‘It took me until I was in my 40s to write a happy, successful 26-year-old
protagonist that my 26-year-old editor liked,” says Susan Shapiro, who has
published seven books in the past seven years and has been riding a wave of
success particularly after her memoir,
Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking,
Drinking, and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except Sex.
For more than
30 years the New York City writing professor has helped thousands of students
get published, get sane, find love and get it together with her brand of Jewish
motherly tough love. But it took her 13 years to publish
Overexposed (Thomas
Dunne Books, 2010, 320 pages), which is about a poor struggling urban artist and
a rich Midwestern wife and mother who end up swapping lives.
To celebrate
her book’s debut, Shapiro held a “book mitzva” where mentors, family, therapists
and students gathered to officially pronounce the project “a book,” blessed by a
rabbi. Even Shapiro’s party planner mother flew in from Michigan to surprise her
with the bat mitzva she never had and delivered trays of cookies inscribed with
her name.
The book mitzva was a continuation of a story that was taken
from her own life.
Her latest fiction is a roman a clef.
An
excerpt regarding her entry into womanhood: “You and Dad didn’t care about me
getting bat mitzvahed.”
“How could you get bat mitzvahed when you called
Rabbi Weiner a sexist pig and walked out on his class in seventh grade?” she
asked... “Of course we cared,” my mother added. “It broke our
hearts.”
The novel introduces us to Rachel, a self-obsessed, neurotic New
Yorker, an aspiring photographer and eternal adolescent and her generous if
preoccupied Midwestern Jewish family of doctors.
Rachel considers herself
an independent girl and wants desperately to be like what she envisions her new
friend Elizabeth, who works with her at Vision Magazine, to be. Elizabeth has a
famous father, cool connections and an exciting but poor and chaotic
life.
In the beginning, Rachel is cute and relatable, especially to
young, single, urban women who want a career first and foremost. As Rachel looks
for love, we cheer her on as she tries to find a suitable candidate, and we
witness a series of disasters, including a newly divorced man who winds up
marrying his significantly younger Orthodox cousin. And we continue to hope she
gets the nice guy.
In a quirky twist of fate, Rachel’s hip, single,
feminist friend reveals that she really wants a stable home life married to a
doctor, and that doctor turns out to be Rachel’s brother. To make usurping
Rachel’s place even more complete, she even moves in to her old
home.
Rachel seems unsympathetic to any woman who would choose the roles
of wife and mother when she thinks she could be so much more. At this point, she
doesn’t accept the feminist view of the freedom to choose and lacks empathy for
any woman who opts for the traditional role. Regarding her new nieces and
nephews, the offspring of her new goyish convert sister-in-law, the workaholic
control freak that Rachel shows signs of becoming, blurts out to her
“condescending psycho sister-in-law who drove [her] insane”: “Since you became a
kid factory, you’re in control of everything.”
In a Freudian analogy,
when her sisterin- law’s due date coincides with her first photography show,
Rachel throws a tantrum. “My own family was picking her on the biggest day of my
life,” Rachel kvetches to her friends who side with her.
However, her
brother and mother do show up. “Elizabeth wouldn’t let me miss it,” her brother
says, flying in from Chicago to New York on the same day of his firstborn
child’s birth, an act few can relate to.
Finally, Rachel’s antagonism
toward her new addition begins to soften as her career grows. Her relationship
with Elizabeth reaches a manageable level. Instead of seeing any playtime with
her as cutting into her work schedule, she takes a liking to her four-year-old
niece, who reminds her of herself. “My parents said I was precocious and
articulate at a young age.”
“You’re selfish and work obsessed and haven’t
been home to visit in a whole year.” Her mother finally takes a stand, siding
with her new daughter-in-law, who rules the home nest. “Feelings misinform,” her
shrink tells her. “It was time to... make peace with my family, especially its
new yiddishe mama, Elizabeth.”
Rachel realizes “they were always there
for me, and I had to start coming through for them.”
And in the story,
she doesn’t get the guy, instead she gets her career and makes peace with her
family. Elizabeth gets the guy and the family too, and maybe that’s
okay.
Shapiro’s funny, Freudian and engaging tale is a good read for
everyone who’s thought they had to choose between marriage, career and family.
And perhaps it’s just like Rachel said: “Maybe the trick was that women could
have it all, just not at the same time.”