Four Sublets: Becoming a Poet in New York, a Memoir (review)

She is dirty blond, curly haired, hazel eyed; she is almost fifty and, as her memoir Four Sublets opens, Myra Shapiro is about to begin a new life. Leaving behind her years as a wife, mother and high school teacher in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Shapiro makes her way to Greenwich Village, opens the door to a sublet apartment on Perry Street and gives birth to herself as a poet.

If you have ever fantasized living the life of an artist, actor or writer in New York City, if the longing to lead a creative existence rests at the core of your being, you will identify with this author’s need to transform her life. You will rejoice that she—grown strong through the collective consciousness of the women’s movement and the competent care of a therapist—comes to understand her past and honor her desire to launch her “deeper truth.”

Myra Shapiro was born in the Bronx in 1932, of Jewish immigrant parents. She has happy memories of her extended family, Marxists, and in particular, remembers the warmth of her favorite cousin Sophie, whose home was where “everyone gathered around a table to eat and talk, to organize protests and make the world better... where people laughed at jokes and sang Yiddish songs.” But Myra’s childhood in New York ended abruptly when she was nine years old and her father moved his family to a small town in northwest Georgia. The year was 1941 and Myra’s father took a job managing a chenille bedspread factory. Myra never adjusted to life in the South, “a world like Dick and Jane’s” where to survive, she was required to surrender her Bronx “moxie,” where to get along she had to learn not to yell and was expected to have good manners. As a Jew in this southern town, she was an oddity, a fish out of water, a person who experienced subtle and not-so-subtle prejudice. She could not be herself.

Just as she failed to adjust to life in the South as a child, Myra felt confined and dis-satisfied, later, within the domesticity of marriage and family. Brought up in a time when most women defined themselves through marriage, Myra wanted to find a man, settle down and have children. At age twenty, in keeping with this wish and expectation, she married Harold Shapiro, her college sweet-heart, but she was not content. “I exposed my-self to another before I opened to myself,” she tells us. All along she longed for something else, something more personally rewarding. She fantasized getting away, going to New York, living alone and writing. Though it is clear she cared deeply for Harold and their two daughters, she hungered for a life of her own.

January 1981. Having begun to write and having seen her younger daughter off to college, Myra grabs at an opportunity to fulfill her fantasy. While spending a few days in New York she decides to “enact a dream.” She answers an ad for a sublet in the Village and then, with only two days to make up her mind whether or not to take it, she shocks herself by signing the lease. Her husband Harold is alarmed, “enraged.” Upon hearing her plan, she tells us, he stares, flabbergasted. “Oh no,” he yells, “if you do this, don’t ever come back.”

Myra digs in her heels. Her new strength and belief in her right to fulfill her passion has brought her to this place. She loves this man, does not want to cause him pain, but she will not be denied. “I refuse to say years from now If only....”

This book gives witness to the birth and life of an evolving poet as she creates the space and serenity needed for her writing, as she gathers a community of poets around her, who teach her, share with her and provide her with support. You will celebrate with her the first...