Hourglass by Dani Shapiro (June 2017)
Published just this past April, Shapiro reflects on various topics in Hourglass- her eighteen years of marriage, the woman she grew up to become, the ways time's unstoppable power shaped both. As I did with Pachinko, I attended an author reading to get a better sense of the book before deciding whether to go ahead and read it myself.
One phrase from an early section of the book caught my ear as soon as Shapiro read it: 'the accretion of sorrow' (1). Despite not having read the book, I recognized immediately the phrase's central role in this memoir. A challenge life throws at us all is how to handle our inevitable suffering. Often, it is brought about after attaching our eternal emotions to so many temporal matters- homes, careers, pets, people. No matter how we divide our burdens or share in each other's successes, the relentless undertow of time always lurks beneath, ready to pull us away from what we've just attached ourselves.
For this book, perhaps a better word for theme is hypothesis. The book is a short but powerful test of how life's sorrows, accumulating with the same inevitably of sand in an hourglass, are best rearranged into something empowering or meaningful. Marriage is one of the laboratories used to examine the idea. The power of the hourglass analogy is significant in this context. No matter how often it is tipped over, the sand merely shifts from one side to the other. Things do not really become better, only different, as the accumulated sand is rearranged in countless ways.
Like all analogies, the hourglass one does have its limits. Unlike with an hourglass, in life the sand is not a fixed quantity. Over a lifetime, it does accumulate. Each new grain is added to the existing pile, an ever-growing representation of how what we are in the moment is not meant to last. And so, because of the inevitable crumbling of so many things, the moments that freeze time become valuable. Each photograph, letter, or journal is a port in the storm- a chance to repair and recharge, of course, but also a reminder that ships are not meant to wait safely in harbors.
One up: This was a fast read. Hourglass is around one hundred and fifty pages long. I wish I'd used an hourglass to track the time it took to finish- I probably would have tipped it over once or twice before breaking it by accident.
I would assume my highly-intelligent readers could finish this in a couple of days (at most). I suppose it has some potential as beach read for those inclined to reflect deeply while staring out at seaweed/jellyfish/seagull-infested waters.
One down: This book is written without major external organizing concepts. In plain English: this book does not have chapters. Rather than try to pound her experiences into a straight-line narrative, Shapiro's pen drifts as freely as a wandering mind. And for the most part, I thought the result effectively drew me into this memoir.
The concept was one she made a loose reference to during the reading. At this stage in her life, Shapiro said, she found herself drifting away from traditional narratives as she became more aware of time's limits and effects. It was a nice thought, of course, but I thought it was an interesting remark to make given the reading started fifteen minutes late.
Shapiro, I was surprised to find myself thinking, is perhaps more domain dependent than I expected. In her case, the ability to write so elegantly about the limits of time did not translate very naturally into considering how my time was limited by waiting around for her to start the reading.
Just saying: Shapiro briefly references private journals she kept in her twenties and thirties. She also discussed these during the Q&A portion of the reading. To put it in as non-committal a way as possible: I'm not sure she will publish these straight out of her closet. For her, the process of reading old journals and recognizing the young woman in those pages was an embarrassing, painful, and exhausting process.
This was a feeling I related to at a certain level. Sometimes, I will read old posts and my eyes will gloss over the ridiculous paragraphs I posted nine months ago (2). But for the most part, I'm pretty content with what's here. The same is true for the journal I kept a couple of summers ago.
I admit I'm not sure I know exactly what kind of writing is most likely to cause me to cringe twenty years from now. I guess I'll have to write a follow up post sometime in the 2030s and see anything from this blog does the trick for me.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. The accretion of sorrow
I originally misheard this as 'the accumulation of sorrow'. Accretion works better in writing but for casual conversation I think I'll stick with my version.
I suppose vocabulary, like sorrow, is meant to accumulate- accrete?- slowly over time, waiting for each of us to come along, examine it, and determine how to best make use of it.
2. 'In any event, I was thrown off a bit to find myself suddenly gripped by a novel.'
