Zibby’s Book Club Pick Allegra Goodman’s This is Not About Us

[1:19]Zibby Owens: This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to totally booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming up and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram zippy owens. So today's episode is a little bit different. Allegra Goodman's amazing novel, This Is Not About Us, was my Zippy's book club pick. And, unfortunately, Allegra was unable to do another podcast interview with me. I've interviewed her multiple times. You can go back and listen to some of our past ones. She also was kind enough to do a q and a with the Zippy's book club audience, which was lovely. So instead, I'm releasing a conversation that she had, which was sensational. I watched it live on YouTube. It was at Zibby's Bookshop with the author Nikki Ehrlich, who wrote The Poppy Fields. So enjoy this conversation. Nikki asked a lot of questions I would ask and had a fabulous conversation. So I hope that you learn more about Allegra's book, This Is Not About Us, and it inspires you to learn even more. And thank you to Nikki for taking one for me for this one. Here are their bios. Allegra Goodman is the author of This Is Not About Us. She is also the author of seven novels, including the national bestseller Isola, which was a Reese's book club pick, two short story collections, and a novel for young readers. One of her novels, which I loved and interviewed her about, was called Sam. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere and has been anthologized in the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nikki Ehrlich is the author of The Poppy Fields, a novel. Nikki is the author also of the New York Times instant New York Times bestseller, The Measure, which was a read with Jenna Today Show book club pick. The Measure has been translated into 24 languages worldwide. She has a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a master's degree from Columbia University. She lives in Los Angeles. Enjoy the episode. Perhaps not everyone has had a chance to read it yet. So if you would like to kind of give an introduction to this book for everybody here. Sure. Sure. So it came out on last Tuesday. So it's been out of a week.

[3:55]Allegra Goodman: And this book is a book about a family, about three generations of a Jewish American family living on the East Coast. There are the grandparents who are in their 80s, the early 80s and late 70s, and then their children who are grown and in their 50s, and then the grandchildren generation like, you know, Nikki's age and younger. And it is a portion of this family sort of from all sides, from different facets, and their name is the Rubenstein family. And Rubenstein means ruby stone. When I was writing the book, always thought of it as like having a gem and just turning it to the light to look at the different facets of the gem. Because the way the book is structured, you can see the family from all sides. You can see the grandmother's point of view. You can see her frustrated daughter's point of view. You can see the point of view of the children and their parents who think the children aren't listening to them, know. And it's got the grandparents, the cousins, the siblings, all different kinds of relationships are explored in this book. So that's just, you know, a brief description. Did you choose the last name because of that, or did you discover that meaning after that last name? I actually discovered the meaning after the last name. I named them the Rubensteins because my mother actually played the piano, and some several of them are musical in this book also. Music is important to them. She played the piano, and she played Chopin. She was really quite a good pianist, although she always said that she peaked when she was 11. She's one of those she sort of knew the waltzes by heart and she would play piano. But her favorite pianist was Arthur Rubenstein. And we had these recordings that she listened to. And so in honor of her, I named them the Rubensteins because he was her favorite pianist. And she was very self deprecating about her music. So she liked to joke because we lived across the street in Honolulu from a piano teacher. And the piano teacher used to take walks. And then she of course would hear my mother playing. And then one day, she came over and she said, oh, you've improved so much. And it was because the recording was on.

[6:04]Zibby Owens: So my mom used to like to tell that story. But, yeah, that's where the name came from. I was gonna ask later about the music in the book, but since you brought it up, how do you find writing music? Because I feel like music is is such a hard thing to, you know, put into words. Like the experience of playing music. Right? Several musicians and there's several, you know, times where you're writing from the experience of both listening to the music and playing the music and it just Mhmm. Oh, yeah. Well, I

[6:28]Allegra Goodman: don't know. I I enjoy writing about that, and I think it's very revealing. The way people respond to music, I think, reveals a lot about their characters. So I I enjoyed doing that. Two of his sisters live in the Boston area, and they're not speaking to each other in the book. I don't think that's a spoiler No. Because it happens early on, unfortunately. You'll notice that bun cake on the cover. That is that is the proximal cause of the rift between them. But they go to the Boston Symphony. If those of you who have lived in Boston or have been there, you know, know know that we have a great symphony and very proud of it. And we have Symphony Hall, which is one of the great halls in the world. And, you know, it's just such a Boston thing. And so the way they deal with their season tickets and the kind of music that they like to listen to is very revealing of them. Yeah. That makes sense. So this is a short story collection, and you've been working on these short stories for many years. Right? And some of them have already been some of them were published in magazines. And

[7:24]Zibby Owens: in the meantime, you're working on your other your book, Izala, that came out last year as well. So can you talk about sort of the writing process of this book and what these last few years have been?

[7:34]Allegra Goodman: It's been very weird. I I wrote this sort of before, during, and after writing two novels on sort of like on the side. It's a story cycle. I would say it it's not really a collection of, like, disparate They they have a narrative arc, and so people read it like a novel. And so people said to me, what do you call it? A story cycle or a novel in stories? Or like, how would you define it? And I define it as a serial novel or as close as I'll get to a serial novel. So when I was a kid and a young writer, I was obsessed with nineteenth century novelists who serialized their books in magazines. And you know, people like Dickens and George Eliot, Trollope, you know, Tolstoy did it. You know, they would write these big books but people would read installment after installment. And this isn't quite that, but there were I think six or eight pieces of it have been published in magazines, six of them in The New Yorker over time. And while I when I started publishing these pieces in The New Yorker, readers would write to me and respond and say, I'd like to hear more about Lily or what happened to Pam? You know, and so I would get that feedback I was working, which is different from like when you're writing a novel in solitude and you know, you finish the whole thing and then you kind of heave it electronically from your desk to your editor all in a piece. And so I decided that this is like as close as I'll get to a serial novel where I had sort of reader feedback along the way. It was very strange writing it at the same time as two other books. But I would say that because of that, I wrote it very gradually. And because it was sort of written incrementally in these pieces over time, it had a different feel to it than like say taking a year and like this is your full time job. It was always kind of my side project. So most of the book, would say 90% of this book, I only wrote on Sunday mornings. I was like writing my novels from Monday to Friday. I don't work on Saturdays. And then Sunday mornings was the time I wrote this book. Wow. And I can tell you exactly when I started, and it was many years ago. It was like twelve or fourteen years ago. My youngest child was taking a rowing class at the community boathouse on the Charles River. As you know, Cambridge and you know, has the Charles going past it. And it was a three hour class. So I would take her there. She was like 10. And I'd go across the street to the Starbucks on Stroh Drive. And I started writing this story about these sisters and this apple cake and the family gathering at the sick bed of a third sister. And I started wondering and thinking as I was writing that story about the trajectory in the lives of each of the members of the family who were gathering. And that was the beginning of this book. And after writing that story, I sort of followed the family. Was sort of the book grew like a tree and I just followed each branch and each twig over time. But I got in the habit of just working on this on those Sunday mornings because of that rowing class and then I kept doing it even after my daughter stopped doing the rowing class.

[10:46]Zibby Owens: How much of the stories that you kept writing was informed by readers being like, I wanna hear this versus you just feeling this is where I wanna go?

[10:54]Allegra Goodman: Yeah. That's a great question. It wasn't like people had, like, plot ideas or Sure. Yeah. Was more like I think it was mostly encouragement. You know? They were just like, it was their curiosity that really inspired And I thought, Oh, I want to do more of this. I should add that I've worked in this form once before. Thirty years ago, I published a book called The Family Markowitz, and it has the same structure. It's three generations of a Jewish American family and the grandparents, the middle aged children and the young adult grandchildren. And it has sort of some of the milestones of Jewish life in it. The family Markowitz has a wedding. It has a Pesach story, which is probably one of my best known stories. And you know, stories about sort of Jewish life. And I had for a long time thought it would be really great to write a latter day family Markowitz about a Jewish family living now. So much has happened in the last thirty years of course. And of course I'm also older. When I wrote The Family Markowitz, I was a really young writer. I was in my 20s and I had two little, little children. And now I am in my 50s. I'm a grandmother. I have four grown children and three little grandchildren. So it was really interesting to revisit that form and to be like the age not like when I wrote The Family Markowitz, was the age of the youngest generation, kind of like projecting and looking up and adopting the or appropriating the point of view of the older people. And now I really am an older person. And I can write about middle age, you know, from that point of view and closer to the and I am a grandparent and I can, you know, understand their perspective, I think, with more experience behind it.

[12:37]Zibby Owens: Yeah. And you have there is a family tree at the very beginning of the book for everybody, which I I consulted a couple times as I was reading because there's there's 22 characters in the family tree. Did you, like, build that tree from from day one from the story? You had all you had everybody.

[12:53]Allegra Goodman: Pretty much. Yeah. I I may have added a little bit to it, but I you know, it's funny. People think of it as a a big family, but it's not a big family in real life. It's just a big family in a book. It's and it doesn't feel like big and confusing in the story and that you're just like, oh, when you can see it. Yeah. No. It's funny because, like, the the family is very much a modern family where they they have one child or maybe two children. It's not like a a family like in the old days when there would be, like, six sisters and, you know Yeah. It's it's not like a big Russian family in in Tolstoy. It could be gross. But I think that if you do consult the family tree, like, you won't need it. You know, once you Once you get after a little bit, you won't need it. Yeah. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[15:50]Zibby Owens: And what was it like writing these stories where, as you said, you're kind of revisiting events from multiple characters' perspectives and you're commenting on other characters and their perspectives as opposed to kind of some of your previous novels where they focus more tightly on, like, one sort of clear protagonist?

[16:06]Allegra Goodman: I've always really enjoyed, you know, playing with different points of view and just what I enjoy about it is giving the that the reader is, like, privy to all the secrets and the thoughts and that the reader understands things from the outside just a lot better than the family members understand from inside. And I like I like giving the the reader that access. Yes. And I like I like playing with it. And a lot of the humor in the book comes from playing with those points of view. Yes. And what people say and then your little aside like, this is what it actually means. Yeah. Which is always fun. Yeah. Exactly. And we're even in the perspective of a dog at one point. Yes. Which is There were some dogs in the book. Yes.

[16:47]Zibby Owens: Do you have any sort of one or two characters that you found kind of the most fun to write?

[16:52]Allegra Goodman: I actually enjoyed them all. I don't I don't favor any of them. I and I don't take sides. Like, there's no heroes or villains in this book. No. They're all very they're human. Like, these people are flawed. They have they have their mishegas, but they're good people. They fight. They also love each other. It's to me, they were just very real and very round. And so, you know, there's a divorce in the book, and I never felt when I was writing that, like, you know, the ex wife was right or, like, he was a terrible person. Like, you know, they were they were they're good people. They love their children. They it didn't work out. You feel you feel that. It never feels judgmental ever. Yeah. Yeah. They judge each other, but I don't judge them. Yeah.

[17:40]Zibby Owens: I'm curious the the order that the stories are in this book. Is that the order that you wrote them in, or did you kind of put them in this Not completely the order I wrote them in. I I actually did. Once I had sort of critical mass of this material,

[17:54]Allegra Goodman: I did take time away from Sundays, but I took in some real time to sort of fit everything together and really think about it and to make sure that there was continuity and that everybody's ages matched up and then all all that stuff. And I have to say, this book was originally supposed to be published after Sam, but I had been secretly working on this historical novel about the sixteenth century noblewoman. So the decision was to publish that one first. And so this book then was delayed, and it really benefited from the delay as books often do because I had time away from it. I had time to come back to it and just keep keep working on it, refining it. So I'm really happy that it that it was delayed in the end. When you're about to start a short story, do you kind of approach it the same way as a novel? Do you do you outline either one? Do you kind of know the ending? Like, what is how does it work? I do outline everything, but my outlines always change. And the goalpost kind of shifts a lot of times. And, you know, when you're working with material, you get a sense of like where it's going, and it sort of pushes back against you. The way I might describe it is like if any of you throw pots on a wheel, you've probably heard ceramicists say like the clay will tell me like if it's gonna be a vessel with a long neck or a short neck, that kind of thing. It is a little bit like writing can be a little bit like that where the material also pushes back a little bit, the characters. It is different from writing a novel that a story has you have to create a whole world in a small space. Mhmm. And it's it's sort of a different art form. And then to have a story cycle or a serial novel like this, they have to kind of work independently and also work together. And so that's an interesting challenge.

[19:43]Zibby Owens: Yeah. I'm sure. And I feel like as I was approaching the end, I was like, how can this book end? Like, this this could just keep going and going with this family. Like, I could just stay with this family. Like, there's still so much going on. How sort of when did you feel like, okay. I think I think this is where I lead them?

[19:57]Allegra Goodman: I think that I I actually felt like I said what I had to say about them that that they're I finish off with there's a birth and I've and some of them gather for that, and it was like a book. I felt like that was Sure. That, like, the material told me that that was that I was done. And there are various arcs that were completed by that time. But do you are they still living in your head and going on to do different things? You know, they you know, as I I've said what I have to say about them, but they still talk to me, and I I still get messages from them. Like, I even got a message recently from a woman who read a piece of this book in The New Yorker. It was published just a few weeks ago, and she and the piece was about Helen, one of the older sisters, and her daughter, Pam. And this woman just started her message, I am Helen. And she said, my children don't listen to me, and I'm sending them each a copy of this story. And I was like, okay. I'm not sure she completely understood the story, but she's definitely living it. So as you see, my character is right to me. Yeah. So I don't need to write them anymore.

[21:03]Zibby Owens: How was it kind of going back and forth with Isola in this book? Because Isola, you said it's it's historical fiction. It's based on true events. Yeah. And this is this is very different. It's really different. Actually,

[21:15]Allegra Goodman: the fact that it's so different really helped. I think it's refreshing to work on something very, very different. And they were also sort of in different stages. They you know, as I was working on them. So it was it was refreshing and fun. Just a different style. You might not know if you didn't know me and you just sort of looked at the two books without knowing the author, you might not know it was the same person who wrote them. No. Which is the excitement. Quite different.

[21:40]Zibby Owens: Well, I mean, because that's obviously a book about physical isolation, someone who is marooned on an island. Yeah. This is a book where, like, no one is ever alone because there's always all these family members who gathering, but that doesn't mean they're not lonely. As well. Yeah. It's also challenging. Yes. Yeah. And, like, how do you kind of explore that

[21:57]Allegra Goodman: tension between sort of loneliness and constant togetherness? Yes. Yeah. That's something that interests me in all my work. And, actually, a lot of my books my books tend to be diverse. They they're quite different from each other in their subject, but you can see sort of underlying themes in all of them, and that's one of them. Know, the loneliness and companionship and being alone and being part of a group and the politics of a group, the politics of family is very interesting to me. And I've explored it in just sort of many different arenas. I wrote a book about a laboratory called Intuition about a bunch of scientists. That was more of a but that was also a book about family. It was about a work family with a work husband and a work wife and their rebellious postdocs who were their children. And those dynamics are playing out there. And so, you know, even though it seemed different in subject, underneath

[22:49]Zibby Owens: there were some of the things I was interested in. Yeah. And Sam, of course, also, you know, being the coming of age, but pretty much entirely from this kind of younger generation. And then with this book, you open up to all the generations. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So do you point to any kind of particular authors or particular stories that kind of were foundational for you? Because you said you're you've done many different genres, many different formats.

[23:13]Allegra Goodman: Yeah. Well, in terms of the short story and and the writing about family, I think Eudora Welty was a very important writer for me growing up. And she is this wonderful southern writer, and she wrote she had a great sense of voice and of place. And I love her dialogue and I loved her humor when I was a kid. So she was really important to me. Another one, Katherine Ann Porter, who was so good at particularly the coming of age and the young girl, you know, young woman subjects. She was important to me. So those are two examples sort of in this form. And then, as I said, I've always loved like these nineteenth century writers. And one of the things I loved about them and still love about them is that they don't just write a novel about one person. It's like a whole community. Like, you know, there's a whole world there that they conjure up in a book like Middlemarch or a book like, you know, David Copperfield, The Great Expectations is I I love their their reach and their range and their ambition. So so that kind of thing inspired me. Do

[24:18]Zibby Owens: your reading habits change based on kind of what you're working on at the time? Oh. Or do you always just sort of read? I sort of read whatever I want. I try to keep them with, you know Alright. Current writers as well as the as the older ones. Sure. But then, obviously, for certain books like Isla, there's lot of research involved. And then for this, probably not quite as hot? No. No. No. No. No.

[24:44]Allegra Goodman: Shockingly little research. Yeah. With easel eyes, I spent a lot of time just thinking about Marguerite's world, thinking about fashion in the sixteenth century, listening to music that they would have played at that time, thinking about jewelry, thinking about ships and navigation, and the hunting of polar bears, and the way polar bears hunt and and just all sorts of things I I did. It was a very different kind of reading. I could see then why this would be a refreshing for you.

[25:15]Zibby Owens: For sure. Definitely. Well, can you tell us a little bit about the cover? You mentioned the bun cave. I think this cover is

[25:22]Allegra Goodman: it's so like the like the art is just so beautiful. Thank you. Yeah. The paint they found this artwork and actually recently somebody posted, like, or sent me a message, and he was like, my cousin did the painting that's on your book. And she's a wonderful artist, and she specializes in food paintings. Who knew? And he, you know, and he's a novelist, Aaron Hamburger, actually. And he his cut that is his name. His cousin, like, I you know, so the so the art director must have found this wonderful image that she created of the Bundt cake. And I love the cover because it reminds me of it's sort of retro looking, it and reminds me of like a kosher cookbook from the nineteen fifties. It does a little bit. Cookbook as I see that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[26:06]Zibby Owens: So you say you want the sort of apple cake on the cover? No. No. This is all their idea. Yeah. Yeah. They consulted me afterwards.

[26:15]Allegra Goodman: And I I loved it from the beginning. So

[26:18]Zibby Owens: And when did you pick the title? Because the the title of the collection is the title of one of the Yes. Stories. So, actually,

[26:25]Allegra Goodman: I couldn't decide what the title would be for quite a while. I I thought about even calling it the family Rubenstein to sort of Sure. Chime in with the family Markowitz. But it is a very different book, I'm a different person. That seemed kinda boring. I thought about, like, maybe trying to use Apple Cake in the title. And my sister read an earlier draft of the finished draft of the book, and it was her idea to take the title from the story and make it the title of the book. And in the story, it has a different context a But little it turned out to be like a really playful, fun title, so I I went with it. But credit to my sister, Paula, for coming up with this.

[27:01]Zibby Owens: I feel like there's also a little bit like because as an author, you probably get asked all the time, like, oh, is this your family? Is this you? And it's like, this is not about us. This is not about Yeah. Exactly.

[27:10]Allegra Goodman: This is not my family. Oh, totally. In fact, when I first finished the book, I sent it to my daughter, the one who had done the rowing class who's now And 20 she's in London. And I sent her, you know, an email with this as an attachment. And she called me and said, I think it's really cute how you label the document. This is not about us to reassure the family. And I was like, no. That's not to reassure the family. That is actually the title of the book. And she was like, oh, so it is about us. No. No. No. It's a fictional family. Well,

[27:47]Zibby Owens: the last question I have to ask, because this this book kicks off with this family feud about this this recipe, this apple cake, are there any family recipes in your family that you think are good enough to start a war? Oh,

[27:58]Allegra Goodman: you know, my mom was funny. She didn't give people recipes. Or she would say, like, is a really good recipe, but it's not for you. Like Like, you can't you can't handle it. You can't do it. Right. I'm not a serious baker. She could really bake. I I bake on the page. Like, I slave over a fictional stove. But she was really quite good, and she could do apple strudel and she could do ragalloch and she was really a fine baker. Sylvia who makes the apple cake in this book is sort of an intuitive baker. She's she does like it's not a fancy cake that she makes and that's what frustrates her sister so much. It's not fussy, you know? But just delicious. She it's just delicious, and it smells really good when it's baking. So Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming. Thank

[28:49]Zibby Owens: you for listening to Totally Booked with Sibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.