Yet these past years have done little to reassure her. Her fortunes have drastically improved since her mother’s death, her third marriage and her child’s recovery. Shapiro became a student of life’s fragility, the inevitability of loss. Then a car crash, in which her father was killed and her mother broke 80 bones, altered her life forever. She rebelled, drank too much, dropped out of college, became mistress to her best friend’s stepfather, a wealthy married lawyer, in a spectacularly ill-advised affair. Shapiro often felt like the black sheep - or, as she puts it, the “blond sheep” - in her own home. Her observant father became addicted to painkillers her mother resented her faith and seethed with rage, much of it directed at Dani. She grew up in a tense Orthodox Jewish household where her parents were deeply divided about religion. In her absorbing novels, articles and well-received 1998 memoir, “Slow Motion,” Shapiro has written movingly about the tragedies that shaped her life. She has the acclaim she’s sought for years, a Connecticut home straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie and, in her mid-40s, a delicate, undiminished beauty. Her son, who suffered from a rare and life-threatening seizure disorder, is fine at 10, saved by early medical intervention and his parents’ unstinting care. After two failed marriages, she has a husband she adores. Dani Shapiro has a problem: Things are going really well.
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