Happier Hour: An Evening with Dani Shapiro and Sarah Manguso

Conversations from the Archive
February 2015
Los Angeles, California

Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, Dani Shapiro
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, Sarah Manguso

Excerpts:

Dani Shapiro: I stopped writing in diaries ten years ago.

Sarah Manguso: Stopped cold turkey?

Shapiro: I journaled during my honeymoon. I have no recollection of writing it. I referred to myself in the third person. “D did this. D did that.” Our memories morph and change. I thought of my diary as a garbage can. I never wanted to look at them again.

Before Slow Motion, I started reading my diaries. I passed out on the couch. I was depressed. I thought, “That young woman doesn’t deserve a book.” The thirty-two-year-old me wanted to write [the memoir] with a filter. I had to find the place where the me now meets the me then [at twenty three]. The last line of my honeymoon diary says, “Home. Married.”

Manguso: That’s not a garbage can.

Shapiro: Time and memory are a landscape you and I share. Rereading Ongoingness broke me out of a writer slump. I live for language. It’s not the story that grips me. The space on the page [in your book] gave me room to sit with it.

Manguso: [The extra space] was an intuitive decision.

Shapiro (on Devotion): I seem to not be able to write narrative, but you’ve put aside that convention. You’re not telling a story; you’re involving me in a story. I was shocked. It was a magical thing.

Manguso: In Devotion, the form is inextricable from content. The form, the form, the form. Every book works across genres.

Shapiro: Any artist is constantly struggling with herself on every level. It’s really, really fucking hard. I thought I was writing a book no one would read. You’re only articulate about your books in retrospect. [Writing Devotion was like] death by prose poem. I thought I’d lost my mind. With narrative, once you’ve begun, you’ve begun, but I knew this was the only structure for the book from the beginning.

We don’t choose our material. We don’t choose our form. The only time I get into trouble is when I force something. Allow structure to reveal itself.

Manguso: I don’t know what to call [my books]. Book-length essay sounds stuffy. Memoir sounds misleading.

Shapiro: Virginia Woolf is so unbelievably artful that she’s beyond art. It’s like looking into a still body of water.

Manguso: It’s the highest degree of madeness. This is what short form is going toward: I want perfect, small things. The answer for me was to go from commercial press to small press. They are rabidly supportive of odd form. Meet someone in the business who really digs you.

Shapiro: There is no one path. There’s no choice. That’s the kind of storyteller you are.

My editor said, “I’d rather have your memory” [than information from my diaries]. We can’t fact-check memory. The platform of the present and the story being told is the story.

In 1997, I remembered a conversation with a particular person [about my father’s death]. In 2009, I remembered the same exact dialogue, only now the person I was conversing with had changed. Both are emotionally accurate.

The pact between the memoir and the reader is “I’m trying to access my memory.”

Manguso: I never consulted my diary. I never thought to. I’ve written all my books from memory. After publishing, I start to forget. It’s great. It’s like uploading it somewhere. It’s okay to forget.

I have no idea where fiction comes from. I don’t know how to do it.

Shapiro: It’s a complicated thing being a writer. You wake up and do something the world doesn’t need and didn’t ask for. [Writing about other people] is very complex, endlessly so. What bothered [my mother] I couldn’t have expected. I have a boundary around my son. I’m very protective of his privacy.

I ask myself, “When my son is thirty, will he be upset about something I want to write about him?” If the answer is “yes,” then I don’t write it.