Anna Shapiro is an accomplished writer of novels and nonfiction. Her published novels include The Right Bitch (Grove Weidenfeld, 1992), Life and Love, Such As They Are (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and Living on Air (Soho Press, 2006). She was a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The Nation, among other magazines. Her reviews as well as essays have appeared in the Guardian and the Observer. Drawing on her talent as a visual artist, she has also illustrated books, including her own, A Feast of Words: For Lovers of Food and Fiction (W.W. Norton, 1996), a collection of essays on the importance of food in the plots of a variety of literary works, along with recipes.
Terry Stoller spoke with Anna Shapiro on February 8, 2025, about her beginnings in Italy, her early interest in drawing and writing, her varied college experiences as she moved from the visual arts to a writing career, her work as a book reviewer, her novels and the perils of publishing, her loving profile of her father’s artwork in The New York Review of Books (Nov. 30, 2018), and her current novel.
Terry Stoller: You were born in Rome, Italy.
Anna Shapiro: My father had a Fulbright Fellowship as an artist. It was quite soon after the war, the 1950s. On the boat going to Italy, my mother said, Let’s have another baby. (I have an older sister.) She tossed her birth control device off the deck, and I was born in Rome. My parents loved it there. With the Fulbright, my father got a year’s stipend, but if you wanted to eke it out over two years, you could. Of course, you were only getting half as much. So they went to Cinecittà Studios and dubbed movies into English. My parents were living on, I think, the Piazza Navona, but their apartment was small. My father became friends with these Italian communist artists; they had taken over the German Academy. (Germans weren’t allowed to use it for a while after the war.) They said, Come over to the Accademia Tedesca, the Villa Massimo. You can live there with us. It was like a park in the middle of Rome, surrounded by high fences and a gate that opened in this grand manner.
Anna Shapiro’s mother as “Miss Bernstein,” Cinecittà.
We left after two years; the Fulbright was over—they needed to earn a living, and my sister was almost 5 and was going to need to start kindergarten. They came back to New York and for a little while lived just off Riverside Drive, and then moved to Levittown. They had friends who lived in Great Neck, and Great Neck famously had a good school system. So they looked for something affordable in Great Neck and found this fabulous Victorian house on top of the highest hill on Long Island, with an acre of land around it, a sort of wild 19th century garden. No one wanted it. It had been on the market for ten years. My best friend when I got to Great Neck lived around the corner in a two-family house; their half cost the same amount as our giant Victorian house. I feel so privileged to have grown up there.
Early life; in the living room, Levittown.
In the early part of your education, you were studying to be a visual artist, correct? Was that because your father was a visual artist?
Both of my parents had gone to art school. My mother was very talented, but she stopped because early in her marriage she felt she didn’t have the dedication and application that my father had, and therefore should give it up, which seems unfortunate to me. Not that you have to be an artist, but it didn’t seem like the right reason. The fact is, I inherited talent from both sides, and you learn a lot just osmotically. People oohed and aahed over my drawings and artwork from the earliest age. It was a sort of given that that was what I was going to do. I think I felt I would vindicate my father because he was frustrated in his career. He only told me years afterward that he was really sad that I had given up visual art. It was so generous of him not to reproach me with it at the time or express his disappointment in any way. And he did say he was really glad that I was writing novels because at least I was still making art.
Later on, you do illustrate books. I read that you were an art student at Cornell, and you were interested in conceptual art.
And my boyfriend at Cornell was very interested; he also was the son of an artist and very talented. This was the year that they instituted the lottery draft. He was from a small town out West, and he got a low number and was definitely going to be drafted. He was a pacifist and he applied for CO status, but his parents were Canadian, so he decided to go to Canada and apply for citizenship, and I went with him. We went to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. It turned out to be the hippest place on the planet. The school had faculty mainly from the Kansas City Art Institute. When we arrived, it was the beginning of this international art festival at the school—it was all conceptual artists from New York and Europe. They gave lectures and showed their work, but basically you just hung out with them. My first three days in Nova Scotia, I hung out with Joseph Beuys and Joseph Kosuth and Vito Acconci.
Were you planning to be a conceptual artist?
I didn’t go there to be a conceptual artist. I was a painter and draftsman. I still thought I’d like to do illustration as a way of making money. I also hoped to sell paintings. But I’d been struggling with that at Cornell. I have a lot of problems with the way art is taught—it may be better these days. Basically you get taught whatever is in fashion in that era. Art teachers are just artists. They are not trained in pedagogy. I was doing this figurative, but not realistic work. One of my teachers thought it was quasi-Expressionistic. They all thought it was good, but it was baffling to them. Where was this going to fit in? I was baffled by their response to my work—like what’s wrong with this? I felt the art world had no room for someone like me.
And it wasn’t as if I wasn’t interested in academic work. I thought I might do anthropology. At some point when I was in Nova Scotia, I took a philosophy course at Dalhousie University. I then transferred to Bennington and studied philosophy.
You’re not writing yet, though.
I always wrote. I just took it for granted and didn’t treat it as anything other than a form of expression. At one point when I was at Cornell and was thinking about how unhappy I was with the responses to my work and whether I could stand to go on with it, I wrote a story—I would write stories. I kept a diary from the age of 9 and had written stories from an even earlier age. I had actually thought for years that I would write and illustrate children’s books. I did write and illustrate a lot of little books, of course unpublished, but I have a lot of them. So I wrote a story, and I thought maybe I would be happier doing that than painting.
After I graduated, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I did design some conceptual pieces. I could have gone on with that, but I loved movies. I thought, this will be a way for me to combine the visual and the verbal. So I went to NYU’s graduate film school for a year in the mid-’70s. I wanted to be a director, to make the movies. If I thought the art world was bad, the movie world is just terrible. I didn’t stay.
But I really loved the writing part. And everybody in my NYU studio class loved my screenplays. Even when it wasn’t your own movie, you would choose a screenplay that someone in the class had written, and mine got made. So I thought, I’ll write. Then I thought, I don’t want to write screenplays and try to sell them. I’ll write a novel. It’ll get bought by the movies, then it’ll get made, then I’ll be in Hollywood and I’ll be able to write screenplays, and I’ll become a director. That was my circuitous route to doing that. And I had worked as a film reviewer when I was in Bennington, for the local paper, which was very good. I had at least written about film professionally.
And then you had a series of “civilian jobs.”
I worked for a film producer at Paramount; my job was just to read books and write about them, reader reports. Then I worked for a literary agent. I was her assistant. When I discovered proofreading, that was so great. I lived in this minimal bohemian way with my boyfriend, and I did not want to make any more money than the bare minimum to pay the rent and eat. I could work two days a week at Time Inc., and you got the health benefits and everything. I loved the people I worked with. When I started reviewing books, I usually was reading my review books while we were sitting around waiting for copy. My work as a reviewer—that was all my first published work.
You wrote book reviews for publications like The New Yorker and The Nation. Is this when you started your first novel?
I was writing the whole time. I was writing short stories, very unsuccessfully in the sense of getting published. I think I published one short story before I went to the master’s program in fiction at Columbia University. The story was in Christopher Street. It was about someone who has a sex change—a trans person.
Your first novel, The Right Bitch, is in the form of a man’s diary and is quite sexually explicit. This was published in 1992, and I was curious whether that impulse came out of feminism.
I definitely was a feminist, but I didn’t explicitly write a feminist novel. It was based on someone I knew. I got his permission. He was very much as he is in the book. And, hilariously, when he read the book, he said, I can’t wait till you write the sequel so I can find out what I do next. He was a guy who had lots of simultaneous girlfriends, which meant he was really mistreating people. But then he also was in love with one of them, whom he’d married. He probably slept with other people. He was an impossible guy, but interesting and amusing.
We’re supposed to like him. But when he is sexually abusing the teenage babysitter, I got very upset. Did you have a reason for including that?
It was just how I perceived this kind of man. They pursue women, and in a certain way have no feeling for them. It’s quite familiar in the art world, men who have a strong feminine side, are sexually attracted to women but are very jealous of women and want to destroy them. They’re competitive with women, but they’re also often very sympathetic because they understand who they’re talking to—with a woman. That was what I was interested in portraying. He was the first person I knew who used a computer. He wasn’t a writer— he was a visual artist—but he did write a lot, and he kept a diary. And he kept it on a computer. At the time, in the 1980s, computers were less stable. For instance, if you vacuumed too near a computer, it wiped the whole computer. I thought he was crazy to trust his life to such a dodgy device.
Was the sexual material partly to be commercial?
No, in those days, it was the opposite of commercial, which is why it was published by Grove—as one friend said to me, the “dirty book” publishers.* I wasn’t thinking about it one way or the other. This is what his life was, and then, of course, when this one woman has his baby and doesn’t let him participate in that, it’s the ultimate female revenge. It is the one thing you can do—you can’t have him, you can’t have his love, but you can love the result of that. That was all I had in mind.
With your next novel, Life and Love, Such As They Are, you’re with Simon & Schuster.
Every publisher I’ve had has made terrible mistakes in the course of publishing the book. Simon & Schuster were really behind me. They still made terrible mistakes.
Are you talking about page proof mistakes?
No. Grove—the first thing they wanted was for me to change the title. They said, The Right Bitch, no one will review it because they will not want that in their journal. I thought that was nonsense. It wasn’t like having fuck in the title, which in a few years would be in a title. My editor and I—he was very nice—went back and forth with titles. He didn’t like any of my alternate titles; I didn’t like any of his. I only liked my original title because it was right for the book; it was necessary. Publishers have sales conferences; the editors do what they’re doing and then they present it to the salesmen, who have to sell the books to bookstores. I guess something had been mentioned about the title having been changed, and at the end of the meeting, the head salesman said to my editor, What was the original title of this book? And my editor said, The Right Bitch. And the salesman said, Great title! But the wrong title had already been sold to bookstores. The book was in their computer systems under the wrong title, in the publisher’s catalog under the wrong title. So if you went into Barnes & Noble and asked for The Right Bitch, they didn’t have it—even though they did have it. That did not help sales. There were things like that with each book.
In Life and Love, Such As They Are, set in this neighborhood, you write about couples coming together and breaking apart. As in your earlier novel, the characters are in the arts: dancers, musicians. How did you come up with that book?
I think, for one thing, I was reading a lot of English novels that were light in tone and comic and quite mean and sophisticated. The way my novel begins, where she’s making a meatloaf in the shape of her lover’s head, that was the image that prompted the whole thing for me.
How did that book turn out with the publisher?
The publicist was determined for it to get reviewed everywhere. And it did get widely reviewed. I got some great reviews, but unfortunately the Times review, which is really the one that counts (or used to be), was what they call a mixed review. A mixed review is essentially bad for the book. It is almost never going to help sales. The book was given to someone it should not have been given to. Basically for a book to do well, you should either be reviewed by someone very well known, or it has to be a super rave, preferably both.
This was pre-Amazon. Now, I guess, a book doesn’t necessarily have to get a good review in the Times to sell.
And so many books don’t even get reviewed.
Your next book, published in 1996, deals with literary works. I love this book: A Feast of Words: For Lovers of Food and Fiction. You’ve done an impressive job of synopsizing the works you’ve chosen—from Jane Austen to Marcel Proust. If I were still teaching, I would use that book for one of my courses.
That’s kind of you to say. For me, it was just fun.
You wrote that the book was a covert autobiography.
Just because I was such a passionate reader. As soon as I thought of doing the book, it all came to me at once. It was because of the zillions of books I had read, I knew exactly which ones I would write about. And there were very few books I wrote about that came from any kind of effort. I would tell a friend I was writing this, and they would say, oh, you must read such and such. There are a couple of those in there, but the rest of it were books that really meant something to me at different times in my life. When I think about those books, I’m back in the time in which I discovered them.
It’s a wonderful selection. You have a recipe, sometimes multiple recipes having to do with the food you’ve described in your synopses. You have to be able to make all those recipes. (And you have to proofread all the recipes!) Where did you get your cooking talents from?
Just from cooking dinner. But I will say, vis-á-vis proofreading—of course, I gave the book to my parents, and my mother called me up the first time she tried a recipe from there. And she said, Well, you know—the Brussels sprouts, they were really hard. They just didn’t get cooked! And I said, Really? I looked at the recipe, and I had left out a step. I very sheepishly told her, You were supposed to blanch the Brussels sprouts before the thing got baked. [A vegetable casserole inspired by Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams.] From the moment the book was published, I felt on the back foot because of that blooper, though no one else ever mentioned it or told me about any others.
“Proust with Asparagus,” illustration by Anna Shapiro in A Feast of Words: For Lovers of Food and Fiction.
But you made each dish before you put the recipe in.
Yes. Some of them were things I’d been making forever. My original idea with this book was that some of the chapters would have recipes, and some would have illustrations. I didn’t intend to have them absolutely with every book written about. But Norton really wanted it to be a cookbook, to sell it as a cookbook as well as a book about books, which again was another marketing disaster—if you’re interested in hearing the publishing stories.
Yes, those are interesting stories for people who are writing and want to get published.
This book did get great reviews, including in People magazine. Francine Prose reviewed it, and they used a big picture, and it was a rave review. Then Norton did one ad; it was an ad for four books, and they did have a quote, but not from that review. And it was featured purely as a cookbook. It was not a book foodies would have been excited about. It was a book that readers could be excited about. My fantasy was that some 14-year-old in her mother’s kitchen would pick up the book and read these things and want to read War and Peace.
“Tolstoy with Soup,” illustration by Anna Shapiro in A Feast of Words: For Lovers of Food and Fiction.
Here are the mistakes made with this book. That was the one ad. The book was scheduled for October so that it could be a Christmas gift book, which was a good idea. And it’s pretty. I get these great reviews in October, and I get booked on a radio talk show—I’ve never been able to remember the name of it—some national book talk show, an hour long. And it was a call-in, so people could call in and ask me questions. It was total fun, person after person calling. At the end of the show, the host said, We want you back. We could do another hour; the calls were so backed up. I tell the Norton publicists; they say, oh, yes, we’ll book you back on that show. They never did it.
I knew people in the neighborhood, store owners who wanted to feature the book for Christmas. They were unable to get the book before January. It wasn’t shipped in time. So it was lots of missteps. Who knows if it would have done better? But it probably would have.
You were going back and forth to England before your next novel.
I was spending a lot of time there. I was always spending time here. I was never gone for more than two months at a time. I never wanted to live in England. It was because of my husband, who is from England. I felt I was in exile.
You were writing for the Guardian and the Observer—book reviews and also articles on popular topics. What was it like to have a regular gig at the Guardian and the Observer?
I think it’s easier in England. I should have loved living there except they were quite hostile to Americans and outsiders. Basically you’re in a country the size of New York State. And everyone knows everyone. The Observer column—the books editor met me at a party, and he said, We need someone to do our first-novel column. Could you do that? I said, Yes. It really was like that.
Did you feel gratified by the work, or were you thinking, I’ve got to get to my next novel?
I got really sick of doing the first-novel column because I was very spoiled at The New Yorker. My brief there was to go into the books room; there would be a bunch of books set aside, and I chose the books I wanted to do. When I started, Edith Oliver was the editor in charge, and she said, Don’t review a book if you don’t like it. Just don’t do it. Sometimes I reviewed books I didn’t like but that I was interested in, or that I thought needed a dissenting review. What a great brief. I never read anything I wasn’t interested in. Whereas at the Observer, they would hand me three novels, and they were rarely very good.
You do get to write your next novel.
I did finally finish it. It took a long time because of going back and forth to England.
The other novels were set in the 1980s and ’90s. This one, Living on Air, goes back to childhood on Long Island, and the father is an artist—although you say in the front of the book: This is not me. That’s not my father. But you just told me you did live in Levittown, where the main character lived.
It really isn’t my father. When it was published, it was not that long after my father had died, and my mother said, I’m so glad Daddy isn’t around to read this. And I said, It’s totally not him. I just used the template of our lives in order to write that. It’s a book I wouldn’t write now. I feel I never really fully resolved what I wanted to do in that book. I did think it was the best fiction I had written to that point, but I never felt I fully resolved what I wanted to.
Do you want to say what that is?
I think I’m writing now about the same period in my life, the ages 14 to 16, 17, and I feel as if I’m writing about it much more straightforwardly and naturalistically and that it’s a zillion times better. It’s much more satisfying to me. In Living on Air, I was trying to produce a certain kind of object, in a certain kind of pattern, and at the same time fit things into it that were more from life, feelings that were more from life. I was trying to do too many things.
I felt there was a difference in your creating the characters in Living on Air, getting more into depth about why they did what they did. The earlier novels were more about relationships and who went with whom.
And I would say, now, I have only gone deeper. I think it was much more a feeling of having to entertain and being afraid of being boring for one minute. And now I’m only interested in being honest. I would say what’s happened is, in 2010, my mother was dying of cancer, and I moved in with her for four months. That was an experience that changed me quite a lot. At the end of it, I had no interest in writing. And I think it disturbed my husband a lot, and I talked to him about what had changed. He said, Why don’t you write about that? So I wrote this fairly straightforward memoir about taking care of my mother—though it was kind of nonchronological. I wrote about it in categories: my mother’s body, who came to the house, because I didn’t want it to be one of these goopy, sentimental kind of things, and I didn’t want it to be about me. I did show that to a few agents, who said, it really has to be about you. That’s what is wanted in a memoir. You have to do it chronologically and make it all about what was transformed in you. I just set it aside. What I found in the course of writing it was so interesting to me. Then I just wasn’t going to write in the earlier way. I actually have completed this multigenerational family saga, about three generations of women, called The Afterlife. It’s about the aftereffects of the mother in the 19th century, her neglect and abandonment of her child and the effects that echoed down through the generations of that original dereliction. It is based on my family history. That is with an agent.
I loved your piece about your father in The New York Review of Books [2018]—the beautiful paintings, the different periods they reflected, and the way you wrote about them.
I think there are things even in that piece about him that would have upset him. He wouldn’t have wanted to read about himself as less successful than he wanted to be. He wouldn’t have wanted to read about reservations I had about some of his work. That would have been painful for him.
City Windows by David Shapiro, ca. 1944.
But wouldn’t he have been pleased that you published his artwork?
Yes, that part of it he would have been pleased by. But any kind of reservations would have hurt him. He would have felt very exposed by the discussion of the successes he didn’t have. And he might not have wanted artwork that he’d left behind being included.
You’ve lived here at Westbeth since 1981.
I wanted to live in Westbeth the very first time I ever heard of it. There was a piece about the development of this building for artists in 1968 in the New York Times when I was at Cornell. I read about it, and I said, I’m going to live there. I continued to always want to live here. It has meant that I could do my two days a week of proofreading and have enough time for writing. There is no greater gift. There are days when you sit down to write, you feel, I can’t lift this stone. Then I think, I’m in Westbeth. I have to write.
*Grove was famous for publishing D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller in the 1950s and ’60s.
For Anna’s article on her father’s art in The New York Review of Books, go to www.nybooks.com/online/2018/11/30/my-fathers-art/
Credit—Anna in Levittown: Art Leipzig.
All images courtesy of Anna Shapiro.
Terry Stoller is a Westbeth resident and author of Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.
Profiles in Art, Copyright 2025 Terry Stoller and Westbeth Artists Residents Council
