In A Daily Podcast, Author Dani Shapiro Helps Us Navigate These Challenging Times

In her new podcast, “The Way We Live Now,” author Dani Shapiro starts each interview with a particular question, so it only made sense to ask her the same: Where are you talking to me from, and what do you see around you?

“I’m in my small home office upstairs in my house in Litchfield County,” says the author of the best-selling memoir, Inheritance. “My fluffy white labradoodle is on the floor next to me. I’m looking out the window — it’s a beautiful late afternoon and everything is just starting to bloom. I’m very aware that for various reasons I haven’t been here the last two springs. I’m surrounded by piles of books and papers.”

But that question is a lead in to what Shapiro really wants to know: How are you living now?

In the daily IHeartRadio podcast, Shapiro is joined by guests from every walk of life to get a sense of “How do we live when we’re all isolated in our homes?” Launched in mid-April, the podcast has featured conversations with a NYC nurse, a senator, a teacher, a movie star, a chef and others, including listeners’ own stories they’ve called in. The daily episodes are intimate and emotional snapshots of what we’re all going through.

Besides Inheritance, Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, Slow Motion, and five novels, and is currently producing the fourth season of her first podcast, "Family Secrets," inspired by Inheritance. She was still in the throes of her year-long book tour — she would have been in Paris or Sydney somewhere right about now —until that came to a grinding halt. As the reality of the pandemic seeped in, Shapiro felt as helpless as the rest of us, but she wanted to do what she could as a writer.

“I was aware that I had a listenership,” she says. “I thought about what’s making me feel better. It’s the conversations I was having with friends or on work calls where people were telling each other how they’re doing. The title just came to me. That’s what I want to know: how are you living?”

Our brains have been injured by this. We are being asked to metabolize something that’s beyond our capacity to understand. We’re living in a dystopian novel.

She made a list of everyone in her world that she’d want to have that conversation with, and then expanded the list to the kinds of people she’d want to hear from. It went from idea to podcast in just two weeks. A Facebook page extends the conversations with posts from the community of listeners that are at once heartbreaking and heartwarming.

People are clearly feeling comforted by “The Way We Live Now,” which was Shapiro’s intention. In answering another question she regularly asks her guests, she reflects on what’s bringing her hope.

“The way I’m seeing people and witnessing myself moving toward what is most elemental and meaningful,” she says. “My college-age son is home — we were never going to have kind of together in our lives again. It gives me hope to see articles about how the natural world is rebounding and stories of people who are being respectful.”

Despite our physical separateness, we’re all really and truly in this together, and sharing our stories keeps up connected.

“I want the podcast to be a tapestry of voices, to be representative of all our experiences,” Shapiro says. “I’ll do it as long as there are stories to tell.”