Tamar Shapiro: Writing Has Become My Daily Joy
In this interview, author Tamar Shapiro discusses how fulfilling one life dream helped lead her to another: writing her debut novel, Restitution.
Tamar Shapiro was raised in both the U.S. and Germany and now lives in Washington, DC with her husband, two children, and the world’s best dog. While writing Restitution, Shapiro attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Program and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. A former real estate attorney and nonprofit leader, she is currently pursuing a low-residency MFA at Randolph College in Virginia. Follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, Tamar discusses how fulfilling one life dream helped lead her to another—writing her debut novel, Restitution—her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Tamar Shapiro
Literary agent: Dani Segelbaum, Arc Literary
Book title: Restitution
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Release date: September 30, 2025
Genre/category: Literary fiction; historical fiction
Elevator pitch: After the Berlin Wall falls, German American siblings, Kate and Martin, are faced with a difficult decision: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled in the 1950s? But a house is never just a house, and the family secrets they discover drive Kate and Martin apart just as divided Germany is coming together.
What prompted you to write this book?
Like my narrator Kate, I grew up in the U.S. with a German mother. Also like her, I have spent my life moving back and forth between both countries. Restitution is not autobiographical, and yet the story very much grew out of my experience of always feeling a little torn between these two homes, of always wanting to belong in both.
My mother came from West Germany, and I had no connection to the East until the early 1990s, when my parents moved to Leipzig. I absolutely fell in love with the city over decades of visiting them, so much so that at the end of each trip I loudly bemoaned that I might never live there myself. Then, in 2017, my husband, kids, and I finally made it happen. We moved to Leipzig too, albeit only for a few years. Having achieved one dream, I decided I would grab the chance to fulfill another: I would use the time in Leipzig to write a novel.
I already knew what I wanted to write about. During the decades I spent visiting Leipzig, as well as a stint living in Berlin, I had witnessed first-hand the way the scars of Germany’s division into East and West, as well as its flawed reunification, persisted to this day. I wanted Restitution to tell the story of one ordinary family shaped by these losses, disruptions and hopes across generations and continents. I believe the questions Restitution asks are as urgent today as ever: What remains when people leave entire lives behind? What happens when personal histories are erased? And what—if anything—can heal these wounds?
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I remember the exact moment I decided I would write a novel about these themes. I was in Iowa City for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Program, sitting at a picnic table in North Market Square Park, shortly before our move to Leipzig, when the idea first hit me. I began writing right there at that bench, and despite years of revision, some of those early Iowa seeds are still recognizable in the book. I signed my contract for publication six and a half years later in December 2023.
I knew early on how I wanted the book to begin and end, but the details in between changed countless times. I completed the first draft while living in Leipzig, so I had the opportunity to do first-hand research, including many conversations with friends who had grown up in the East, as well as with their parents and neighbors. I also read as much as I could—novels, histories, legal treatises. Everything I learned informed what I wrote, so I was always updating and refining. But the core of the story—the relationship between Kate and her brother Martin—remained constant throughout.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Absolutely everything about the publishing process has been a learning moment. I came to writing later in life after a long nonprofit career. I’d finally gotten to the point where I felt completely comfortable with who I was professionally, and then I was crazy enough to jump into this new world I knew nothing about. I’ve loved every moment, but it has definitely been an adjustment. The hardest thing to learn was how to let go. I could have kept working on this book forever, and I am very grateful to my publisher for prying it out of my hands. The best surprise along the way was discovering how warm and supportive the writing community is. Sharing writing with others is such an intimate and vulnerable act, and I am grateful for the new friends I’ve made who are not only willing to treat my writing with care and love, but also to share their writing with me.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I’d often heard writers say that they wrote because they couldn’t not write. Before I began working on my novel, this never made much sense to me. There were so many alternatives to writing. After all, I’d loved my nonprofit work on housing and community development. If the novel didn’t work out, I thought, then I’d just stop writing. So, I was very surprised to discover, halfway into my book, that I, too, could no longer imagine not writing. I’m now well into a draft of my second novel, and writing has become my daily joy. I love the challenge of crafting sentences such that every word feels just right. I have fun puzzling my way through roadblocks and figuring out how to get unstuck. And I learned that I particularly love revision, because it’s through the process of rewriting again and again that I finally discover exactly who my characters are and what it is I want to say.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Restitution is a family story, and I hope that readers will be drawn in by the family dynamics, especially the complicated sibling relationship that is at the heart of the book. It is also a novel about belonging, about the desire we all have to feel at home in a place and about the many ways this can go wrong. Of course, Restitution is specifically focused on the lingering impacts of Germany’s East-West division and its subsequent reunification. When I look around at what’s going on in our world today, I am convinced there’s still so much to learn from this period in history, especially the way political decisions can breed personal resentment and create societal divisions that are extremely difficult to repair. But Restitution ends on a hopeful note, mirroring my hope that our broken world will see better days.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Don’t give up! There is so much rejection in the writing world, and I know how awful it can feel to be sending queries into a black hole. One way I dealt with this rejection was by setting little goals for myself. For example, every time I received a rejection, I immediately sent out another query or submission on the very same day. That way, I could go to sleep focused not on the rejection but on the fact that I was moving forward. The good news is that there is very likely someone out there who is interested in your story. You just need to keep trying to find the right person while at the same time continuing to find joy in the writing itself.
