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Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Maggie
Haunting
Reader
Novel
Hold
Takes
Powerful
Doesn
Astonish

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My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
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The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to.
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If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people.
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If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art
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There is no end to the promotion. There is no end to the possibilities. You can continue to promote a book for years, literally.
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I did want to feel like life's all of one piece.
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I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
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Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.
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Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories
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I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue – of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track.
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Courage is more important than confidence
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Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.
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Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
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I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.
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When a writer's whole being is poured into a piece of work, there is never enough. The feeling of finally getting to the end of a piece of work, of making it as good as you can at that moment, is more of a relief than anything else, and then you wait for reviews.
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I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.
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If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt it has to be creative.
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Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.
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At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.
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