Paulina Porizkova With Dani Shapiro: A Conversation

Dani Shapiro is a bestselling novelist, memoirist, and host of the podcast Family Secrets, now in its sixth season. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Time. She has taught at Columbia and New York University and co-founded the Sirenland Writers Conference. Signal Fires: A Novel (Knopf) opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of the accident become a secret so dangerous it can never be spoken. But time moves on and when the Shenkmans – a young couple expecting a baby boy – arrive, it’s as if the accident never happened. Then Waldo, the Shenkmans’ brilliant, lonely son, befriends Ben. He’s now retired and struggling with his wife’s decline, and past events come hurtling back in ways no one could ever have foreseen. Signal Fires illuminates the ties that bind families together and the secrets that can break them apart.

Paulina Porizkova is a writer born in Cold War Czechoslovakia, now known as the Czech Republic, and a former model who in 1988 became one of the highest-paid catwalkers in the world as the face of Estée Lauder. She has acted in 16 movies and several TV shows and has served as a judge on America’s Next Top Model. Her debut novel, A Model Summer, was published in 2007. No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful (The Open Field) is her nonfiction debut. No Filter tells the story of how Porizkova rose to prominence as a model, appearing on her first Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover in 1984. That same year, she was cast in the music video for the song “Drive” by The Cars; it was love at first sight for her and frontman Ric Ocasek. He was 40 and Porizkova was 19. The next decades would bring marriage, motherhood, a budding writing career – and later sadness, loneliness, isolation, and divorce. Following her former husband’s death, which came with a revelation of a deep betrayal, Porizkova stunned fans with her vulnerability and disarming honesty as she reckoned with that betrayal and started over. After a lifetime of being looked at, she is ready to be heard.