Hourglass

Time, Memory, Marriage

De: Dani Shapiro

Narrado por: Dani Shapiro

The best-selling novelist and memoirist delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds, and about the accretion, over time, of both sorrow and love.

Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning--a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves for all time when the self is so often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise--how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack? Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence. Artful, intensely emotional work from one of our finest writers.

Honest and insightful.

Very good. While in ways it is sad about the aging process, for some it gave me hope around my current life. I think because her honesty showed me that I am not alone. Quite a gift.

Visceral & Lovely

Any additional comments?

This book was a great listen. I appreciate the way that the author goes back and forth between the moments in her life.

Stunning

I found Hourglass, or it found me, at exactly the right moment. Shapiro is a master of the braided memoir. She has a poets heart, is a brave, and necessary artist. I loved this book.

Story ok, but the monotone narration drove me craz

The story was ok, a little too much jumping around and random thought inserts (but I suppose that style has become pretty popular as of late). But the thing that stuck out the most was the author's monotone melancholy voice. I almost couldn't finish the book with how it was read. No voice fluctuations or change of pace or anything, just sad monotone all the way through. I wish I could blame this fault in the narrator, but the fact that the narrator is the author means she wanted it read in this fashion.... Poor choice. Even if I hadn't listened to the book (or if it had a different narrator) I still probably wouldn't recommend it. Not interesting enough for me, and a little too doom and gloom in style (or maybe it was just her voice that made it seem like that).

Transience and Permanence

Loved this book and Shapiro's peculiar juxtaposition of the lyrical with the ordinary, wrapping and winding like love itself through this vulnerable narrative.

An author who continues to risk. A book recommended especially for those of us who reject time as a construct.

Brava!