Laurie Barshay

“I touched follow on my phone's screen. I saw it—a vision—two half sisters who had never known of one another's existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast.

I see you.

I see you, too.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all my ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
― W.B. Yeats

“I’m not giving you up,” she said. The thin shell holding me together cracked, and suddenly I was weeping with my whole body. “And you’d better not be giving me up,” she said. Every syllable, deliberate. “I’m not giving you up, Shirl,” I sobbed. “I was so afraid that—” “I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me,” she said. “And you are my brother’s daughter.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“I don’t want to be a presentist,” the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love