Welcome to Untangle. I'm Patricia Carpice. Today's Encore episode is with the brilliant best-selling author, Danny Shapiro. Danny's written several memoirs including slow motion, devotion, inheritance, and hourglass. Time, memory, marriage. She's written 11 books in total with Signal Fires being her most recent.

She's also host of the podcast Family Secrets.

In this interview, she shares how we make meaning of what happens in our lives

and how we shape our experiences into story.

Meditation is a part of her everyday ritual to stay grounded and to tap into her

own inner landscape. Now here's Danny. Danny Shapiro, it is such a pleasure to have you on Untangle

today. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So let's start by getting a little background on you. And I know,

you know, so many of our listeners know you, but I first fell in love with your writing with your first

two memoirs, slow motion and devotion. Can you just talk sort of a little open ended about about slow motion and devotion and what inspired you to write those books?

Sure.

Great.

Sure.

Yeah.

So interesting because many people who discover me through slow motion actually don't know that I had written three novels prior to slow motion.

And that's relevant

because I thought of myself entirely as a fiction writer. And then there came this moment

where I realized that my fiction was kind of being haunted by my autobiographical material,

by something that had happened to my family and to myself in a period of time that was very dramatic and difficult.

And I came to this realization, it was really a literary realization,

that I needed to almost heal that haunting by writing about that period of time

directly in slow motion. And so I wrote slow motion really out of a feeling, almost like a

curative, like this is going to really help and transform my fiction, and then I'll go back to

...