Once she learned about who her father was, she felt explained.
She took three years writing this book, buried in all the research and the reporting aspects of it all. She had to think about what she was learning about identity, what it’s like to be a family, the nature vs nurture debate? And what it’s like to be a secret kept for a whole lifetime? These things helped her as she tried to create a book that she wanted anybody to find themselves in. With this book, she had to think about things that made her story universal, for the first time as a memoir writer. She was just in a disorienting place, only grasping at straws. Each time she came back to this question, she was in the exact same place, as it was not an evolving question for her. She was totally consumed with what her parents knew and when they actually knew it. She was only keeping up with the story instead of actually getting ahead of it. Trauma is something that is recursive, something she learned when she wrote these first two hundred pages. At the time, she thought she could write the book without returning to Didion’s work first.
She was speaking about structure and spareness. Her editor told her that it was her version of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, which to Dani made a lot of sense. She thought that there was something not working with it. Once she got back home from the tour, she picked up the manuscript once more and took it to the cafe that she does a lot of her writing and reading. For two months, she didn’t look at her work on this book. Then she put those pages aside to go on tour for another book she wrote. It was like she was writing for her own life, in a sense. When she wrote “Inheritance”, she wrote the first two hundred pages fast, like she was on fire. “Inheritance” won the 2019 National Jewish Book Award, Wired Magazine named it as one of the year’s top Science books, and was named a best book of 2019 by Vanity Fair. It is an iTunes Top 10 podcast, and it features stories from guests that, like Dani has, uncovered life-changing and long-buried secrets from their families pasts. In 2019, she launched Family Secrets, an original podcast, in collaboration with iHeartMedia. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Oprah, Elle, Granta, The New Yorker, among others, and they’ve also been broadcast on NPR.
She has also taught at New York University and Columbia, as well as writing workshops all around the world.ĭani is a guest editor of Best New American Voices 2010 and a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. Dani is the cofounder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.
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