Elena Mauli Shapiro: A Dead Woman's Box

I e-met this week’s guest author, Elena Mauli Shapiro, on one of my favorite writing sites, SheWrites.com. Her post about how a saved box of collected objects inspired her first novel, 13 Rue Therese – which The New Yorker’s “Book Bench” calls “gush-worthy,” with “an elegant weather of its own” – is gush-worthy as well. And she has a short story coming in Five Chapters next week! – Meg
1982—A little Parisian girl draws a princess, an adventurer, a dragon on a piece of paper. She cuts them out and has them talk to each other, constructs meandering stories with the figures freed from the blank page. Though she is too young to know how to read, she opens every book she comes upon and pretends she understands it, imagines what might be inside.
Upstairs in the same building, a lone old woman dies. Nobody comes for her belongings. The other tenants scavenge as her apartment is cleared: jewelry, silverware, old clothes. The little girl’s mother saves a box. Inside the box: black lace gloves, yellowed letters, a rosary. Many tiny objects worth nothing but memories.
1992—The girl is no longer little, and no longer Parisian. She lives in America now. The dead woman’s box came with her all the way across the world. One day she will write a story out of that box, she knows.
1999—The girl is in college, writing a tentative novel about a mischievous Parisian piano teacher. Her writing instructor asks her why she writes. She is completely flummoxed by the question. It is as if her teacher has asked her why she eats, why she sleeps, why she craves love. She is silent for a moment, then answers, “because—I have to?” The teacher looks her over, evaluating what she just said. “That’s a good answer,” the teacher replies.
2005—The girl is a woman now. She is married. She has dreams about the objects in the box. She writes fragments. She is in a state of febrile upheaval. One day she realizes that the mischievous piano teacher she wrote about all those years ago is the non-existent ghost of the dead woman in the box. The story pulls everything the live woman has into itself.
2008—The book has been fallow for two years. The woman stopped halfway through, quite convinced no one would ever read it. Nevertheless it must be written, or she will regret it forever. As long as it remains unfinished, it accuses her.
2009—Submissions. Rejections. Further conviction the manuscript will die its quiet little death in her desk drawer like other manuscripts before it. Then one day an agent writes back, “We’ve just now had a chance to read the pages and they are quite lovely; we’d like to read the manuscript in full.”
2009, later—After further revisions, the agent sends the manuscript to a few editors. The little Parisian girl who is now a married woman settles in for a good long wait, braces herself for more rejections. Four days later, an offer comes in from an editor who read the manuscript on an airplane to Europe who says, “I must have this book.” The little Parisian girl who is now a married woman feels as if she is watching herself from a great height. She wonders whose life she has wandered into. She has never sold her writing before and now her agent quotes her a number that makes her scream into a pillow. She laughs and laughs and says, “Yes, yes, tell the editor, yes.”
2011, today—The manuscript has become a book. The little Parisian girl who became a married woman is now called an author. You are reading the story of how her story about stories came to be. Perhaps you will read the book. Perhaps a small child will open the book and pretend to understand what is inside.
The dead woman’s box lives in a drawer in the author’s nightstand. She keeps it there in case it wishes to leap back into her dreams. – Elena