Dani Shapiro's new novel Black & White (Knopf, 2007) uses Sally Mann’s controversial photography as a springboard for a story that explores the question of how a grown daughter can forgive a mother who exploited her in the name of Art. Shapiro described how new ideas for fiction “ping!” or “shimmer around the edges” and how she learned from Grace Paley to write fiction in the bath (pen and paper optional). We discussed how anger fuels her fiction, and how she has written about intrusive mothers since a 1993 story in Story Magazine. About this piece, Shapiro says: “If you’re a writer, and your mother walks in on your bikini wax, you’re pretty much going to write about it.” Our lively conversation eventually tackled the question of what rescues us from ourselves…Can literature rescue us? --JDH

Jess deCourcy Hinds: Can you describe what you first felt looking at Mann's photographs? Can you remember the exact moment when you thought, "I have to write about this"?

Dani Shapiro: I do remember the exact moment, which was long after I first became obsessed with the work of Sally Mann. After Family History came out, I was in that worrisome state of casting about for ideas for a new novel, and nothing was really taking hold. I had a couple of characters floating around in my mind, an estranged mother and daughter forced to deal with each other after the mother falls ill—but the idea didn’t have enough guts for me, it felt obvious and familiar and too domestic—all things I try to shy away from when starting a novel. But I couldn’t quite let go of these characters either. And then, one day, while I was in the car driving from my house in Connecticut into New York City (many of my ideas come to me in the car) I had what pretty much amounts to a eureka moment: I realized that the mother was a photographer who had taken a series of provocative nude photographs of the daughter as a child. Hence the estrangement. And Sally Mann—who I think had always occupied some small space in my head since I first saw her work in Immediate Family in 1990—came glaringly into focus. My first thought was, hasn’t someone told this story before? I thought about Ann Beattie’s Picturing Will and Kathryn Harrison’s novel Exposure, both of which dealt with photographers and their children. I immediately re-read both books and, to my relief, I realized they had nothing to do with the story I wanted to tell.

As for the first time I saw Mann’s work, it was probably 1989 or 1990—I had a boyfriend at the time who was beginning to collect photography and I saw her photographs of her children at The James Danziger Gallery. I was stunned by the power and the provocative, complicated beauty of the images. I identified with the children, I think, particularly with Jessie, her oldest daughter, who had a preternatural precociousness that I think I also had as a little girl. I was immeasurably moved and wanted to own a print of “Candy Cigarette”, which—interestingly enough—is one of the few images in which Jessie is clothed. But unfortunately I couldn’t afford it.

JDH: Do you often get ideas for stories through images, or do your story ideas usually come from a more verbal place?

DS: I think my ideas almost always come through images, and through something else—something hard to describe. Joan Didion once described that feeling, that knowledge that she would have to write about something as “the shimmer around the edges”. That sums it up for me, that ping – that feeling that something has exited the material world for me and has entered another realm in which it is available to me.

JDH: I've certainly read good books about angry children and angry parents before, but no author explores anger with the psychological complexity you do in Black & White, Family History, and Slow Motion. Even your piece from Story in 1993 explores anger—a mother irritates a daughter by intruding on her while she's getting a bikini wax. What are your thoughts on anger?

DS: I’ll resort to another favorite quote. Edward Albee once said this: “For the anger and rage to work aesthetically, the writer’s got to distance himself from it and write in what Frank O’Hara referred to in one of his poems as ‘the memory of my feelings.’ Rage is incoherent. Observed rage can be coherent.” I’ve thought of that quote often, over the years. You can substitute pretty much any intense emotion there—grief, elation, heartbreak, desire—and it’s true that it is impossible to write out of the immediacy. One of the main reasons Black & White is written in the third person (it’s my first novel that is not narrated in the first person) is because I knew that I needed to have the narrative distance to take a step back from Clara’s understandable rage at her mother, and be able to have a small measure of omniscient sympathy for Ruth. Or perhaps an authorial sympathy. Black & White is my first novel in which I felt I had a kind of removed, beneficent, almost God-like view of all of my characters. Otherwise, the book would have risked being a daughterly rant.

I’m glad you brought up that short story, “The Way Women Laugh”, which was published a long time ago in Story Magazine. It was, by my estimation, my first decent story. Talk about the shimmer around the edges—that story was borne out of a moment when my own mother did in fact walk into a room in a spa where I was getting a bikini wax. If you’re a writer, and your mother walks in on your bikini wax, you’re pretty much gonna write about it. I was blessed with a mother who gave me tremendously good fodder as a writer. She was a difficult mother in almost every other way, but she supplied me with many years worth of material—which is probably how I managed my own rage toward her. You might even say that I turned her into my muse—the way Ruth turns Clara into hers. Though nakedness in writing and nakedness in image-making are completely different animals. As is taking on one’s mother—versus taking on one’s daughter.

JDH: I was able to respect Ruth as an artist—she was really ruthless (excuse the pun) and her focus and tenacity were admirable. Did her artistic seriousness help you feel sympathetic towards her?

DS: I only realized the pun in Ruth’s name after I finished the book! The ruthlessness of artists is something I think about a great deal. And certainly Ruth’s seriousness enabled me to connect with her. I felt for her, even though I found her choices monstrous. What does an artist do when she finds her true subject matter—and that subject matter is her own child?

JDH: How have your feelings about Mann’s photography changed since becoming a mother?

DS: After the birth of my own son (he’s now eight) I revisited Mann’s work and saw it very differently. I also was affected by the realization that the photographs had been staged. They clearly weren’t snapshots—captured moments. That idea had eluded me before. I hadn’t been looking at the images from the perspective of wondering how they had been shot. But I found myself mulling over the idea that these images had been set up, lit. A child had been asked to take her clothes off. To pose nude.

JDH: What have been some of the more surprising or interesting reactions so far from readers of Black & White?

DS: I’ve been surprised by the vehemence of some of the responses, though I guess I shouldn’t be. Some readers have been finding Ruth so profoundly narcissistic that they have no sympathy whatsoever for her. Others find her quite human and tragic as a character. I read a wonderful bit of Proust recently, where he describes every reader as the “reader of his own self”. So, in a sense, I think any given reader’s relationship to his or her own parents probably plays in a very visceral way into the response. I’ve also been accused, by one critic, of “gunning for Sally Mann”. That surprised me, because though the work of Ruth Dunne is very much inspired by Mann’s work, Ruth is in no way similar to Sally Mann, either in her biographical details or in the trajectory of her life.

JDH: You were an actress and model before you pursued a writing career. Would you say those experiences of being behind the camera helped you understand how Clara would feel when photographed by her mother?

DS: In one, very specific way, I suppose that my early experiences as a child model played into my understanding of Clara. When I was a little kid, I was part of two very public ad campaigns—the first was when I was nine months old and I was the baby in the Beechnut Baby Food commercials. This, obviously, I don’t consciously remember at all. But then when I was three, I became the Kodak Christmas poster child and I do have some memory of that shoot. I think I understood on some level that it was important—that a lot was riding on it. And that probably helped me to understand Clara’s sense of hyper-awareness that something big was happening when she was in front of the camera.

JDH: Slow Motion, your bestselling memoir, was the first book of yours I read—and I was absolutely blown away by it. And I wonder if one reason it was a bestseller was because so many of us serve in roles as caregivers to ill relatives, and these roles aren't recognized or appreciated by society. I think America's optimism, our "can do" attitude also makes this a difficult, lonely place to be sick and be a caregiver…People are starved for honest stories about tragedy; so that's why I think your book strikes such a chord with people. Do you agree? What were some other responses from readers?

DS: I think the key word in your question is honesty. People are starved for honest stories, stories in which the teller, or the writer, isn’t puffing themselves up or making more (or less) out of something that happened to them, but rather, trying to lay it out in all its bare truthfulness, without regard for how he or she will be judged. I found a way, while working on Slow Motion, to really almost willfully not think about people eventually reading it. I told myself that I could change my mind about publishing it. That I could always pull it back. And by doing so, I enabled myself to take risks that I otherwise might not have taken. I wasn’t interested in protecting myself—I was interested in telling a story as truthfully as I could.

JDH: I also wanted to ask about the subtitle, A Life Rescued by Tragedy. This grabbed me at the bookstore, but after I read the book I wasn't sure if it completely captured the book for me. Do you mind if I ask whether the subtitle was your idea, or your publisher's?

DS: I’m so glad you’re asking that question! I HATE that subtitle. I absolutely detest it and I always have. I allowed my publisher to talk me into it. The hardcover of Slow Motion was published simply with the subtitle: A True Story. That was mine—I preferred it to memoir. And when the paperback came out, my paperback publisher convinced me that readers needed something more to go on. (And you did say it grabbed you at the bookstore, so perhaps in that one sense they were right.) But I have now had to live with that subtitle for the past eight or nine years and it makes me cringe every time I see it. Mostly because the neatness and tidiness—not to mention hyper-self-awareness—that it imposes on my book has nothing to do with the book I wrote.

JDH: I couldn’t agree more. You know, there's something so delicious about the idea of being rescued, but I’m also wary of the idea. "Rescue" is a word used to describe women more than men—princesses are rescued in fairy tales. If we can’t be rescued by tragedy, do you think we can be rescued by happy things—love, children, success? In a way, your memoir also explores being "rescued" by literature and writing.

DS: I think I believe much more in being rescued by literature and writing than the silly idea of being rescued by tragedy. Great art has the power to redeem. And I am certain that becoming a writer did, in fact, save me. It gave me a way to shape my history, to organize it mentally, psychologically, emotionally, and ultimately creatively. Becoming a writer has allowed me access to my own inner life in a way that I don’t think anything else—including years of therapy—possibly could have. Tragedy—on the other hand—is simply that. Tragic. And the idea of being rescued by it is again way too neat and tidy—as is being rescued by the happier things you mention: family, success. The real rescue is much deeper and inward than anything that can be quantified on the outside.

JDH: I enjoyed some of your shorter work on your website, particularly your story in One Story and your piece in the New Yorker about a pregnant girl at her high school prom. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing the initial germ of an idea that led to you write either of these stories. And, when writing the New Yorker piece, did you intentionally visit a prom as a reporter, or did you just happen to observe the scene and take notes?

DS: The germ of the idea for “The Six Poisons”, which was published in One Story came from running into someone I didn’t want to see in a yoga class. It happened a couple of years before I actually sat down to write the story, but the moment stayed with me, and I found myself thinking about playing out a whole relationship, a whole history against the backdrop of a yoga retreat. The holistic contrasted with the human. A chance to explore the limits of new age wisdom. And that particular New Yorker piece, about the prom, happened in a funny way: I was sitting on my stoop in Brooklyn, where I lived at the time, and my neighbor, who was a teacher at a city high school, stopped by and started telling me about some of the dramas surrounding that evening’s prom. I thought it would make a great “Talk of the Town” piece, so I ran inside and called my editor. She gave me the go-ahead and I went. So yes, I did visit the prom as a reporter. All of my “Talk of the Town” pieces were entered into as a reporter.

JDH: You recently became a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. How does working on a magazine feed your creativity as a writer? How does travel? Any trips planned this summer?

DS: I’ve tended to write magazine pieces over the years in between writing books. This Travel + Leisure thing is slightly different for me in that I’m producing their back page each month, interviewing an interesting person on the subject of his or her favorite place. I do find that really fascinating—to be able to delve into why a particular place has meaning or resonance. The first back page I did was with a close friend, Milos Forman, who chose The National Theatre in Prague—where he was about to direct a play—his lifelong dream. I've also profiled Jamie Lee Curtis, Jonathan Lethem, Angelika Taschen, and Nora Ephron—who chose Las Vegas and totally made me want to go. That woman can convince anyone of anything.

As for travel, I don’t know that it directly feeds my work, but certainly it opens up my head. My husband and I, along with Hannah Tinti from One Story, recently started a writers’ conference in Positano, Italy at a gorgeous hotel there. It’s called Sirenland and we’re planning to run it each March. And one of the glorious side benefits for me is that it allows us to know that at least once a year we’ll get out of the country.

JDH: That sounds lovely….To change topics completely: You were once quoted saying "Research is a euphemism for procrastination." Tell me more about this. What are some ways you prepare to write a book if you're not doing conventional research?

DS: What I meant by that was that writers—myself included—can decide in the middle of a book, or a story, that suddenly they need to know everything about a particular tree that grows on a particular island in a particular climate—and can spend the rest of the day bopping around the internet in search of a single detail. Sometimes this is necessary—sometimes it’s useful—but I’ve found, for myself, that most of the time my imagination does a better job of creating a cohesive narrative than any amount of research that accumulates a bunch of facts. It’s also my experience that writers who spend a lot of time accumulating facts then feel like they have to use them, otherwise they really would have been wasting time. Sometimes, when you’re reading along in a novel and you stub your toe against some random detail, some random fact and wonder what it’s doing there—mostly likely it’s there because the writer spent a day finding it.

As for preparing to write a book, I try to keep in mind something Grace Paley once said in a workshop at Sarah Lawrence. She told us that she wrote in the bathtub. At the time, I thought she meant that she literally climbed into the bath with a notepad and pen. Years later, I realized what she meant. She meant that she took baths. We need that dreamy time. That ruminating, quiet time that allow ideas, places, characters, a voice to emerge—like the eureka moment I had in the car about Sally Mann and the character of Ruth Dunne. So I guess that the best preparation, for me, is to find a way to get very quiet and listen. I also read a lot. I re-read Virginia Woolf, who is a tonic for me. I read books that take narrative risks and are full of thrilling language. I try to remind myself that these books, too, began with a writer taking that leap of faith of first setting pen to the blank page.

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Interview with Gayle Brandeis