Shapiro's short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, Oprah Magazine, New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and many other publications. She has also the author of several novels, including Black & White (2007) and Family History (2004). Currently-lives in Bethlehem, Connecticutĭani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Inheritance (2019) Hourglass (2017), Still Writing (2013), Devotion (2010), and Slow Motion (1998).Education- B.A., M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College.It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in-a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. Inheritance is a book about secrets-secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. She woke up one morning and her entire history-the life she had lived-crumbled beneath her. In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and LoveĪ memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.

Inheritance by Dani Shapiro