The overwhelming popular and critical reception for the film Rain Man, which received eight Academy Award nominations, has helped to focus national attention on autism. In psychiatry, autism is defined as a pervasive developmental neurological disorder, characterized by impaired communication, excessive rigidity and emotional detachment.

Although the character Raymond, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, is autistic, he is also an idiot savant, which most autistic persons are not. But the film, however well done, is a work of fiction. There are many families that must cope with the realities of autism each day. Such is the family of William and Barbara Christopher and their sons John and Ned. Mr. Christopher is perhaps better known to the public as “Father Mulcahy” in the immensely successful television series “M*A*S*H.” In a new book, Mixed Blessings, due for May release, the Christophers have written about the extraordinary challenge of raising their autistic son, Ned. Alan Alda says that theirs is “A book that brings you right into the center of their hopes, confusion, love, exasperation and grit. This book is alive . . . Bill and Barbara’s strength is contagious . . . their humanity is healing.” Mike Farrell comments: “A faithful and heartfelt rendition of their experiences . . . People are in sore need today of (such) examples of the true meaning of parenthood.” And R. Wayne Gilpin, President of the Autism Society of America, writes that Mixed Blessings is “Rich in caring, concern, and grace.”

Editor Roger Bishop interviewed William and Barbara Christopher last December. The edited excerpts from a long conversation about their important new book appear below.

RB: For whatever else it may be Mixed Blessings I saw as a story of the parents’ love for their two sons and of the parents’ extraordinary patience, persistence and intelligence in dealing with the physical disability of one child. Are there other things that you would like to say describing this book?

BC: I think you have said it very well. We think of it as a family story too. Only one family member has autism, the rest of us fortunately do not, and the kinds of challenges that we faced as a family are certainly parallel to any challenge that you meet as a family. And almost every family has some challenge.

RB: Early in the book you say that Ned’s teachers say that he’s the smartest boy they have had in their class, but then you receive a note from the Christian Nursery School expressing some concern about his behavior. The note in part says, “We would like to have some professional advice so that we can help him . . . we’re worried about Ned and we know you are too.” I think there are other parents that might find themselves in a similar situation. Would you talk a bit about this first visit to the psychologist?

WC: When the Christian Nursery School expressed their concerns to us, we thought it was time maybe to ask some questions, and we felt very good about their raising him.

BC: One of the things that happens, I think, is that you have your doubts, and you’ve talked to the pediatrician and he is very reassuring, and that makes you feel very good and you think, “Well . . . I don’t know a lot about children, I guess he’s O.K. He’s not much like John, but trust the pediatrician, he’s fine.” And then the next thing happens that makes you feel uneasy. So when the teacher finally says, “We know you are worried about him too,” I think I felt very devastated. On the other hand, it was almost a relief.

WC: Yes, we were in a partnership with these people. Neither one of us has the answers quite, but their suggesting get a little help, and then we can proceed. That sounds smart—that sounds like the way to go. We never thought going to get that little help would open up something much bigger.

RB: Toward the end of the book, there is a quote from a leading biologist in the study of autism and she says, “Autism is no longer a diagnosis, it is a description.” Would you elaborate on what you learned about autism?

BC: Well it is a pervasive, life long neurological disorder which is incurable. It affects the person afflicted with varying degrees of problems of all kinds—language disability, communication, socialization, and sensory organization. And these basic neurological problems manifest themselves sin different ways in different autistic people—there’s the full range of intelligence, there are retarded autistic people, and there are genius autistic people. I think when Mary Coleman said that about autism no longer being a diagnosis what she meant was after you get this label of autism, there are many subgroups—there are many variations on the theme and there are many approaches. I know that Ned would be called autistic and some kid over here, who’s very different, would also be called autistic. It’s very hard to generalize.

Many autistic people don’t socialize at all. Ned has always had certain people in his life that he really had affection for and an interest in. Some autistic children I’ve met have a real stone wall. Others progress into what is very close to a normal life and normal ability to relate.

RB: It’s understandable certainly, from what you’ve said here and from reading the book, that the general public would be quite confused about what autism is.

WC: We hope we drew a clear picture of what Ned was like because we don’t think of ourselves really as being expert in autism, but we did feel we had an interesting story in Ned. It’s hard I think for us as parents now after having written the book to know whether the book is going to make people say, “Yeah, I know what that kid is like.” I hope people do know what he’s like from reading because I’ve read other books and I sometimes wanted to know clearly just what the boy being described was like.

RB: May I ask where the idea for the book originated?

BC: Abingdon Press came to us and asked if we would be interested. Bill had received an award from an organization called Religion in the Media, and Abingdon was also receiving an award at that same banquet. They heard Bill speak and he mentioned his interest in the handicapped. Shortly thereafter they contacted us to see if we would be interested in writing about our experiences raising an autistic child. Bill’s first reaction was, “No, let’s not. That sounds like a lot of work.”

WC: To write a few sharp anecdotes or to sketch out something—that wouldn’t be so hard, but to sit down and have a book that really we could say, “this is what it was like,” that seemed formidable. But we soon discovered these letters that Barbara had written. They allow things to be in the book that really couldn’t have been written into the book. The letters can say things that we couldn’t even begin to say—not just because of the fact that the letters brought back forgotten things, but they also say things that we might find very awkward to put down, even if we could remember them.

RB: From a reader’s standpoint, I felt that the letters added a lot because you get some sense of your family life—other things that are going on.

WC: That’s the kind of thing we never would’ve been able to write in. Also the interesting thing is that the letters express feelings that we were having at the time, which in retrospect we—it was sometimes hard to believe we had those feelings.

BC: One of those things that struck often when we started working on the book and going through all our diaries (they’re not real diaries, they’re calendars) and going through the letters was the fact that we were so busy. We were constantly doing things, and while Ned was a big focus in our life, he wasn’t the only thing.

RB: Although the book should be helpful to so many people—parents certainly—all kinds of parents, it would seem to me the writing of the book and the reliving of these experiences would have been somewhat difficult. Was that true or did you have another reaction to that experience?

BC: I think I was both things, but certainly there were moments when—especially when I would uncover a letter I had completely forgotten about. One that comes to mind is the letter I wrote to the institutes when we were writing to see whether Ned would be a candidate for their program, and I outlined all the things we’d been through, and I remember reading that letter and just falling apart and thinking “how awful.” But at the same timeI think there was a kind of interest in looking at our own life this closely quite apart from problems or dealing with autism or Bill’s career. Just taking your own life, looking at it hard over a 20 year period and trying to organize it to make it intelligible to someone else was a very interesting process. 

WC: There were a few things that we found in the book that were painful to relive. I was thinking of some of the negative experiences like when Ned first went away and he lived in a group home and the experience was not good. We kind of had to hold back—we didn’t want to make a tirade.

BC: We didn’t feel we were out to settle scores.

RB: Well, the book certainly reflects, what I think we could generally call—maybe you would choose another term—an emotional roller coaster as you try one approach, then you try another approach, and you talk with professionals in the field who are apparently giving you their very best judgement on these things and often they’re wrong. But it does seem to me that you’re very generous with the way that you do treat the different people regardless of how they work out.

BC: Well, you know people don’t go into this field unless they really want to help, and the professionals we encountered weren’t alone in not having the answers. 

WC: I think one thing that is true—some might be critical of professionals in that there is some attitude that they feel they ought to have answers, and if they don’t, sometimes they kind of invent or fake it a little bit to make the parents feel this professional does know what they’re talking about instead of coming out and saying, “I don’t think I know either.”

BC: Of course we didn’t want to hear that. The last thing we wanted to hear was, “Well, I don’t know anymore than you do.”

RB: One of the parts that I so much enjoyed was a happy family experience when you went to England and you visited the Jane Austen places. You quote from her: “It is well to have as many holds on happiness as possible.” I was contrasting that with the Washington trip that you described later on which didn’t work out nearly as well.

 BC: No. That really was a very low point. And of course the abuse of medication is a serious problem with children like Ned, and children with various skinds of mental handicaps, because it seems to be such an easy solution, and it’s almost always the double edge. 

WC: What you end up with these kids is the unpredictability. With kids like Ned or kids in special education, the professionals and the parents learn that they have to make allowances for these very big swings. Especially autistic people who have days or cycles almost of months where they operate very well, and then they will operate not nearly so well, and you can’t despair saying, “Oh, what’s happening? Is his brain deteriorating?” In autism you learn to begin to expect these swings and if you’re using medication, it’s just that much more complicated because you don’t know what you’re going to get.

RB: We don’t have time of course to go into all the different schools and approaches, but I was particularly fascinated by the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia. This program demanded a lot of Ned, but also required an incredible amount of your time and effort. Would you talk just a little bit about that?

BC: It is hard to talk jut a little bit about the Institutes. It was a very all encompassing program which kept us busy from the early morning until late at night, and to many people it seems overwhelming, but the thing that is really hard to do with a child like that is nothing. Ned doesn’t do “nothing” very well. A normal child finds all kinds of things to get interested in and starts to develop friends an d alife of his own. In the years before we were doing the Institutes’ program, it was driving Ned to school and driving him from therapy to therapy. I was busy all the time and I didn’t have a sense of success. So when we began the Institutes’ program, we were so inspired by these wonderful people in Philadelphia and we saw immediate progress—so we were working terribly hard but it was terribly interesting. It was the most interesting time in my life, and Bill at the same time was working on “M*A*S*H” and coming home and helping with the program. It was very exciting. 

I don’t think we could have done it forever—it was too intense for that. They don’t have the answers necessarily for all the problems, but they have an approach that works for many children to help them—not cure them, but help them. We gained a lot of confidence in ourselves through working in such a direct partnership with professionals.

RB: For those who know you, Mr. Christopher, as Father Mulcahy from the “M*A*S*H” program, have enjoyed that through the years. In the book you get some sense of your work on that program, but was the experience with Ned such that it affected your portrayal of Father Mulcahy in the program or not? 

WC: I really felt totally free of anything like my home as I worked. One thing I think an actor does, I’m sure, is if you’re working and your life seems to be making sense around you, it may send you off to the studio in high spirits, and you may attack your work with  vigor and all. I always felt we had a pretty positive way of working with Ned. And if anything, I think the fact that Barbara and I were such a wonderful partnership all through our marriage has sort of reinforced my ability to give myself to my work. We developed a clear path—way of living with Ned and brining him along—if anything it made me clearer in my mind to devote myself to my work. I didn’t feel that I was at the studio sitting there wringing my hands about what was going on and unhappiness at home—that just wasn’t part of it. So I didn’t feel I had to write about that.

She may be 20 years sober and a Catholic convert, but don’t get the wrong impression—Mary Karr is no “candy-ass” (her word). She’s still the tough, scrappy outlaw that readers were introduced to in her first memoir, The Liars’ Club.

When it was published in 1995, The Liars’ Club offered a searing portrait of Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that raised the art of the memoir to a new level and brought about a revival of the genre. In her follow-up, Cherry, she recalled the wild ride of her adolescence and her sexual coming-of-age. Her third memoir, Lit, more than 10 years in the making, details how Karr ultimately emerged from her troubled upbringing triumphant, but not before a descent into alcoholism and near-madness.

A recent call to her New York home confirms that Karr indeed hasn’t lost her edge. The conversation—briefly interrupted by a call from the dean of Syracuse University, where she teaches English, and the arrival of her “heroic” assistant, without whom, she says, she would be “like an overfilled Macy’s balloon”—proves lively and candid.

“I’ll tell you,” she says with only the faintest trace of a Texas drawl, “this is the first book I’ve been excited to promote. This is what my life’s about now . . . how I became a mother, my relationships, my spiritual practice, my nervous breakthrough. Those things are so much closer to who I am now. This is what I talk to people about. Even if people think I’m an idiot, I’m interested in having the conversation with readers.” And readers, whether familiar with Karr’s previous work or not, will be riveted.

Never shying away from self-scrutiny, she explores the dissolution of her marriage, the joy and pain of motherhood, her father’s stroke and death, her fraught relationship with her own mother and her professional setbacks and successes in equal measure. This account of the latter part of her life is as unsparing and unsentimental as her first two memoirs and, like the others, by turns hilarious and gut-wrenching. She again brings to the task her acerbic wit and a poet’s eye for lyrical detail.

In search of the stable home she lacked as a child, Karr married a handsome, patrician poet and with him has an adored son, Dev. But over time, she drank herself into the disease that nearly destroyed her mother. Her path included, among other detours, a stint in “The Mental Marriott,” a famous asylum, where she found wisdom in unlikely places.

Asked how writing this book was discernibly different from writing the other two, Karr laughs, “Well, for one, I’m clearly the asshole. I think that’s the big thing.” She adds, “The hardest thing for me about writing these books is how to handle the emotional and moral questions, and this one obviously posed a lot of moral questions. You know, how do you write about your child? How do you write about someone you’re divorced from?” She says that, toward the end of the process, she ending up throwing away 525 finished pages of work.

She’d been working on the book for seven years, and her editor was pressuring her to turn in a finished manuscript. “I said, look, y’all could publish this, and it’s technically true, in that I didn’t make up the events, but it didn’t feel true. I mean, the other thing was when I wrote about the religious stuff I had a very hard time not sounding like one of those evangelists saying send me a dollar.”

Writing about religion, she concedes, is tricky business. “It’s very hard to write about. It’s like doing card tricks on the radio, I think—writing about prayer and spiritual experience to people who mostly think you’re an idiot. On the other hand it was an important part of my story, and I felt obligated to represent it, not in any evangelical way. . . . I know this sounds insane, but I believe that God wanted me to write this book. That doesn’t mean that God wants the book to succeed by any measure.”

She’s unapologetic about her faith, and anticipates a backlash from critics and “professional atheists” alike. “Believe it or not . . . I’m an extremely private person. You really wouldn’t know that, even though I’m pretty open and honest about things that other people would not be open about, but the degree to which I care about my reputation is pretty limited. I really gave that up long before I published anything anybody read. I think you have to [do that] as a writer or else you’ll go insane. My fear [in writing about faith] wasn’t so much that people would look at me and think I was a candy-ass, as that I wouldn’t represent it truly—I wouldn’t be able to recreate an experience in the reader that matched and mirrored my experience. I wouldn’t be able to create an emotional experience for a secular audience. That’s what I was most scared about.”

Karr manages to write about spirituality without ever coming across as didactic or preachy—no small feat. “Well, on two earlier drafts I did,” she confesses. “Hopefully I corrected that.”

In one passage, she eloquently describes her first stirrings of faith, a brush with the numinous: “I feel some fleet movement travel through my chest—a twinge, a hint. This faint yearning was not belief itself, but wanting to believe.”

She says her transformation would never have been possible without her mother’s recovery from alcoholism. “I honestly think if my mother had not gotten sober, there’s no way. . . . She gave the whole family a great gift.”

“I was so scared and so mean all the time,” she says of her pre-sobriety days. “I do feel like my life has been transformed and is better than I could ever have imagined. I’m so much more in it. I have more life now in a day than I used to have in a year.”

Karr’s entire body of work attests to this simple truth: that the past, until you reckon with it, will remain in hot pursuit. In other words, what you don’t bring into the light will destroy you. Lit brings this process full circle. That pleasingly monosyllabic title encapsulates this writer’s entire journey thus far—one that is about drinking and the illuminating revelations of sobriety, about the redemptive power of literature and how the act of writing can save a soul. 

Katherine Wyrick is a writer in Little Rock.

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Excerpt from Lit:

Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.

No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around.

Wasn't that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted robert Frost:

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in
And thought of doing something to the shore
Water had never done to land before . . .

Pretty, Doonie said.

Quinn spat in the sand and said, She's always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she's fine.

He zipped up his outsize wet suit with force. The crotch of it hung down so low that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger.

My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison.

That's me, I said. Miss California.

Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, from Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr (2009).

More from Mary Karr:
On religion: “The Catholic Church didn’t designate me a spokesperson. I’m sure the Catholic Church, many people, wouldn’t approve wholeheartedly of my particular brand of Catholicism. I mean, I have sex outside of wedlock . . . I do things the Catholic Church frowns on to say the least.”
On alcohol: “We have no business drinkin’, our people.” Describing a moment on her wedding day, she writes, “Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes.”

Elena Gorokhova’s transformative moment as a writer came in 2004 when she enrolled in Frank McCourt’s memoir class at the Southampton Writers Conference. For the previous 10 or 15 years she had occasionally written—and published—fictionalized bits and pieces about her childhood and youth in Leningrad during the Brezhnev era. Writing was a pleasure, even a necessity, but more tangible concerns—her teaching responsibilities, raising a child, cooking dinner—kept her from taking it seriously.

Then came Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes. “He was a brilliant storyteller, but also just as brilliant a teacher,” Gorokhova remembers during a call to her home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where she lives with her second husband, their daughter and her 95-year-old mother, a figure who looms large in Gorokhova’s enthralling memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs.

McCourt’s classroom included 11 other students and two celebrities who were auditing the class—actors Alan Alda and Anne Bancroft. “The synergy of these three enormously talented people provided this incredible, electric atmosphere. Magic happened every day in that classroom!” Gorokhova says. “From that moment, from that seminar, A Mountain of Crumbs all came together.”

One thing Gorokhova learned from McCourt was to focus on the “hot spots,” those defining moments in life when something significant changes. “He compared it to walking on the beach. ‘You can just look at the surface of things,’ he said, ‘or you can go with a metal detector and go for the gold that’s deep inside.’ ”

Gorokhova has clearly gone for the gold. The 20 episodes in A Mountain of Crumbs are extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail and offer an engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Beginning with Gorokhova’s mother’s brutal experiences after the Russian Revolution and in World War II as a doctor, the narrative follows Gorokhova through interactions with her friends and family members, her early education—in school and in the Soviet system—her intellectual and sexual awakenings and her growing disillusionment with the Communist government, until in 1980, at age 24, she meets and marries a brilliant American physics student and leaves Russia for good. Along the way, the wryly ironic Gorokhova illuminates the ludicrous tensions that existed between public and private life in the Soviet Union and tweaks the noses of authorities, including her mother.

“The United States is a different country and has different tensions and different kinds of stresses,” says Gorokhova, a linguist who has taught English as a second language since 1981. “What it doesn’t have is the kind of schizophrenic slicing of your soul in half that we had in the Soviet Union. There were things that I could say and that I could show to my family and friends. Then I would go outside, like everyone else, and I knew I couldn’t say or show that to people I went to school with or worked with, and especially not to any officials. It was the post-Stalin era, so they were not going to throw us into Siberia for a joke [during Stalin’s rule, Gorokhova’s uncle had disappeared in the Gulag after telling a joke to a foreigner]. But we had to be careful, we had to pretend everything was all right. The essence was that the government lied to us and we knew they were lying. They knew we knew they were lying. But they kept lying anyway. And we kept pretending to believe them. It was this duality, this divide, that ruled life there.”

For much of the narrative, Gorokhova associates that duality with her overprotective mother and an equally overprotective motherland. A somewhat more forgiving Gorokhova now says, “My mother was born three years before the Revolution. She went through famine and through two wars. She was a surgeon in World War II at the front. Her first two husbands didn’t last long and my father died when I was 10. She was very strong, obviously, and very controlling. Of course she loved us and was very protective of us but she didn’t show the warm side. She stifled. It occurred to me she was just like the country. What was the intention of the Soviet state? To have a just and equal society, to take care of the people. In the Soviet Union no one starved. No one was out of work. We all got our miserable wages for sitting at a desk for eight hours and doing crossword puzzles. The money was little, the food was scarce, but we were all in the same situation. There was this control and smothering on one side and this protective quality on the other.”

Gorokhova’s path away from the stifling system toward independence opened when a grade school friend played a recording of a basic English lesson. “It was so mesmerizing,” Gorokhova says, “an English male voice speaking English. It was captivating.”  Gorokhova begged her mother to pay for English lessons, and her mother finally agreed. Her knowledge of English afforded Gorokhova the opportunity to encounter Western visitors in Leningrad and to catch glimpses of a different sort of life in English-language books and movies. “It was putting these little bits and pieces together that told me that all this about capitalism rotting and crumbling and socialism succeeding and thriving was nonsense,” she says.

“And when I came here, I started writing in English,” Gorokhova continues. “I never tried to write anything in Russian when I lived in Russia. But when I came to this country, I felt the necessity and I allowed myself to write—in English. It took me a few years to learn the English rhetoric. Then in 2004 I saw that the legendary Frank McCourt was teaching his memoir class. I thought, this is ridiculous. Who is going to accept me into Frank McCourt’s class? But then I thought, why not? I submitted an application, and I got accepted. I was stunned. I was stunned.”

And from this beginning, an American writer was born.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

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Watch a video interview with Elena Gorokhova:

A few weeks ago, author Dani Shapiro, her atheist husband and their young son went to hear a children’s choir perform on a village green near their New England home. They listened to hymns and Christmas carols interspersed with readings by Persian poet Rumi and Catholic author Thomas Merton. Then the family went home and lit Hanukkah candles.

“I thought, this is my idea of what it should be like,” Shapiro laughs during a call to her home in Connecticut. “If I hadn’t done the journey, though, all these contradictions would have felt wrong. I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

“I was looking not so much for religion . . . but a way of life that would allow for greater meaning.”

“The journey,” as Shapiro calls it, is her search to discover a deeper truth about life, which she details in her lovely mosaic of a memoir, Devotion. Courageous, authentic and funny, Devotion is Shapiro’s exploration of her own relationship with faith.

In her mid-40s, Shapiro found herself unsettled and out of balance. What did she truly believe? What kinds of values did she want to instill in her young son? Raised in a deeply religious family with strict rituals, Shapiro was drawn more to the spirituality of yoga and meditation, yet also attended monthly Torah studies. In Devotion, she asks: Is it all right to take a hodge-podge approach to spirituality, or does dabbling in different faiths signal a wishy-washiness, an unwillingness to choose a doctrine and stick with it? And how did her family history feed into her confusion about faith?

“I had reached the middle of my life and knew less than I ever had before,” she writes. “Michael, Jacob and I lived on top of a hill, surrounded by old trees, a vegetable garden, stone walls. From the outside things looked pretty good. But deep inside myself, I had begun to quietly fall apart. Nights, I quivered in the darkness like a wounded animal. Something was very wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.”

Shapiro got serious about meditating (“It’s a struggle for my kinetic, type-A, busy-minded self,” she admits). She went on silent retreats and practiced yoga. She read about spirituality. She talked with friends and relatives, devout and not. She pieced together fragments of her life, both harrowing and beautiful, that shaped who she is.

Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household with a father prone to panic attacks and a supremely difficult mother, Shapiro found her childhood fraught with confusion. By her 30s, she was a recovering drinker, had lost her father to a car accident (which she wrote about in her gritty first memoir, Slow Motion) and had a newborn with a potentially life-threatening seizure disorder. After hearing the planes hit the World Trade Center, Shapiro and her husband, screenwriter Michael Maren, sold their Brooklyn brownstone and headed for Connecticut.

But even in that bucolic setting, even when her son was no longer sick, her anxiety grew and she knew she needed more. “I was looking not so much for a religion—I had one and had mixed feelings about it—but a way of life that would allow for greater meaning, greater depth, greater awareness,” Shapiro says. “I desperately did not want to be 80 years and saying, ‘But I was just getting my life together.’ ”

Those are the words her mother uttered on her deathbed. In Devotion, Shapiro revisits their beyond-rocky relationship.
“I grew up hearing, ‘You made this happen,’ or ‘You poisoned this person against me,’ ” she says. “With my mother, I had to ask myself, is it ever OK to give up on a person?”

The answer, at least for Shapiro, was yes. After attending several therapy sessions with her mother, Shapiro talked with the psychiatrist, who told her something he’d never said to a client in 30 years of practice: She and her mother had no hope of forging a healthy relationship.

“It was such an incredibly intense moment,” Shapiro recalls. “It will remain one of the definitive moments of my life. The feeling of somebody totally unbiased corroborating that or saying, ‘Yeah, this really is impossible.’ It was in equal and opposing measures relief and incredibly painful.”

The relationship she had with her mother hasn’t tainted her own parenting. “I’m very glad I had a boy,” she admits. “During the sonogram, I heard it was a boy and was instantly and profoundly relieved. I think it would have been very complicated for me to have a daughter, and I think I would have been a very self-conscious mother of a daughter.”

Jacob, now a healthy grade-schooler, has adapted to the slower pace of life away from the city—although it took awhile. “When we first moved, there was a sidewalk out here bisecting a huge meadow and Jacob would not step off that sidewalk,” she laughs. “He went from this urban two-and-a-half-year-old to being this total country boy.”

Someday, that boy may read one or both of her incredibly honest memoirs, which yields mixed feelings in Shapiro. “Slow Motion is a book I’m really proud of,” she says. “I’ve often wondered whether I would have written it had I already had a family myself. I dread the day Jacob picks up that book. As a mother, I wouldn’t have written it; as a writer, I’m glad I did.”
Still, she’s learned to live with that, and with other quirky aspects of being a best-selling memoirist. “Nobody ever asks me anything about myself,” Shapiro says. “People say, ‘You must feel like I know everything about you.’ Actually, I don’t! That’s a strange phenomenon. I don’t feel I’ve exposed myself. I’ve written about the part of my life I wanted to write about.”

In one chapter of Devotion, a magazine editor offers to send Shapiro to India to report on yoga and meditation. A dream assignment! But Shapiro turns her down, saying, “My life is here.” And that is the beautiful simplicity of Shapiro’s journey: She doesn’t want to go to exotic, far-flung destinations, Eat, Pray, Love-style. She just wants to look inward. Ultimately, Devotion is the best kind of memoir—although it’s about someone else’s life, it makes you shine a flashlight on your own.