An Interview with Allegra Goodman

Edited by Talia Blatt

Allegra Goodman is an American novelist and short story writer based in Cambridge, MA. The fiction board of The Harvard Advocate hosted her in the Advocate building on 21 South Street for a conversation about Jewishness, children, her time at Harvard, and her most recent novel, Sam, which was published this January.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

We’d love to start with your memories of Harvard and The Advocate.

Allegra Goodman: I was writing fiction and even publishing fiction, but I was on the poetry board because I was still thinking I would rather be a poet than a story writer. I figured out some things, as one does in college. I realized I was definitely a storyteller more than a poet. But I love poetry. I used to come to meetings here, all four years--- I comped freshman year. These were very ancient times. They actually gave us a poem, and I wrote out by hand my critique of the poem, and then somebody read my handwriting.

What precipitated that change from poetry to prose?

I studied poetry while I was here. I'm always telling people who write fiction that it's really good to read poetry. I'm a big believer in reading other genres—you can learn a lot about language and the use of words. I also had this romantic idea that poetry was the higher art form. My fiction was funny, satirical. I didn't take it as seriously, but I had more of a knack for it. I began to understand that even in my lighter and more satirical fiction, there could be complexity, and that you could really delve into character. You could talk about people in interesting ways. That's where my interests lay.

I remember when I first published a story. I actually wrote it the summer before I came to Harvard. I grew up in Hawaii. My parents called me. This is when people had letters and it came to the mailbox in Honolulu, that they accepted my story. I had literally just gotten to Wigglesworth. The story was about this middle-aged man who was a scholar of George Bernard Shaw. And he was very complex. He was an Orthodox Jew, but he didn't believe in God. He enjoyed this contradiction, and he nurtured it. And I thought to myself, you can do this when you write fiction, you can write about somebody who isn't consistent.

A story you wrote a while ago now, The Other Side of the Island, was so formative for me and other members of the board. Something I particularly like about that book is how it subverts the rebellious adolescent trope; it's the parents who are rebellious, and the kid who just wants to follow the rules.

That book is one of those books that’s for kids, but it's not just for kids. Again, I was really interested in those complexities and contradictions. I remember being a kid and a teenager, and the desire to fit in, the desire for conformity and the feeling that your parents are weird in some way. I've seen it in my own children—they got to the age where they were like, ‘Can you just walk a little farther away from me?

What struck me while rereading it—and I probably felt this when I first read it as a kid but wouldn't have articulated it this way—I felt that there was something essentially Jewish about the family. The family name is Greenspoon. The forecaster is sometimes called the Prophet, which feels messianic. Like you were saying about parental weirdness, as a kid I’d have the sense, and it was sometimes made explicit in my family, that we were different. There's also a rebellious intellectual culture that felt Jewish. Do you see it as a Jewish text?

It's very astute that you say that. It's hidden by the dystopian society they live in, where all religion, spirituality, and ethnic differences have been erased. But there are little clues. In the climax of the book, where Honor goes and finds her mom, there is some Holocaust imagery. I’m interested in dystopia that isn’t far from truth. In their society, they rename all the months, and the days of the week. That happened after the French Revolution. Everything is from somewhere, but it's never named. When you're a kid, you might just read through. It's left for you as you get older.

I love your story in The New Yorker, “La Vita Nuova.” That has a lot of Harvard references, which is fun for us—the characters share Le’s vegetarian summer rolls, so do we!

You realize when you write about a place how much things have changed. Harvard changed a lot. Some of the places in that story have closed. The store that sells the Russian dolls was there 20 years ago, but not anymore. When you’re a novelist or story writer, you can catch something in amber. A lot of my stuff is about Hawaii, but in coded ways. Much of the Hawaii I knew is gone.

The girl in the story is working as a babysitter for this little boy in West Cambridge, somewhere I never ventured as a Harvard undergraduate. But a lot of the imagery and a lot of the themes in that story really grew out of my experience having a little boy. There’s a line where Nathaniel says, “If you're upset, you should go to the zoo.” That is something my kid said to me. On my oldest kid’s first day of school, I actually got lost going to the school, and had this terrible sense of dread. To give you an idea of how old I am, this was before GPS. I was very upset because he was the last kid standing there with the teacher. Like oh my god, I'm the worst parent. He could see that I was upset, so he slipped into the backseat and said, “If you're upset, you should just go to the zoo.” Little things like that can end up transformed or used for different purposes.

I really liked the nesting dolls in that story. If you were to create nesting dolls in your own life, what would they be?

Oh gosh. One would definitely be me in Hawaii, as a little kid. One of me here as a college student, for sure, because these four years contain so much growth and learning. Then probably my years in grad school at Stanford, and then being a mom. Amazingly, you keep growing and changing as you get older. I used to think that life after college was the afterlife. There have been different states in my career as well. I was more of a short story writer, then I became a novelist. I'm a grandma now.

It's interesting that you bring up the dolls. Some of you may have this experience with your own work —sometimes you can get stuck writing a story. I was finding my way with the voice of the story. How will this woman get out of this problem? She's heartbroken. She is being hit on by this boy's father. The story needed a turn, just like a sonnet has a turn—it may not be a dramatic plot moment, but it could be dramatic in terms of the inner life of the person you're writing about. I was so stuck. I actually dreamed the idea of the dolls. And I actually dreamed it was my life, just like you said so smartly. But I gave my dream to her, again, taking something that I had thought or imagined or experienced and giving and transforming it, displacing it onto the character. The act of transformation is what makes fiction so much fun, more fun than writing a personal essay, which I also do. I much prefer the coding that happens in stories.

That leads us to another question, one we've been asking other authors this year. What are your thoughts on autofiction, both as an approach and as a discourse?

I will never write a novel where there's a character named Allegra Goodman. There's a place for that, but I’m not into it. As I said, I really like the encoding of fiction. I wrote a book about cancer researchers. I'm not a scientist, but I imagined my way into the kinds of pressures that they would feel, and the kinds of inspiration they might have. My fiction is never going to be autobiographical. However, it is really, deeply personal. I give it my dreams; I give it my memories. And I find that really, really satisfying—revealing and concealing and expressing yourself, all at the same time.

I'm curious if you feel that mediates the way you experience life. I write fiction and I often will find myself in a situation that's particularly beautiful or interesting or painful. And as it's happening, I’ll be wondering: How will I narrativize this? Is it fiction material? Sometimes that's useful, and sometimes it worries me.

I've definitely felt that it’s strange to be taking note like this. But it may take a long time for you to use that material. And that might be a good thing. When I was your age, I felt more comfortable writing about old people. Now that I'm older, I feel more comfortable writing about younger people and younger experiences not so close to me. There is something to be said for that kind of perspective and distance. I think the imagination needs space; it needs time. When my son said that cute thing to me, it came back to me when the time was right for it, years later. Maybe jot things down, but they will wait. They will keep, and be better for it.

On that note, I feel like you beautifully describe the perspective of a young person, observed from an outside and older perspective. How do you tap into the mindset of a child?

You have to find some entry point, and often that entry point is somewhere where you can remember yourself as a child, some connection to an experience. I never had my heart broken the way Amanda in “La Vita Nuova” has her heart broken, but I've had disappointments. I've had grief. I would add observing, listening, watching somebody think and behave. We did an exercise in the class I teach, where we just listened to how people talk to each other, the way they repeat themselves, their rhythms. This is not to say that I think that I could write about anybody's experience. It's sort of like being a casting director. You don't want to miscast your ideas into the wrong places, just because it would be a challenge or because you think it would be cool. It has to feel authentic.

How do you then find that entry point? I’m thinking especially about Intuition.

With Intuition, I really wanted to write about scientists. I’m the least scientific person you can imagine. My sister is an oncologist, and her husband is a doctor. So I know scientists. And I did some research, which involved doing some reading, but also observing, going to labs and following people around. I had to get permission. A postdoc at the Whitehead Institute allowed me to come in and look at him working with his mice. I was interested in the work with animals because I felt that was something visceral and tangible. I drew pictures of where the mice lived, how they were fed. The postdoc held up this mouse by the tail. And he said, ‘Allegra, what you really have to understand is the bitterness of this experience.’ I’m a quick study with the psychological stuff. The postdoc introduced me to somebody else who did cancer research on mice. She showed me the hairless mice they were growing tumors on and she showed me how she would sacrifice a mouse. She used that word, sacrifice, not the word kill. All those nuances you want to know if you're writing fiction. Anyway, I found an entry point through those postdocs, and that was the place where I started Intuition. I began to see the lab as a family. I'm a person who specializes in writing about families. The PIs are the parents, the postdocs are the teenagers. I understand these relationships to the extent that I can find my way in.

Why do you think you return to the family as the atom of your writing?

All individuals come from somewhere, something. Even Amanda, who's feeling so isolated, talks to her parents on the phone. I'm very interested in larger connections, and I always have been, even as a kid. All those networks of kids and their parents and those parents’ friends fed my imagination.

What other recurring themes do you find in your work?

Each of my books is really different in style. We have this dystopian novel, I wrote these satirical stories, “La Vita Nuova” is much more of a wistful story. I find that I return to themes of intergenerational conflict. I’m also interested in religion. That's partly because I'm a Jewish American writer. It’s always under there, even if people aren't religious. I'm interested in ritual and what ritual means in the modern world—not necessarily religious ritual. The laboratory is a highly ritualized place. I'm interested in doubt and faith and questioning. I'm interested in growth—what happens to people when they're tested.

What are some of your writing rituals?
As a writer, my ritual is listening to music before I start working. I like to watch people. I'm a morning person. I like to work first thing in the morning. I know college students are not like this. I was the morning person in college, which made me very uncool. I lived in Dunster House and I ate breakfast with two other people. The three of us ate breakfast every morning. One of them became a computer science professor at Cornell and the other became a chaplain. So it was an interesting group. I’m good at remembering details. It’s useful to remember what somebody ate for breakfast. Henry James said, ‘Be the person on whom no one, nothing is lost.’

Can you touch on transitioning from writing short stories to writing novels? Do your ideas present themselves to you as novels now?

I know some people who write novels and think they could never write a short story. Anytime I try to write something small, it turns into a novel. But it's not that I started writing short stories and ended up writing novels. I write stories even now. I have an instinct for what’s not going to fit in the short story. My second book was a collection of stories that were all linked. It was like baby steps toward writing a novel. Some people don't even realize it's a book of short stories. They read it from beginning to end, because I arranged them. It you're interested in kind of making that transition, it might be fun for you to write some related stories and put them together.

When I was a senior here, I started writing a novel. In those days, almost nobody did a creative thesis. There weren’t so many creative writing classes. I wrote my thesis on Paradise Lost. But on my own time, I was writing this novel. I love Victorian novels. I was reading George Eliot, and I had always been really into Dickens. I had read a lot of Henry James and Jane Austen. I was really interested in those novels that weren't just about one person, but about a whole family or whole community. I was like, ‘I'm going to write one of those in my spare time.’ So I started writing this novel, and it was a complete mess. I was just too young. When you're a senior, you don't think of yourself as young as you really are. I failed at it. It was a good experience for me, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't control the narrative. I went to grad school and wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare. Then about five years later, I went back to that novel, because I still liked the characters. I rewrote the whole thing from scratch. And that was my first novel.

It doesn’t get easier. Often when I write a book, I go off in the wrong direction, and I can't just realize that after a few pages, I realize that after like 200 pages. The first time that happened to me, when I wrote my first novel, it was a serious crisis. I was like, ‘I can't do this, I can't be a writer.’ And now it's just my process.

You have a novel coming out soon. What can you tell us about it?

This book is quite different from my others. It's called Sam and it's about a young girl growing up on the north shore of Massachusetts. I’ll give you guys a copy of it. I went to an event with booksellers in Providence. They asked what the book is about. And my description of the book got shorter and shorter as time went on, because I was getting exhausted. It got to the point where I said, ‘Well, it's about a girl named Sam, who grows into being a human.’ One of the booksellers asked if the genre was horror, mystery, suspense. And I was like, ‘Well, it's a coming-of-age story. So it's all of the above.’ What's interesting about this book, in terms of its voice, is that it starts when she's seven, then takes her through her twenties. It moves very fast. I was interested in showing somebody's mind, their heart opening in the way that you might see a time lapse of a flower opening or a seed sprouting. You can see that in film, but I do it with words. The language very, very subtly changes. It’s all from this intimate third person point of view. You can't find where it happens. Where did she turn into an adult?

You mentioned that Jewishness is an undercurrent in a lot of your books. Do you feel slotted into a Jewish-American writing tradition?

Anyone who's hyphenated has to grapple with it at some point. Yes and no. It can be an advantage to draw upon those experiences and that tradition. The slotting happens more with marketing than anything else. Writers have a lot of choice. My advice to anybody is don’t let other people tell you what to write. Write what interests you, what draws you in, what you want. Just like scientists. I find scientists really inspiring. They experiment. They try new tacks. They're not always in a rut, doing the same thing over and over again.

I haven't studied Jewish American literature. It's a great tradition, but I didn't feel compelled to only study things by people of my experience. It’s really important to seek out literature that might be about different experiences. The best classes I took at Harvard—Milton,17th century poetry—could not have been farther from my experience as a Jew growing up in Hawaii in the 20th century. I was really into Puritans. I was really into the courtly poetry of Chaucer. If you speak English, and you read and write in English, then anything that's written in English is your heritage. Anything in this language belongs to every student and every writer.

Let’s do a little speed round. What was the last gift you gave or received?

My second son is going to law school. I got him one of those Hydro Flask containers so he could pack a hot lunch.

What have you been reading recently?

I just read Haven by Emma Donoghue, who is the author of Room. She returns to certain themes. This book is set in the eighth century, and it's about three monks who live on this island.

What's something you've always been bad at, no matter how hard you try?

I have a terrible sense of direction. GPS changed my life. I told you how I got lost going to my son's school. I'm also quite bad at math. Really I'm only good at English. A lot of people at Harvard were just good at so many different things that they didn’t know what they wanted to do. I didn't have that. It made some things easier.

Do you have any hidden talents?

My best hidden talent is probably that I'm very good at remembering things, especially dialogue. People are like, ‘Oh my God, you remember what I said?’ I’m also good at remembering numbers.

How much sleep did you get last night?

I didn't sleep that well. But I usually get eight hours.

If you could interview any author, living or dead, who would it be?

I went to Celeste Ng's reading recently. She lives right here in Cambridge. She would be a lovely person for you guys to interview, especially because she went to Harvard. She’s just super smart.

What was the last movie you saw in theaters?

I actually saw Top Gun: Maverick. It's so much fun. Middle aged women are the right demographic. And it’s the kind of big movie you want to see in theaters. But my tastes tend toward depressing documentaries from Eastern Europe with subtitles. My husband only likes movies with happy endings. He and my daughter in law watch Bollywood movies together.

Do you have a go-to snack for writing?

Black licorice. No one else in my family likes it.

If you could live in any fictional world, what would you choose?

When I was little, it would have definitely been Oz. And then when I got a little older, probably Narnia. And now that I'm older than that, I honestly find this world so interesting. And in many ways stranger than fiction. Yes, I like this world.