Susan Shapiro
By Susan Shapiro
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Life Taking It Personally: A Feminist Defense Of The First-Person Essay
Read Jia Tolentino’s May 18 anti-personal essay personal essay “The Personal Essay Boom Is Over” on The New Yorker’s website, then Google: Vivian Gornick, Roxane Gay, David Sedaris, Daphne Merkin, Leslie Jamison, Zadie Smith, Mary Karr, Gary Shteyngart, Jhumpa Lahiri, Elif Batuman or Joan Didion. Guess what you’ll find? Great recent personal essays, many in…
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Culture How The Fearless Adventurer Ruth Gruber Joined My Writing Group
My friend Ruth Gruber, who recently died late last year at age 105, was born before women could vote and lived long enough to cast her lot with Hillary. Reading her extraordinary obituary, I thought: she never got to see an American female president. Yet she did get the last word. We met in 1987,…
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Life The Last Jewish Wedding in West Bloomfield
“If it’s what I fear, he may need neurosurgery,” my internist father whispered. I tried desperately to decipher the squiggles on the M.R.I. scan of my brilliant, robust husband, my hand trembling. He’d taken the test last week, after dizzy spells had left him off-balance. Before he could see a specialist, I’d asked Dad’s opinion…
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Culture One Jewish Woman’s Quest to Become Joan Didion
I can’t wait to read “The Last Love Song,” Tracy Daugherty’s upcoming Joan Didion biography, or to see the film Hollywood producers are planning to make of Didion’s iconic “Goodbye to All That.” I was in college when I first devoured that essay about the Episcopalian author’s early years in New York. I can envision…
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Life My Matchmaker Divorced Me
Dan Brownstein / Susan Shapiro and her husband You would think finding someone their bashert would ensure a lifelong friendship, not a vendetta. When I was 29, my friend Valerie set me up with “Aaron,” “a smart handsome screenwriter mensch” she said I should marry. After a tumultuous off-and-on courtship, I finally heeded Valerie’s advice….
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Culture Excerpt: ‘Overexposed’
When my best friend Elizabeth and my brother Ben landed in New York for their holiday weekend wedding extravaganza, Ben called me from their hotel in Rye, mentioning that Elizabeth’s mother had chosen flute music for their Sunday evening reception. “Flute music?” I asked. “For when we walk down the aisle,” Ben explained. “That’s the…
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Culture Shrink And Grow
With many shrinks away between now and the end of the summer, Susan Shapiro, the author of the new novel “Speed Shrinking” (St. Martin’s Press), suggests abandoned patients get their fill of talk therapy from these works of fiction: “Fear of Flying” By Erica Jong There’s a reason 20 million copies are in print. Jong’s…
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