Kaleidoscope

The bestselling author of Inheritance and Signal Fires delivers her most ambitious work yet: an intricately woven, luminous memoir about a sudden upheaval in late middle age—for readers of Patti Smith’s M Train and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

It was Christmastime in the West Village when the world shifted before her eyes. String lights melted into pools of color, passersby became shapes in the night, and she knew: she would never see the world the same way again—soon, she might not be able to see it at all.

It had been less than a year since Dani Shapiro was diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening illness, and learned that the cure would likely cost her sight. The prospect would frighten anyone, but for a writer—an artist whose whole vocation is attention—it threatened the very source of her work.

And yet, as her own face blurred in the mirror, Shapiro found herself paying attention in new ways: Confronted with the possibility of losing one way of seeing, she began discovering another. 

How are we reintroduced to ourselves when the narrative changes? Shapiro is thrown headlong into her own past. With her trademark intimacy and candor, she shifts fluidly through time, exploring friendships, family, marriage, identity, and the creative life with renewed urgency—circling the blind spots we all carry. Growing older, she finds, doesn’t diminish us. It makes us kaleidoscopes: every self we have ever been, turning alongside the ones whose stories have yet to unfold.

At once meditative and propulsive, Kaleidoscope is Shapiro’s most finely wrought work to date—an impressionistic marvel of a memoir about learning to see our lives with fierce clarity, even as the world dissolves at the edges.

• "I could not put Kaleidoscope down, and I did not want it to end. It is gripping and luminous and so beautifully written, I had to pause between sentences, catching my breath. Dani Shapiro delivers both a very specific intimacy and a wider frame for her experience, allowing each of us to find ourselves in her story. This is memoir at its very best."
  Belle Burden, author of Strangers
• "Dani Shapiro is a gifted and lyrical writer. When her life and her sight are threatened, she is forced to see her inner and outer world through a new and prescient lens. Her observations on vulnerability, fragility, aging, identity, love, and life itself are profound and deeply insightful. Kaleidoscope is a beautifully constructed narrative, and good medicine."
  Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water
• “There are books you race through because you need to know what happens, and books you slow yourself down for because you can’t bear for them to end. Kaleidoscope is both. Dani Shapiro has written a work of astonishing beauty about the strange math of a life: the loves and losses, the choices and accidents, the selves we shed and the selves we carry forward. I have loved every one of Dani’s books, but this one stopped me in my tracks. It may be her finest yet.”
  Suleika Jaouad, author of The Book of Alchemy