Black and White, Dani Shapiro
Black and White, Dani Shapiro
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Black and White

Author: Dani Shapiro

Narrator: Marguerite Gavin

Unabridged: 8 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/15/2007


Synopsis

From the author of Family History and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion comes a spellbinding novel about art, fame, ambition, and family that explores a provocative question: Is it possible for a mother to be true to herself and true to her children at the same time?

Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to fourteen. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of museums around the world as well as the pages of New York City tabloids that labeled the work pornographic, cast a long and inescapable shadow over its subject. At eighteen, when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of small-town Maine, where she married and had a child, a daughter whom she has tried to shield from the central facts of her early life and her damaging role as her mother's muse.

Fourteen years later, Ruth Dunne is dying, and Clara is summoned to her bedside. Despite her anguish and ambivalence about confronting a family life she has repressed and denied for more than a decade, Clara returns. She finds Ruth surrounded, even in her illness, by worshipful interns, protective assistants, and her conniving art dealer.

Once again, she is Clara Dunne, the object of curiosity, the girl in the photos. Except this time she has her own daughter to think about—a girl who at nine looks strikingly like the girl in Ruth's photos—and she yearns to protect her, to insulate her from the exposure that will inevitably result when her two worlds, New York and Maine, collide.

As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. A brilliant examination of motherhood—a novel that pits artistic inspiration against maternal obligation and asks whether the two can ever be fully reconciled—Black & White explores the limits and duties of family loyalties, and even of love. Gripping, haunting, psychologically complex, this is Shapiro at her captivating best.

About Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro's most recent books include Family History and Slow Motion. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker; Granta; Elle; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Ploughshares, and has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is currently a visiting writer at Wesleyan University and lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Carol on May 01, 2019

****4.5 Stars****......more

Goodreads review by Betsy on April 21, 2023

Speechless. Dani Shapiro’s book possessed me. As my rage built, I really thought I might blow up and be nothing but guts splattered on the walls. But then I didn’t. Instead I felt a kind of catharsis I’ve never felt in real life. Specifics are unnecessary. Dani Shapiro is one of the best writers I’ve......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on February 10, 2011

Dani Shapiro is one of my new favorite authors of all-time! Her writing is intimate and candid, though dark and real. Sadly, Black and White is her latest novel and already going on four years old! However, Shapiro has recently released a memoir called Devotion. Black and White is about Clara, a woma......more

Goodreads review by Amy on February 04, 2009

Depictions of child nudity or children with nude adults appear in works of art in various cultures and historical periods. These attitudes have changed over time and have become increasingly frowned upon particularly in recent years, and especially in the case of photography. In recent years there h......more

Goodreads review by Alison on September 30, 2007

This reminded me of a Jodi Picoult novel--a little more subtle, thank goodness, but still an Issue-Driven novel. The main character, Clara, has a problem from her past: in this case, her mother became a famous photographer based on nude photos of the daughter that could be construed as abuse rather......more