When an author can invoke vivid memories from a reader's own life, the writing moves beyond the form on the paper and into the reader's psyche. The work then achieves a point of influence when an author reads her work to a room of softly smiling, all-too-knowing listeners who are right there with her because they are survivors of the words and actions of the story.
Jane Shapiro's reading from her short story entitled "Poltergeist," one of her short stories to appear in The New Yorker magazine, filled the Wren Room near capacity yesterday.
The enthusiasm in the room was apparent when the audience groaned at Shapiro's suggestion that she would forego the ending of her piece.
Her tale vividly captures the period in a mother's life when her teenage children are on the verge of adulthood; when the parent/child roles reverse; when the parent learns to step back as the children sprint ahead; when the mother must regain their own life with a mixture of reluctance and relief invoked by their children's departure.
While giving keen insight into the amalgam of feelings that parents, especially single mothers, must wade through when their children are growing up, Shapiro's work also reflects the trials and tribulations of adolescence with words which carry an unparalled sense of reality and universal applicability.
Shapiro's narration had the rare quality of informality, creating the feeling that the audience had once known her daughter "Nora" and son "Zack" who tromped off to school each day filled with diet coke and toast, their shining hair perfectly coiffured, adorned with "calculated, shabby, sexy black."
The mother and two children of "Poltergeist" live in their old family home, enjoying a comfortable lifestyle, but not enjoying each other's company.
The children have reached the age when they start to give unsolicited advice to their exasperated mother who loves them, worries for them, but doesn't particularly like the clothes-obsessed, self-centered culturally well-rounded young people that they represent at this moment of their lives.
It is a story of "future Ivy Leaguers" who are the same men and women who, in a few years, will walk across the campuses of Dartmouth and Cornell, Princeton and Brown, still thinking that they have their lifestyle down to a calculated science: school, culture, politically correct activities, drugs, sex and back again.
The first person narrative, told in the voice of the mother figure, is a perfect mix of originality and anonymity. But Shapiro's work gains its power through its representation of a parent who steps out of the mother role and finally stands as a real person with fears, annoyances, resentment, and love for her children.
Her character gives her readers the opportunity to meet their own mothers under the guise of a stranger, to hear a mother's fears which are kept stealthily hidden under the propriety of work, discipline, and parental obligations.
Shapiro was a mother of two children living in the idyllic community of Princeton, New Jersey, when she began to write more than ten years ago. Her articles have appeared in The Village Voice and The New York Times, among other publications.
After publishing her most recent novel in 1992, "After Moondog," she has established herself as a realistic voice of the growing number of unrelenting middle-aged women who have children and lives of their own.
