Free Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro Page B

a walk. Take a bath. Take a drive. Bake a cake. Nap a little. You’ll try again tomorrow.
    81
    Dani Shapiro

Mess
    I had just turned seventeen when I went off to college, and though I may have looked the part of a freshman, I was im-mature and confused. The rules of my strict upbringing had defined me and kept me in place. In casting those rules aside—
    no longer worried that God might be watching—I was on my own, and as prepared for it as a toddler crossing a city street by herself. They say that the cerebral frontal cortex—the part of the brain that identifies and comprehends risk and danger—is not fully developed until well into one’s twenties. Risk and danger—these were mere abstractions. I never even considered that actions produce consequences.
    I entered a self-destructive spiral that lasted six years and involved drugs, alcohol, and a powerful married man, the step-father of one of my closest friends. He was also a socio-path who eventually served time in prison for tax evasion and embezzlement. Read that again. Slowly. Try to make sense of it. Mistress of a married man. A married criminal man. I didn’t rebel by half-measures. Once I began, there was no stopping me. Anything could have happened, and a lot did, none of it pretty. Certainly, observing me during that time, few would 82
    Still Writing
    have laid odds on my growing up to become a novelist and memoirist, a professor, a contented wife and mother living in rural Connecticut. Life doesn’t follow narrative arcs that stretch from one predictable scene to the next—does it? The landmark documentary Up series, by Michael Apted, in which he follows a group of British schoolchildren beginning at age seven, and then every seven years up through middle age, has the tag line: Give me the child until age seven, and I will give you the man.
    Well, yes and no. If we examine a moment’s interactions and details, we can cast out lines, like fishermen; there are infinite ways a life might unfold. If someone were to have observed me at age seven, the trajectory through my early twenties might have shown up like the faintest crease a fortune-teller might see in the palm of a hand. If someone had drawn an arrow from my parents’ unhappiness back through my family’s history, which included some alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and a complex legacy of secrets, then perhaps one could have imagined a rough patch down the road. But, as in the blooming of an orchid or the metastasis of a tumor, the conditions had to be right. If I hadn’t crossed paths with that particular man would something else, equally or perhaps even uglier, have happened? Or would the shadow of that particular danger have passed over me? Throw any variable into the mix—a phone call, a different turn, a stranger walking into 83
    Dani Shapiro
    the room, a new friend, a caring mentor, a thunderstorm, a broken lock—and everything changes. Suddenly you’re telling a different story.
    What happened next could not have been etched into the palm of any hand. The winter of the year I was twenty-three, my parents were driving home during a blizzard and my father passed out behind the wheel of their car. My mother was in the passenger seat. He was wearing a seat belt. She was not.
    Two weeks later, my father died from his injuries. By the time my mother was pried by the jaws of life from the wrecked car, she had eighty broken bones. In my memoir Slow Motion, I write about my parents’ accident. I write about being a twenty-three-year-old college drop out trying to disengage myself from my married boyfriend, subsisting on a diet of white wine and scotch and saltines. I write about my grief at the loss of my father; taking care of my mother; ending, finally, my destructive relationship; returning to college. On the cover of a paperback edition of Slow Motion, the subtitle reads:
    “a memoir of a life rescued by tragedy.” This is marketing-speak, fraught and complex events reduced to a sound