says.
She adds that having children together can be a third thing for a while, but that raising children, of course, is generally only a chapter in a couple’s life.
Perspective
“They will leave you, as they should,” she says. “If all goes well, you are going to be left there and empty handed and mouth open, unless there is a next chapter, a next stage for you.”
She remembers talking with an aunt, someone who is now 92, on the phone one day. Shapiro was worried and sad, and concerned about her husband’s career, and the effect that the marriage was having on him. At one point, he had been a foreign correspondent in Africa, fluent in multiple languages, able to defend himself with a gun, writing important stories for internationally known publications.
“M. is injured and I can’t fix things for him,” she writes. “No, it’s more than that. I’m part of his injury, a perpetrator of it. Sometimes it feels like his leg is caught in a trap—and I’m the trap. If he hadn’t left Africa. If he hadn’t become a filmmaker. If he hadn’t become a father.”
She expresses her concern to her aunt, who responds, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted 24 years.”
Shapiro says that provided her with some perspective.
Shapiro’s marriage, with its ups and downs, is past the 18 year mark. Her parent’s marriage made it to almost 30 years when her father died. Her in-laws made it to their 60th anniversary.
“My parents did not have a happy marriages,” she says. “The fact that they had been married to other people gave me this weird sense when I was a young woman that ‘I can get married. It doesn’t have to last.’ … I admired my in-law’s marriages. Their partnership was strong and their kids looked at them like they were really good parents. It wasn’t easy. Each of them had strong personalities. And they loved their children, but they did not live for their children.”
She says her mother-in-law just recently passed away.
“I had a sense of them as two people who had barely been apart for 60 years. They barely spent a night apart. They ate lunch together every day because they preferred to,” she says. “And the things I learned from that include that there have to be other connections and other people and community. Still, I admired the power of their bond.”
In the end, she says, she found herself fascinated with the idea that the stories, while interesting, were not as important to her as “what is underneath the stories.”
“Time. We can’t pin it. We can’t stop it. It continues to sift and move through us,” she says. “Like poets do, I wanted to capture that sense, not just of telling a story, but of something deeper than a story, meaning.”
She says she was very conscious of the white space in the book, and of wanting the reader to enter that white space with their own experiences and emotions.
She says she felt honored when someone told her that her book is the kind of gift a mother-of-the-bride should give her daughter. “I just loved that so much,” she says. “It has spurred a lot of conversation about spiritual life and the kinds of things people don’t talk about easily. Especially now with so much noise in our culture and so much trouble. To be human is to be gathered together around a book, to use it in a way to talk about things that matter, things that matter deeply to us. Otherwise we might feel very much alone or isolated.”
And, ultimately, the book has a hopeful message.
As for that third thing that Donald Hall says you can lose?
“Sometimes you get it back,” he adds.