Dani Shapiro To Discuss New Book INHERITANCE At The Music Hall January 27

On Monday, January 27, bestselling author Dani Shapiro comes to The Music Hall's Historic Theater. She will discuss her new memoir, INHERITANCE, an exploration of the ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.

The 7pm event includes an author presentation followed by an onstage interview with psychiatrist and author Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. It will be held at The Music Hall's Historic Theater at 28 Chestnut St., in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

"Dani Shapiro delves into perhaps the most complex questions that we all face regarding who we are and what can happen when we lift away the veil of childhood to discover family secrets that alter our own identities," says Patricia Lynch, executive director of The Music Hall and executive producer of the Writers series. "I'm eager to hear Shapiro and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's insightful conversation."

Dani Shapiro's memoir, INHERITANCE, offers a profound inquiry into the complexity surrounding paternity, identity, and love. What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.

INHERITANCE is a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

Dani Shapiro is the author of several memoirs and novels, including Hourglass, Still Writing, and Family History. Also an essayist and a journalist, Shapiro's short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and many other publications. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, the New School, and Wesleyan University, and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Shapiro is the host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. is an author, educator, and psychiatrist. He is the founder of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is also a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and director of the National Complex Trauma Treatment Network. When he is not teaching around the world, Dr. van der Kolk works and lives in Boston.

Tickets for Innovation + Leadership: Dani Shapiro with Inheritance on Monday, January 27, at 7pm is $13.75. For each 1-2 tickets sold, the purchase of a book voucher (INHERITANCE, $16.95 paperback) is required. Vouchers can be redeemed on the event night for signed copies of INHERITANCE. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score, will also be available for purchase at the event.

Packages can be purchased online at TheMusicHall.org, over the phone at 603.436.2400, or in person at the B2W Box Office at the Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut Street.

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