Write the Aftermath: The Millions Interviews Dani Shapiro
Signal Fires is Dani Shapiro’s eleventh book and her first work of fiction in 15 years. It’s a significant departure from her last four books, all memoirs, the most recent of which is 2019’s Inheritance, which explores Shapiro’s discovery that the man who raised her was not her biological father. But whether she is writing fiction or nonfiction, family secrets (not coincidentally, also the name of Shapiro’s popular podcast) and how they ricochet through time remains her chief occupation.
In Signal Fires, the circumstances surrounding a tragic accident from 1985 continue to haunt the members of the Wilf family in the present day. Bound by their shared secret, each of the Wilfs privately grapple with their own culpabilities. But their efforts to bury the past are thrown into flux as the family’s patriarch, Ben, grows close with their new neighbors, the Shenkmans—and in particular, the Shenkmans’ son Waldo, a tender but wise 11-year-old with an expansive view of the world.
