A Gefilte Fish Out of Water

The Body, Brain, & Books: Eleven questions with Susan Shapiro

Welcome to another edition of The Body, Brain, & Books. If you enjoy reading these quick, insightful interviews brimming with wisdom and hope, please subscribe to Beyond!

1. What are you reading now?

I’m catching up on stacks of books by former students:  memoirs by Esther Mollica (“The Queen of Gay Street”) and Kelly McMasters (“The Leaving Season”). Debut novels by Sharon Sochil Washington “The Blue is where God Lives,” Robert Markowitz’s “Clown Shoes," Kerika Fields’ “With Your Bad Self," Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s “Dear Chrystanthemums” (a novel in stories.) In nonfiction,  Allison Yarrow’s upcoming “Birth Control.”  From colleagues,  poetry books by YuYutsu Sharma “Lost Horoscope," Deborah Landau’s “Skeletons," Grace Schulman’s “Again the Dawn” and Tsipi Keller’s "Waves and Tonics” (a novel in verse.) I also just did a piece on Phillip Lopate so I reread all of his work which reminded me why I’ve always found him so inspiring. 

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

There’s a family rumor that when I was one I marched around our Michigan house chanting “I had a little shadow” from the “A Child’s Garden of Verses” by Robert Louis Stevenson that my aunt bought me. An NYU professor later insisted that our artistic sensibilities are formed before we’re three and asked what my favorite writing themes were as an adult. They've always been doppelgängers and mirrored images. 

I had two English teachers I loved at Roeper- the artistic school my parents were cool enough to send me to. Schavi Diara turned me onto Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and Jack Zucker assigned Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow and the Philips: Roth and Levine. I don’t think my parents were thrilled when I fell in love with "Portnoy’s Complaint" or "Fear of Flying” in high school which I didn’t hide but flaunted. 

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?

“The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai,” translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell.  I met him in New York and in Tel Aviv. I’m a failed poet and his work was important to me early on. Harvey, a mutual poet friend later broke my heart by telling me “You have too many words, not enough music.” But then Harvey said “There’s more poetry in your prose than your poems.” Luckily he was a New York Times Magazine editor who bought my essays that led to memoirs.  So as they say, when one door closed, another opened.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Black silk top 

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve encountered recently?

I read that when someone asked Toni Morrison “why do you write?” she answered “Because otherwise I’m stuck with life.” That resonated. I always tell my students “Writing is a way to turn your worst experiences into the most beautiful art.” 

6. Tell me about a special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I never had pets but liked my husband’s husky Tinder, my sister-in-law Carol's Labradoodles Bronx, Bruno, Cash and her mulitpoo Nutell and my Israeli cousin Sivan’s tiny white Havanese Gemma.

7. What’s one thing you are happy worked out way differently than you expected?

I taught writing in person for 25 years at The New School, NYU and Columbia, which I loved. I was in the middle of teaching a term at the New School in March 2020 when the pandemic hit. I had to finish classes online. Since I’m a technophobe, I thought I’d hate it. But it turns out it’s been amazing and I launched private zoom classes where I’m able to have more brilliant editors and agents zoom in each week, and can help more students of all ages get published. 

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself? 

Since I work at the computer for so many hours, I’ve been trying to get in 12,000 steps a day. I like to do walking-talking office hours with my students at night. But if it’s raining or snowing or 85 degrees outside, I’m known to turn on Jackson Five or Motown music of my childhood and dance at 11:40 to get my numbers in before my apple watch goes to zero at the stroke of midnight. 

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

I hope I still have career heights to scale. I’ve been blessed with amazing agents and editors, but my sales numbers are low. So there’s always a fear it’s over. But I think helping so many students brings me good karma. A bunch of people who took my classes in the past are now my editors and the best speakers in my classes and panels.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

There’s a story I’ve written about in my memoir “Only As Good as Your Word” about how, when I was sixteen, my school guidance counselor broke my heart by telling me I couldn’t graduate early because I wasn’t “emotionally mature enough” to handle college. Big meetings were planned with my parents, headmaster, teachers. Years later, my father revealed a secret he’d been keeping two decades. Turned out, it was a poorly endowed school because so many kids were on scholarship. If I graduated early, they’d lose two years tuition. So my conservative dad wrote a check to get me out the artistic liberal school I’d loved. I was stunned it had nothing to do with emotional maturity, it was all about money. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I’d asked him. “I didn’t want to ruin your idealism,” he answered. By the time I was 40 and married I could handle it and appreciated all the ironies.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Growing up a gefilte fish out of water in suburban Michigan, I was drawn to confessional poets who said horrible things you weren’t allowed to say all the time, that was their job. From Robert Lowell’s “I’m tired, everyone’s tired of my turmoil.”   My addiction specialist once advised me to “lead the least secretive life you can.” 

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Susan Shapiro, a popular Manhattan writing professor, now teaching online, has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, NY Magazine, Newsweek, Salon, Tablet, Elle, Wired and New Yorker magazines online. She’s the bestselling  author of several books her family hates,  including the memoirs The Forgiveness Tour and Five Men Who Broke My Heart, which was recently optioned for a movie.  Her coauthored book American Shield comes out in November. You can follow her on Instagram @profsue123 or Twitter @susanshapironet.

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Pick a question from above to answer in the comments! What’s a guiding force in your life? What is your biggest hope for yourself today? Tell me all about it.