Kaleidoscope

The bestselling author of Inheritance and Signal Fires delivers her most ambitious work yet: an intricately woven, luminous memoir about a sudden upheaval in late middle age—for readers of Patti Smith’s M Train and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

It was Christmastime in the West Village when the world shifted before her eyes. String lights melted into pools of color, passersby became shapes in the night, and she knew: she would never see the world the same way again—soon, she might not be able to see it at all.

It had been less than a year since Dani Shapiro was diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening illness, and learned that the cure would likely cost her sight. The prospect would frighten anyone, but for a writer—an artist whose whole vocation is attention—it threatened the very source of her work.

And yet, as her own face blurred in the mirror, Shapiro found herself paying attention in new ways: Confronted with the possibility of losing one way of seeing, she began discovering another. 

How are we reintroduced to ourselves when the narrative changes? Shapiro is thrown headlong into her own past. With her trademark intimacy and candor, she shifts fluidly through time, exploring friendships, family, marriage, identity, and the creative life with renewed urgency—circling the blind spots we all carry. Growing older, she finds, doesn’t diminish us. It makes us kaleidoscopes: every self we have ever been, turning alongside the ones whose stories have yet to unfold.

At once meditative and propulsive, Kaleidoscope is Shapiro’s most finely wrought work to date—an impressionistic marvel of a memoir about learning to see our lives with fierce clarity, even as the world dissolves at the edges.