Laurie Gwen Shapiro

BIO

Writer and filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro's childhood in Manhattan's Lower East Side colors everything she creates.

Despite its cheeky title, her first (and largely autobiographical) novel, written in her twenties, THE UNEXPECTED SALAMI (1998, Algonquin), was critically acclaimed, and was an American Library Association notable book. The book is currently in development as a major motion picture, to be directed by Alan White (Risk, Erskineville Kings).

THE MATZO BALL HEIRESS (2004) is Shapiro's first novel for Red Dress Ink.

Shapiro codirected and coproduced the 2001 theatrical documentary about octogenarian New Yorker Tobias Schneebaum, Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, with her brother David Shapiro. Together they were the recipients of over 10 major awards, including the Independent Spirit Award for best new documentary directors.

With New York City sergeant Conor McCourt, she also coproduced two HBO/Cinemax documentaries about her former Stuyvesant High School English teacher Frank McCourt and his three brothers — The McCourts of Limerick (1999) and The McCourts of New York (2000).

Her first play, Inventing Color, premiered at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. It was awarded one of three "Best in Festival" citations by Stagepress.

She was recently a phone-a-friend on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and much to her relief, anted up the right answer for her best high-school pal.

A notorious klutz and recovering eBay-aholic, Shapiro's back again living in the Lower East Side with her Aussie post-college vacation fling, now her husband and father to her toddler girl.

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AUTHOR TALK

March 2004

In this interview with Bookreporter.com Co-Founder Carol Fitzgerald, author Laurie Gwen Shapiro talks about her inspiration for THE MATZO BALL HEIRESS, how she and her family celebrate Passover and the literary figures who have had a significant impact on her writing career.

BRC: Having already written a largely autobiographical novel in your twenties (THE UNEXPECTED SALAMI), whose character did you draw upon for Heather Greenblotz, heiress to Greenblotz Matzo? What inspired you to tell this particular story?

LGS: I was having a documentary meeting in the legendary dairy restaurant Ratner's on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I'm not kosher, but it was close to my house and a good place for a colorful lunch. My table noticed a young woman being treated like royalty by the staff. Everything was on the house. Nosy me, I asked her who she was, and she blushed and admitted that she was from a very famous matzo family. We became friends and eventually she gave me the okay to construct a novel about a third generation matzo family --- as long as I made up the characters. My secular protagonist is from the most famous Jewish family in America who has lost touch with her heritage and longs to reconnect without giving up her lifestyle.

To make sure it was fictional, I made Heather Greenblotz a documentary maker, like myself, so I could write about her career with authority. I then imagined what it would be like not to have parents who call everyday and have been beyond supportive of my career. All of the major details are fictional, although a few of the minor characters, like the perpetually stoned intern, are colorful variations on people I have known.

BRC: Surprisingly, although many writers in the Chick Lit genre are Jewish, their characters have neutral surnames, and their culture is tucked quietly into the plot. Is THE MATZO BALL HEIRESS breaking ground? Is being too Jewish a taboo in romantic fiction?

LGS: My first book THE UNEXPECTED SALAMI was published a few months after BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY, so during the writing of it I didn't even know the term "Chick Lit." It was simply reviewed as a novel. Now, however, every thirty-something woman who writes a book has to be wary of the label. So I decided to play with the now-official genre by going against the adage "It won't play in Peoria." I put my protagonist's Jewish-ness front and center. And she was going to be sexy, dammit, even with the last name Greenblotz, a name that could be pegged as "too Jewish." I had a few people back away, but just as many were interested in the material and recognized that the audience didn't have to be all Jewish. Family and food transcends. Joan Golan, the woman who signed THE MATZO BALL HEIRESS to Red Dress, isn't even Jewish.

BRC: Tell us about Passover in your home. Do you have a traditional Seder or is it more like the Greenblotz Passover? Who attends and who leads it?

LGS: When I was a young child, I would go across the street to my father's mother's apartment. I had fifteen first cousins --- and all of the cousins and aunts and uncles were squeezed into Grandma Ida's one-bedroom apartment. She cooked everything from scratch, including the gefilte fish that she ground herself. My parents had children in their forties, so I was always the youngest cousin and almost always asked the four questions.

Today on the first night, I go to my aunt and uncle's house in Seaford, Long Island where my second cousins are squeezed around the table. My aunts have kept up some of Grandma's recipes, but alas the fish is now from a jar. On the second Seder night I go to Tonic Nightclub in New York, which is housed in the old Lower East Side Kedem kosher wine factory. (The booths are made from the old wine kegs!) Many New York musicians go to this Seder (by invitation only --- but luckily I am a friend of the owner who, like me, grew up in the Lower East Side). Once, I shared the Four Questions with Sean Lennon. I was amazed he knew some Hebrew. I think Yoko once dated a Jewish man after John's death.

BRC: Can you see yourself writing about other Jewish traditions and holidays in the future?

LGS: Yes. I don't want to be typecast as "this or that kind of a writer," and yet I see a real niche that is underserved. Jewish literature is usually reserved for more orthodox stories --- think of everything by Allegra Goodman, Myla Goldberg's BEE SEASON, Nathan Englander's short stories. These are wonderful books, but I think that cultural Jews crave even more --- works that speak more directly to them. I grew up loving shrimp salad sandwiches, I have a daughter with an Irish surname, and yet I strongly identify myself as Jewish. My husband and I are raising our child to be a secular Jew, even though he went to Catholic School. In 11 years, there will be an O'Leary Bat Mitzvah.

BRC: What have your family members and friends said about THE MATZO BALL HEIRESS?

LGS: My husband never lets me hear his music before it's done, so I get back at him by only letting my friend Corey read it before handing the book to the editor --- although I have to admit my husband is hilarious and I often rush to a notepad when he speaks off-the-cuff. The first person who read the copyedited book was the real matzo heiress who inspired me. She didn't recognize the family at all; I think she was relieved about that. However, she LOVED the book and I was thrilled by that news.

My parents and husband have just finished it and given me the thumbs up. My husband is a tough critic and said he was laughing on the subway, although he did annoyingly manage to pick out one big typo. Two of my aunts have read the book: they enjoyed it and loved any bits of them that seeped through. They also both pointed out that Passover requires four sets of dishes, not three. I quickly retaliated that "this is an unreliable Jewish narrator, who knows about Judaism from TV shows and popular books, not from her family." Eventually they accepted that I wasn't covering an error. (Sounds like BS, I know, but I wasn't being defensive! I really meant for her to get tidbits wrong here and there.) My other friends will be reading the book this week after the publication date, so I nervously await their verdicts.

BRC: You are an award-winning documentary maker and playwright as well a novelist. How have your other, largely collaborative careers influenced your written word?

LGS: I think being around an editing room has made me a better editor of my own work. I will admit that a lot of my writing can be chatty --- it's my signature style, my voice, so to speak. But loose can be too loose, so reigning things in is a good skill to hone.

BRC: As a filmmaker, you had the opportunity to travel to exotic places and then draw upon those travels in your writing. As a new mother, you hardly ever leave the island of Manhattan. How else has being a mom changed your writing?

LGS: I'm having a love affair with NYC again, looking at it through a toddler's eyes.  A big willow tree on the corner of Avenue A and Sixth Street that I hardly noticed before awes her. I take a lot of walks downtown with my stroller, whereas I used to take the bus. I try to vary my route and often pretend I'm a tourist in NYC for the first time and looking for details. I keep a notebook in the diaper bag, so when my daughter falls asleep I can jot down some thoughts on a park bench or a top. I am also much more attuned to issues of parenting. I can write about being a mother now with much finer detail. I used to address motherhood with broader brushstrokes.

BRC: You were a student of Frank McCourt's at New York's Stuyvesant High School, and co-produced two documentaries about his family with his nephew Conor McCourt. What did you learn from him that influenced your own writing? What other writing mentors have you had?

LGS: I had A LOT of writing classes with Frank McCourt --- I had a massive crush on him and kept transferring into his Irish Literature and Creative Writing electives. (He used to laugh: YOU AGAIN?) He was a star well before his literary debut. There were waitlists to get into his classes. He taught us that you could combine humor and tragedy. Because of his teachings, I never try to write funny. I usually start with some kind of pitiful state the character is in and just let him or her speak, and humor seeps through. Stuyvesant in my day had a duo of great English teachers, McCourt and the very unsung Judy Hawke --- who even Frank McCourt tapped as a pre-publication reader for his writing.

At college I studied poetry with the top-notch poet Stephen Dobyns, who famously holds no punches when addressing sexuality or emotion.

After college I was a member of informal workshops with fiction writer Abigail Thomas, who had previously been an agent. She helped me to stop worrying about what was being rewarded in publishing circles at the time and to start concentrating on finding my own voice. She felt strongly that I should write a novel and not short stories. I agree: short story writing is an entirely different skill. She was the most encouraging of all my teachers and helped me get published.

BRC: As a native of New York's Lower East Side, how do you feel about the gentrification that has so dramatically changed the flavor of the neighborhood?

LGS: I once had a heated discussion with Elizabeth Erlich, a gifted writer (MIRIAM'S KITCHEN) who is a dear friend of mine from the Abigail Thomas workshop days. She said in our workshop that she felt horrified when she was visiting the Lower East Side. Everything Jewish from her youth was gone. I rallied that I grew up there and still live there, but I see it differently. For me, the Lower East Side reinvents itself every generation. There is no room for sentimentality. I love the new Fujian Chinese restaurants and the Dominican coffee shops. I love the good strong coffee of Schiller's, the "hot" place in my neighborhood. And I love that there is still a mikvah (a ritual bathing spot) going for the more orthodox Jewish women of the neighborhood. I enjoy it now because I know that in thirty years a mix just as exciting will be there, but all new.

BRC: You seem to be a magnet for oddball experiences. Do you seek out new experiences or do you let happenstance do its thing?

LGS: Both. I put myself in places where something unique might happen. I used to beg for the crazy temp jobs. Material. Material. Material. My favorite way to meet interesting people at parties is the couch method: go to an imposing party, sit down on an empty couch, and someone else who is shy or tired will eventually talk to you.  That's how I met Nena O'Neill, who wrote the number one bestselling book OPEN MARRIAGE in the sixties with her husband. I had thought she was someone's grandma who got herself invited and then she was flooring me with her whirlwind career. She was the basis for one of the characters in THE MATZO BALL HEIRESS, Rina O'Reilly, who advises Heather Greenblotz on not caring what other people think when you make your relationships work.

BRC: What are you working on now and when can readers expect to see it?

LGS: I am currently working on a second novel for Red Dress that will be out in 2005 called, as of this date, THE ANGLOPHILE. It will be steamy and humorous, and set in contemporary England and the U.S.

Are you there, God? It's me, Laurie: Please cast COLIN FIRTH in a film version!

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