HOURGLASS

Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro; Alfred A. Knopf (145 pages, $22.95)

Dani Shapiro’s fourth memoir opens with her husband (whom she calls only “M.”) standing in the snow in his terry cloth bathrobe, firing a gun at a woodpecker that is pecking away at their house. It’s an unforgettable scene, and a significant one. M. is outside, protecting the house, the home, the family; Shapiro is inside, worrying.

Their marriage of nearly 20 years is the heart of this book— their steadfast relationship, M.’s willingness to give up a dangerous job as war correspondent (so she would worry less—ha!), the son they nearly lost, their recurring and serious financial pressures, and now the start, perhaps,

of M.’s professional slide.

“Hourglass” looks at how a marriage endures over time, and at how time changes the marriage—changes the people, but also the relationship, with strengths and weaknesses toggling back and forth. M.’s assurance, “I’ll take care of it,” later becomes his wife’s assurance that she will.

The book moves around deftly in time, anchored by Shapiro’s clear writing and excerpts from her old journals. The young Shapiro, headed to France with M. on their honeymoon, seems ridiculously naive. (She had “all the self-knowledge of a Labrador retriever,” Shapiro writes.) She had no idea what lay in store, the problems they would face, the way that love and passion would turn into something else.

Shapiro quotes Grace Paley more than once: “The decades between fifty and eighty feel not like minutes, but seconds.” And given the smooth way that Shapiro plays with time in this book— compressing it, moving it, revisiting it—she makes you know that it’s true.