Send us a text

Before you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the woman beneath the legend.

Shapiro has long gravitated to improbable, irresistible tales. In The Stowaway (2018), she unearthed the story of Billy Gawronski, the teenager who swam the Hudson to join an Antarctic expedition—a book born of her own dogged persistence in tracking down his widow. Before turning to biography, she was an award-winning filmmaker, co-directing the unforgettable documentary Keep the River on Your Right.

In this episode, Shapiro traces the arc of her storytelling life back to the notebooks of Harriet the Spy, and to the questions raised in a favorite Grace Paley short story, “A Conversation with My Father,” which wrestles with how to tell the truth about life without reducing it to cliché.