She is not afraid to show herself in an unflattering light, which helps secure our trust. Her prose is clear and often lovely, and her searching questions are unfailingly intelligent. But her books work not just because the situations she writes about are inherently dramatic and relatable.

Like another author of multiple memoirs, Kathryn Harrison, life has handed her rich material. 'I couldn't imagine what might come next.It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life - even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine - and still not know the truth of oneself.'Īs she has demonstrated in previous books - including Devotion (2010), her memoir about faith, and Hourglass (2017), about the challenges of marriage - Shapiro is skilled at spinning her personal explorations into narrative gold. Yet that raises many more questions and broader societal issues concerning in vitro fertilization, sperm donors, and privacy protections. Without divulging too much, I can tell you that Shapiro and her husband, two experienced reporters, crack the genealogical mystery with surprising ease. Inheritance reads like a detective story, albeit an emotional one. If Paul wasn't her real father and she isn't who she thinks she is, then who is she? Where did the non-Ashkenazi French, Irish, English, and German 48 percent of her DNA come from? And, even more upsetting: Did her parents know this and deliberately hide it from her? Shapiro is shaken to her core by this discovery. At age 54, Shapiro is shocked to learn that the devout Orthodox Jewish stockbroker she thought was her biological father - Paul Shapiro, the man who died in that car accident - wasn't a blood relative. This time around, the catalyst is a genetic spit test taken out of idle curiosity in 2016. Inheritance, Shapiro's tenth book and fifth memoir, is a quest to uncover a family mystery involving her identity. The tragedy galvanized her to clean up the wreckage of her life.

The accident slammed into 23-year-old Shapiro at a time when her life had veered dangerously off-course: She was a coke-snorting, heavy-drinking college dropout, the 'kept' mistress of a friend's stepfather. At its core is the mid-1980s car crash that killed her father and seriously shattered her mother. Twenty years ago, Dani Shapiro's first memoir, Slow Motion, fell into the we-shall-overcome group. Many literary memoirs involve surmounting hurdles or uncovering family secrets in pursuit of self-discovery. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Inheritance Subtitle A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love Author Dani Shapiro

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