In elegant prose written with the breathless momentum of a thriller-Jennifer Egan calls Inheritance a “genetic detective story”-Shapiro chronicles the detonation of this news and the life-altering revelations that unspooled in its wake. 2019), Shapiro’s 10th book and fifth memoir, which tells the story of her discovery at age 54, thanks to an at-home DNA testing kit taken cavalierly one evening, that her father, who died in 1986, was not her biological parent. “It truly does feel to me that everything has led up to this,” Shapiro says. It took me a moment, in the dim lighting, to identify the gently wavering material as dozens of tiny, iridescent black feathers. Shapiro could be an actor, too, lively and radiating warmth, dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt, jeans, and heels, as well as a vest that, at first glance, appeared to be moving. No one seems disturbed by the two of us, the recorder conspicuously on the table, my beat-up ARC stuffed with Post-it notes. The clientele is, I think, largely actors or stagehands, grabbing a quick bite before evening call times at either the nearby Public Theater or the off-off-Broadway theater a few doors down. It’s brisk outside, but the café is cozy and slightly out of time-all wood and candlelight, the tables largely empty except for, here and there, a stylish person sipping from a mug the size of a decorative gourd.

We’re sitting at a table in the back of the Smile, a subterranean café on Bond Street in New York City. 'The thing that’s interesting about right now is imagining what I will ever write next,” Dani Shapiro says.

Inheritance shapiro