Hourglass

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by Dani Shapiro

The best-selling writer and memoirist presents her most personal and compelling work yet: a cutting, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the vulnerability and elasticity of our most important ties, and about the accumulation of both sadness and love over time. ‍

Hourglass is a study of how time affects marriage, how it is abraded, reinforced, and sculpted by chance and experience in wonderful and sometimes horrifying ways. Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart with courage and unflinching honesty, inviting us to witness her own marital reckoning—a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she created, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

What factors are at work to shape our most fundamental bonds? How can we establish lifetime commitments in the face of constantly fluctuating identities, and how do we commit ourselves for all time when the self is always changing? How do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, and desire what we have rather than what we lack in the face of the unexpected, disappointment, and compromise—how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, and desire what we have rather than what we lack?

Shapiro writes magnificently of the delights and hardships of married life, drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, in a bright story that unfolds with urgent immediacy and incisive insight. One of our best authors has created a piece that is both artistic and extremely emotional.

Our thoughts on Hourglass

Our favourite quote from Hourglass

Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you’re capable of imagining is already a thing of the past. Who did you think you would grow up to become? You could never have dreamt yourself up. Sit down. Let me tell you everything that’s happened. You can stop running now. You are alive in the woman who watches you as you vanish.

Book Summary

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Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you’re capable of imagining is already a thing of the past. Who did you think you would grow up to become? You could never have dreamt yourself up. Sit down. Let me tell you everything that’s happened. You can stop running now. You are alive in the woman who watches you as you vanish.

— Dani Shapiro, Hourglass