Jane Fonda recently made news by saying, "I guee old age is hard, but it's youth that is really hard. People forget how brutal it is to be a clueless twentysomething."
I thought of this in reference to "Slow Motion," a memoir by Dani Shapiro. The story Shapiro tells is relatable; it's just about being dumb and reckless in one's twenties. Shapiro is a student at Sarah Lawrence when she finds herself sleeping with her close friend's married father; this guy is a pathological liar and a powerful lawyer, with his name in NYT stories and flashed across CNN screens.
Shapiro soon loses her friend, and she drops out of college; she is going to "become an actress." This doesn't go well, but at least the powerful lawyer is forking over huge sums of cash. Also, Shapiro's parents seem not to care about Shapiro's behavior. There is really only one moment of parental interest, when Shapiro's mother says (after years), "Just tell me the name of the man you're dating. Is it Ted Kennedy?"
What happens next is standard, banal awfulness: Shapiro's parents wreck their car. The crash is enough to send both Mom and Dad to the hospital with severe injuries; soon, Dad is dead. Shapiro must navigate this loss--and must also deal with family weirdness and family pettiness. (One detail I love: There is a family rift, and one half of the family does not care that the wife of the deceased is in a hospital. "We're not having the shiva in a hospital. We're having it at our home, and Wifey will just have to miss it....")
Most of us have lived through this kind of cringey stuff, but most of us choose to look away. Shapiro has a gift for recalling (apparently) everything, and she doesn't let herself off the hook. The coolness, the lack of self-pity, is remarkable. Also, it's just a pleasure to read these sentences:
The night before I receive the phone call that divides my life into before and after, my face swells in an allergic reaction to skin cream, then blisters and chaps. I am at a health spa in SoCal, a place where wealthy older women go to rest and rejuvenate, where young matrons snap their bodies back into shape, after pregnancies, where movie stars stretch out on tables, offering their smooth backs to the sun.
I am none of the above, and for the past three days, since arriving, I have often paused amid cacti to wonder what, exactly, I'm doing here. I am twenty-three, and my life has become unrecognizable to me. I have slid slowly into this state, the way one might wade into an icy lake, dipping a toe in at first, then wincing, pushing past all resistance until the body is submerged, numb to the cold.
This memoir made me think of the pilot of Lena Dunham's "Girls" (which I then found and rewatched on my laptop). Can I offer higher praise? An inspiring and strangely riveting book.
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