Hourglass

Time, Memory, Marriage

Dani Shapiro

$29.99

Paperback

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English

Vintage
20 April 2025

Memoirs; Sociology: family & relationships

The New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance delivers her most intimate and powerful work- a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, sorrow and love.

The New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance delivers her most intimate and powerful work- a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, sorrow and love.

Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time - abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning - a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves for all time when the self is so often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise - how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack?

Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence. Artful, intensely emotional work from one of our finest writers.

'A beautiful book by a writer of rare talent' Cheryl Strayed

By: Dani Shapiro
Imprint: Vintage
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 197mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 10mm
Weight: 117g
ISBN: 9781529909999
ISBN 10: 1529909996
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 20 April 2025
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Dani Shapiro is the author of the instant New York Times bestselling memoir, Inheritance. Her other books include the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. In February of 2019, Dani launched an original podcast, Family Secrets, in collaboration with iHeartMedia. An iTunes Top 10 podcast, the series features stories from guests who - like Dani - have uncovered life-altering and long-hidden secrets from their past. Along with teaching writing workshops around the world, Dani has taught at Columbia and New York University, and is the cofounder of Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Find her at danishapiro.com.

Reviews for Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

Compassionate, insightful, and powerfully honest, in Hourglass Dani Shapiro illuminates the deepest mysteries, contradictions, and consolations of so very much - love, memory, the people we used to be and the people we’ve become. In other words: life. I was absorbed by Hourglass and consoled by it, too. It’s a beautiful book by a writer of rare talent -- Cheryl Strayed Reading this book was like skating across a perfect piece of ice and then slowly noticing the cracks. Dark, cold water shows through. We can’t see the depths. Be careful, Shapiro warns, be careful, but still she skates on in the fading light with remarkable beauty and grace -- Jenny Offill Gorgeous, stunning, extraordinary— life-changing -- Will Schwalbe Dani Shapiro’s prose is elegant and crystal clear, the perfect vehicle for her fierce intelligence and curiosity about things that lurk just out of view. Hourglass is such a lovely book -- Richard Russo Poignant… Timeless… her prose has a way of making even mundane disappointments feel portentous and universal * The New York Times Book Review *