The author says the book stemmed “from the white-hot center of the experience of having my life and my vision threatened”
Credit: Little, Brown and Company; Jeannette Montgomery Barron
NEED TO KNOW
- PEOPLE can exclusively reveal the cover of Kaleidoscope, a new memoir from Dani Shapiro
- The memoir explores Shapiro’s experience with a life-threatening illness that also put her vision at risk
- “I’ve written this book as a map and a guide for all of us who are navigating the many selves who make us who we are,” Shapiro says
Author Dani Shapiro still remembers the moment she realized that she was losing her sight. It was wintertime in New York’s West Village neighborhood when the crowds and the lights around her began to blur.
“I have always been on the comfortable side of those boxes we check during our annual physical. Each year, that long column of check marks told a lucky story. Nothing to see here,” Shapiro says. “But several years ago, my vision began to blur. I realized that I couldn’t make out words on the page. I soon learned that I had a rare, serious illness, and that the treatment for it would probably save my life but might cost me my sight.”
That experience — and what came after — became the subject of the author’s upcoming memoir Kaleidoscope, for which PEOPLE can exclusively reveal the cover. The book, out next spring from Hachette Book Group imprint Little, Brown and Company, traces the threats presented by the diagnosis — to both Shapiro’s vision and her writing.
Credit: Little, Brown and Company
Being forced with the possibility of losing her sight forced Shapiro to find new ways of paying attention to the world around her, taking her on a journey through her own past. In Kaleidoscope, the author reflects on “friendships, family, marriage, identity and the creative life with renewed urgency — circling the blind spots we all carry,” the book’s synopsis states.
For Shapiro, the author of 11 books including the novel Signal Fires and the memoir Inheritance, putting her experience on the page was crucial. In fact, the book came to her “demanding to be written.”
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“As a writer, especially in my memoirs, I think of myself as a reporter, and my primary subject is how to live this one, wild, precious life we have been given,” Shapiro says. “I am a witness, an observer. What would happen to me if I couldn’t see? How would I navigate the world? What happens when we get hit with something unexpected, something out of the blue? Which is, of course, what happens to all of us again and again. Our story is always changing, but then how do we live that story, embrace it, learn from it, grow from it, continue to become the best version of ourselves?”
Credit: Jeannette Montgomery Barron
“I had to write Kaleidoscope from the white-hot center of the experience of having my life and my vision threatened,” she continues. “I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want to write it later, if I were to get to the other side of it. A window opened that allowed me to explore vulnerability, fragility and terror, while at the same time learning more than ever about kindness, courage, love and what matters most.”
As such, the memoir’s title reflects a deeper meaning too. Shapiro says that she now views herself, and others as a “kaleidoscope.”
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“The shards of us — the decisions, the mistakes, the regrets, the choices — assemble and reassemble to become a whole. And that whole is a thing of beauty,” she says, noting the influence of the women who have been by her side throughout her experience.
“I’ve written this book as a map and a guide for all of us who are navigating the many selves who make us who we are, ever changing, ever being altered, rewritten,” Shapiro adds.
Kaleidoscope will be published on May 4, 2027 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.
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