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"  In Devotion (Harper), best-selling memoirist and novelist (and ELLE contributing editor) Dani Shapiro (Slow Motion, Family History, Black &amp;amp;amp; White) movingly unravels her personal history\u2014from her Orthodox Jewish upbringing and her parents&amp;#039; seemingly unrewarding marriage to her near\u2013nervous breakdown when her infant son suffers life-threatening seizures\u2014and her subsequent quest to resolve a spiritual unease and to satisfy her son&amp;#039;s questions about God. Shapiro excavates her psyche to examine the milestones of her life\u2014her on-and-off battles with alcoholism as a young woman, the trauma 9/11 inflicts on her young family\u2014in the shadow of her religious past. She eloquently grasps at the eternal questions that pierce her deeply\u2014What&amp;#039;s our purpose? Who&amp;#039;s listening?\u2014raking up familial histories and dredging through the ephemera of her late parents&amp;#039; lives to make sense of her present. Through yoga and meditation (&amp;quot;a formal way of considering, however briefly, what matters most&amp;quot;), Shapiro attempts to quell her restless mind, vexed as it is by both the mundane\u2014sickness, car accidents, bills\u2014and the thorny: Why did her mother, an atheist, choose to live life according to a faith she didn&amp;#039;t believe in? As Shapiro struggles to reach higher ground, she begins to find that perhaps there&amp;#039;s no ultimate escape. Rather, &amp;quot;Life keeps coming at us. Fleeing is pointless, as is fighting.&amp;quot; Shapiro&amp;#039;s spiritual inquiry digs at doubts many of us face about our place in the universe, and her struggles with the God question serve as a hopeful reminder that a belief system can begin with an individual manifesto: less a set of rules than a matrix of bits and pieces that form the &amp;quot;patchwork of our lives.&amp;quot; ELLE: In Devotion&amp;#039;s opening scene, you&amp;#039;re having a moment with an &amp;quot;energy worker,&amp;quot; and you say what happens defies everything you believe\u2014that you are on the &amp;quot;other side of logic.&amp;quot; Do you thinking letting go of logic is a necessary part of the spiritual journey you take in this book? Dani Shapiro: Yes, I think that essentially there&amp;#039;s logic on one side, and really anything resembling faith is on the other side. Logic and faith don&amp;#039;t occupy the same side. When I started writing Devotion, I entered it wanting to spend a couple of years living inside all the questions I had, and one of the things I realized when I was writing was that there are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book. This was very much a journey I wanted to go on, and the only way I could really give myself the permission and the time to do it was by knowing that it was what I was doing for work, that I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working. Otherwise I&amp;#039;m way too type A, and it would have felt both impossible and self-indulgent. I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life.  ELLE: For many women who are already juggling a career, relationships, and kids, how can this kind of spiritual assessment fit into their &amp;quot;normal, modern&amp;quot; lives? And in families, does this weight usually fall on the woman&amp;#039;s shoulders? DS: I think it&amp;#039;s primarily women who begin to ask these questions. At least in my experience and for people I&amp;#039;ve talked to, the men don&amp;#039;t just have greater resistance\u2014they have less of a conscious need, and I say conscious very deliberately because it&amp;#039;s a human need when it arises. It&amp;#039;s not gender-specific, but I do think it&amp;#039;s women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of &amp;quot;I want more here&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I want more for my family.&amp;quot; I was joking around with my son the other day because he was complaining about having to go to religious school on a Sunday morning, and he said, &amp;quot;Why do I have to go?&amp;#039; and I said, &amp;quot;Your father hated Hebrew school and he went, your father&amp;#039;s father hated it and went.&amp;quot; The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion\u2014it&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;re going to. My husband is an atheist, and at a certain point while I was writing Devotion, he turned to me and said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m really glad you&amp;#039;re doing this,&amp;quot; and I think it has opened him up in ways he&amp;#039;s very happy about but wouldn&amp;#039;t have done himself. I don&amp;#039;t care that I had to do it. It&amp;#039;s good for the people that I love, but he wouldn&amp;#039;t have done it on his own, for sure. ELLE: Your son, Jacob, suffered from life-threatening infantile seizures. How did the experience of his illness affect your thoughts about religion and God? If that chapter of your life hadn&amp;#039;t happened, would you have still taken this journey? What else could have spurred it on? DS: I think there are a number of things that were seeds of this journey. One was certainly Jacob&amp;#039;s illness and the feeling I had at the time of wanting desperately to believe in something and knowing I didn&amp;#039;t particularly\u2014also, the need to pray, even though I didn&amp;#039;t know what or who I was praying to, but also I think if we were still living in New York, I wouldn&amp;#039;t have written [Devotion]. There&amp;#039;s something about urban life\u2014you walk out your door, and you&amp;#039;re in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it&amp;#039;s very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving. I found when we moved to the country that the absence of that was so stark. I&amp;#039;d open my door, and instead of thousands of people walking by and horns honking and lights flashing and dogs being walked and shop windows and endless stimuli, what I was faced with was kind of nothing. What I was faced with was myself in a much starker and more profound way than I had ever experienced before. What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter. And lastly, [there&amp;#039;s a line] from Carl Jung\u2014&amp;quot;thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life&amp;quot;\u2014that was such a fundamental thing for me. Reading those words and recognizing them as absolutely true and wanting to be prepared, but not knowing how to do this next step. I was also reaching a point in my life where I wanted to reconcile myself or understand better the way I was raised, and my very religious childhood felt like a part of me that I had abandoned. Sometimes\u2014it just happened to me the other day: I realized there was a tune running through my head, and so often the tune is something from my childhood, and often it is something I heard in temple. Even though I might not be able to translate the words, still there&amp;#039;s attachment to them, the way we&amp;#039;re attached to smells and sights and sounds and tastes. As a fiction writer, that&amp;#039;s been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point? I did want to feel like life&amp;#039;s all of one piece. ELLE: You say your life is &amp;quot;complicated with Jewishness.&amp;quot; Was there ever a time you resented that? Do you think having that background helped or hurt your search for these truths? DS: When I started the search, I didn&amp;#039;t know how much of any one thing it would be. I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will. I didn&amp;#039;t know how much my years of being in therapy would play into it. I think growing up with something helped me. If we grew up with nothing, we&amp;#039;re complicated with that. That&amp;#039;s the thing I keep hearing from people. The friends of mine who have grown up with nothing have a longing for something but feel like they don&amp;#039;t know where to begin. When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me. I was very suspicious of the idea of answers. The people I met along the way who had thought the most about this stuff, and who I really admired, take a little bit from here and a little from there. They were able to glean bits of wisdom, and it struck me as a very modern idea. I had always thought of people who do that as being intellectually lazy and looking for solace, and that it wasn&amp;#039;t pure, and that&amp;#039;s part of where I come from, that there&amp;#039;s a right and wrong way to do things. That hamstrung me in terms of feeling like I could find myself. ELLE: What is your hope for Jacob, as he gets older and faces similar questions? Do you think he&amp;#039;ll have these same struggles?  DS: I hope for him that he will feel complicated at some point because what I feel now is that I&amp;#039;m giving him something. The whole book began with him asking me questions. I was uncomfortable with not having anything to say to him. I think Jacob is going to be complicated by being the son of two writers, by being sick as an infant, and by the fact that I&amp;#039;ve written about him in this book. There have been moments for me\u2014and they tended to be moments of great emotional intensity, moments of grief and mourning, but also of joy, deaths, the birth of my son, and my wedding day\u2014when I was glad to have ritual. I was glad to know, This is what we do in this moment, these are the steps that we take. There is something, even though I didn&amp;#039;t realize it [at the time], comforting to me about that\u2014and I think comforting in the same way I was talking about before, the way a smell might be comforting\u2014something baking, or freshly mowed grass, something that brings you back to the place where you began. I want him to have that, and I don&amp;#039;t think I will care if he rejects it. But I would regret not having given it to him in the first place. ELLE: What would you tell your younger self about all of this\u2014the questions of life? DS:  Devotion is my second memoir. Slow Motion, my first memoir, was the story of a pretty massive rebellion on my part, of my very lost younger self. 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. They were based on images and fantasies rather than any kind of real perspective. I spoke at a college where the whole freshman class had read Slow Motion, and I was so aware that they were looking at me in front of them, thinking, How did that girl become you? I could read it on their faces: How is that possible? That girl should be dead or just in some other universe. That girl&amp;#039;s idea of a good time was not going to be sitting in a lotus position on her bedroom floor examining life. And yet if I could say anything to that girl, it&amp;#039;s just, &amp;quot;Hold on.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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