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cal. She explains that although the
setting might be real, the plot is
entirely fictional.
"In order for my imagination to
run, I need concrete and specific
things I know," she says. So not only
is the main character a telephone psy-
chic, but her husband is a handsome
pharmacist, just like her own.
The fictional Miriam has always
kept her career — helping others in
their romantic, business and other
pursuits — secretive in the Great
Neck community. Her husband, who
is having financial problems at his
pharmacy, is not interested in her
advice and their teenage daughter is
embarrassed about her mother's occu-
pation, and unmindful of her moth-
er's intuitions about her new
boyfriend.
Miriam asks, "I could help strangers
put their lives together, but how could
I keep mine from falling apart?"
Her beloved dead grandmother —
who taught her to use her gift for the
general good, not for her own gain —
rejoins her at moments, even in a
bagel store, where Miriam is moved to
add a braided challah roll to her
order. "Even though she had come
only for a moment, she was to my
mood what yeast is to dough,"
Shapiro writes.
The novel is peppered with refer-
ences to Great Neck, along with
Yiddish and Yiddishkeit.. Although
she now speaks only a little Yiddish,
Shapiro has a deep feeling for it, as it
was her first language.
Shapiro has written a first novel
that's humorous, and also takes on
themes of forgiveness and self-under-
standing in a thoughtful way.
I wonder if she will know my ques-
tions before I ask
them. She says
that she doesn't
channel her writ-
ing. "What I love
best is story-
telling," Shapiro
comments, dis-
cussing the process
of creating a
novel.
Rochelle Jewel
Often, she
would call a friend Shapiro: "I ask to
be a channel for
and spin an
miracles
for other
episode of her nar-
people."
rative, writing it
down as she told
it. "I don't think in a linear way," she
says, noting that she kept track of the
unfolding story on a large roll of
freezer paper.
The author, who grew up in
Rockaway, N.Y., says she first showed
signs of her psychic power when she
was a young girl. At age 4, she told
her father that one of the customers
in his grocery store was going to die.
Her father responded by saying,
"Impossible," that the man was
healthy as two horses. Four days later,
the man died of a heart attack.
When she was around 9, she began
to be asked to leave friends' homes
when she would make comments
about things like impending divorces.
"It wasn't that I was trying. It was as if
I had already been told, as though
someone had a conversation with
me," she says.
Her grandmother was able to look
into a woman's eyes, and tell if she
was pregnant. And she could look at
the whorls on someone's fingertips
and tell if that person were prone to
certain diseases.
Shapiro says that she feels an affini-
ty with biblical figures who had
visionary powers, like.Joseph, in his
interpretation of dreams.
"What people like about me is that
I'm the thinking person's psychic. I'm
educated," she says. "I won't be telling
them hokey stuff and curses."
As she begins her work, Shapiro
prays. "I ask to be a channel for mira-
cles for other people," she says, "to
please serve them," so that through
her, whatever it is that they need to
hear to heal their hearts and bodies,
they do hear — "something to help
them live better."
"Sometimes when I'm getting
dressed in front of a mirror, I'll see
someone standing next to me. It can
be someone who belongs to one of
my clients," she adds.
Before beginning to write the novel,
which took seven yealt Shapiro, the
mother of two, studied poetry writing
in a Great Neck adult-education pro-
gram. She found that her poems kept
getting longer and longer, and that
she "has a need to write more."
About 30 years ago, a famous clair-
voyant told her that she would pub-
lish a story with Simon & Schuster.
When she heard that the publisher
was looking at the novel, she says that
she knew they would buy it.
"I think it's so great to be putting
out a novel at age 57. It's such a hope-
ful thing, that life can always hold out
the most wonderful surprises," she
says.
Now she divides her time between
writing and dealing with her tele-
phone clients, and has almost com-
pleted a sequel. "I have a lot more
Miriam in me," she says. IT
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