Slow Motion: A True Story [Hardcover]

Dani Shapiro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 1998

From one of the most gifted writers of her  generation comes the harrowing and exqui-sitely written true story of how a family tragedy saved her life. Dani Shapiro was a young girl from a deeply religious home who 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 to drink heavily, and became estranged from her family and friends. But then the  phone call came. There had been an accident on a snowy road near her family's home in New Jersey, and both her parents lay hospitalized in critical condition. This haunting memoir traces her journey back into the world she had left behind. At a time when she was barely able to take care of herself, she was faced with the terrifying task of taking care of two people who needed her desperately.
            Dani Shapiro charts a riveting emotional course as she retraces her isolated, overprotected Orthodox Jewish childhood in an anti-Semitic suburb, and draws the connections between that childhood and her inevitable rebellion and self-destructiveness. She tells of a life nearly ruined by the gift of  beauty, and then saved by the worst thing imaginable. This is a beautiful and unforgettable memoir of a life utterly transformed by tragedy.

Editorial Reviews

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.

From Library Journal

Successful novelist Shapiro (Picturing the Wreck, Doubleday, 1996) details the tumult and rebirth she experienced in early adulthood, illustrating how one tragedy can prevent another from happening. Things didn't look good when, relying on drugs and alcohol to drive her through life, Shapiro dropped out of college to become an actress and continue her love affair with her best friend's stepfather, a flashy New York attorney. Then, a tragic car accident that left both her parents in critical condition supplied a much-needed impetus for change. As Shapiro nursed her parents, she rebuilt her own life, eventually returning to college, establishing herself as a writer, and embracing the traditional Orthodox Jewish upbringing she had previously rejected. This absorbing story, written with humor and honesty, is a good choice for sophisticated young adults. [This book was excerpted in the August 24/31, 1998 issue of The New Yorker.AEd.]AJoyce Sparrow, Oldsmar Lib., F.
-AJoyce Sparrow, Oldsmar Lib., FL
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 245 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (July 7, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679456317
• ISBN-13: 978-0679456315
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #646,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dani Shapiro's most recent books include the novels Black & White and Family History and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Vogue, Ploughshares, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other publications. She lives with her husband and son in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the best memoirs out there., July 21, 1998

By 

Gary Delsohn (Corona del Mar CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Slow Motion: A True Story (Hardcover)

I have read literally dozens of memoirs the past few years and this book is as good as any of them. In addition to being so well written, its unflinching honesty and pain make it impossible to put out of your thoughts long after you've finished. The author doesn't try to excuse or exaggerate her own shortcomings and weakness and the picture she paints of her lawyer lover is so slimy and ugly the only question one asks is how possibly could she have fallen for him. of course, we know the answer: money, insecurity, fame, romance, etc. Growing up in a Jewish family with all the attendant confused feelings about God, observance and the family feuds that seem to accompany it all, I could easily relate to what Shapiro experienced with her family. This is not a prurient or self-pitying book and it's almost hard to pinpoint its attraction other than to settle on its honesty, integrity and the drama attached to a life when one finally matures and realizes there are more pre! ssing reasons to live than simply in pursuit of one's own pleasure and respite from pain. People depend on us, sometimes too much, and the sacrifices we make for family can be suffocating. As the author points out, what kind of person would we be if we didn't at least try to live up to some of the expectations. I loved this book.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't trust the teller, trust the tale...but can we?, June 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Slow Motion: A True Story (Hardcover)

Competently written, but I am troubled by Slow Motion's disingenuousness. Dani Shapiro seems to be giving us what is usually called a "brutally frank" picture of an ugly chapter in her life, and she portrays herself as a woefully naive New Jersey girl--one of the world's leading innocents--who got mixed up with a beastly man (before she dated the beastly man, she dated "a [college] senior who...tried to feel me up"). In "Vogue," an admiring reviewer made reference to this man's having taken Shapiro's virginity as well as her innocence. Actually, when the 20-year-old Shapiro got involved with "Lenny Klein," she had already been married and divorced--she wrote openly of her marriages in a "New Yorker" essay. Being divorced is nothing to be ashamed of, so why didn't Shapiro, who supplies plenty of information on her bulimia, her drinking, and her drug use, give us an accurate picture of her romantic history? In this particular memoir, it IS relevant. The omission of this information made me wonder, in retrospect, how much other personal history was airbrushed or revised or simply misleading. Taken too far, discretion is deception.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A compelling and brave memoir, but unanswered questions., March 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Slow Motion: A True Story (Hardcover)

I tuned in to "This American Life" in the middle of Dani Shapiro reading from this book, without realizing the selection was her memoir! I was impressed enough to find and read the whole book. Ms. Shapiro is a gifted writer, and I look forward to reading her novels. I felt the strength of this book is her ability to describe the complexity of her feelings: guilt, anxiety, loss, and embarrassment, if not shame, at the life she leads as the "sugar baby" of a wealthy married man. It's emotionally candid without being self-indulgent.

I do want to know a little more, though, about the present. This is someone who has dealt with some difficult problems in her life, and gone on to carve out real success for herself. She barely touches on how good it feels to finally be in control of her life, and it feels as if something is missing. Maybe there are things she felt best to leave out? Unresolved issues? A relapse of some kind? What was it that prompted her to write this memoir, more than ten years after her father's death and the end of her affair?

I have recommended this book to my friends, even with my criticisms.