Serenity Now

A few years ago, Dani Shapiro began suffering from what she calls an “is-this-all-there-is despondency,” a spiritual malaise she chronicles in her new memoir, Devotion (HarperCollins; 245 pages). She had her farmhouse with a quarter-mile-long driveway, a sweetheart of a husband, an adorable son and a thriving career as a novelist, but something was missing.

A diamond-studded tennis bracelet? No: inner peace and the means to cope with the impermanence of all things, including herself. This kind of crisis–regarded as a luxurious problem by many–is not an uncommon malaise in the well-heeled, 40-something mom set. Not coincidentally, they tend to purchase a lot of books.

Devotion does not provide a template for finding your own personal Jesus (or whoever). It’s a history of Shapiro’s quest to explore her own faithlessness. She grew up in an Orthodox household but cast aside her Hebrew religious study as a teenager. As an adult, her sense of God was that if he existed, he was not a micromanager. (“As far as I knew, he had never gotten me a parking space.”) She wants to believe in something but doesn’t know what.

To that end, Shapiro talks with her old family rabbi, meditates, practices yoga and produces a memoir preciously divided into 102 tiny chapters loaded with mantras, definitions and people chatting over cups of herbal tea. The sense is of an essay padded to book length, but some of these miniatures work. A charmingly self-aware one describes the family car being struck by a bottle of salad dressing. Shapiro is taken aback; she had not put salad dressing on her list of fears.

If you’ve read Slow Motion, her memoir recounting a misspent youth as the cokehead mistress of a rich creep and the car accident that nearly robbed her of both parents, you know Shapiro has a heightened sense of drama. She is wiser now but still can’t stop obsessing over what could have been, whether it be a medical crisis her son survived as an infant or a terrorist attack. (She put her Brooklyn brownstone on the market a few days after Sept. 11.)

Shapiro uses the word neurotic to describe herself–a relief, because it saves me from pointing the finger. She is the nervous type, and her journey evolves in such an indulged mind-set that those plagued by more practical matters may find Devotion silly. But her sincerity, intelligence and admission that she doesn’t actually read all the yoga books she buys are endearing; her need for answers touching. What makes Devotion most compelling is its willingness to explore the elusiveness of certainty.