After a decades-long advertising career and a memoir (The End of the World as We Know It), Robert Goolrick leaped into fiction in 2010 with A Reliable Wife, the tale of a mysterious mail-order frontier bride. His second novel, Heading Out to Wonderful (Algonquin), opens with another stranger with a secret, a man who arrives in the tiny town of Brownsburg, Va., in 1948 with a suitcase full of money. [See our review below.]
Your first novel, A Reliable Wife, was a pretty big success. Did you struggle with Heading out to Wonderful?
I think you hope always that you'll write a better book, so of course the pressure increases on yourself then. But I think it's purely internal pressure. I didn't feel any pressure from the external world. You just hope to write the best book you can. And you hope that your second novel is better than your first novel. That's about it.
But also, in this case, it was difficult because it's a true story. I wanted to tell the story honestly and honor the people whose story it was, because I knew some of them. So it was very important to me to get it right in that respect.
Why relocate them the events to Virginia?
The actual story took place in Greece, and I set it in Virginia because I grew up there and because I wanted to go back and write sort of a love letter to my childhood and to the countryside in which I grew up. So the town of Brownsburg--there's a real town of Brownsburg, although it's greatly fictionalized in the book--and that whole countryside that's in the book is very familiar to me, the people and the music, and all of that. It's very beautiful, and it's very much a part of my character.
So I moved out of New York and moved back there in order to be closer to the source of the material, at least as I was writing about it.
Are you planning to stay?
For the moment. Well, I thought I was going to leave New York for a year, but that was three years ago, so it looks like I'm going to be here for a while.
Your first book, a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It, dealt with the subject of your childhood, then A Reliable Wife was set elsewhere. What was it like coming back to that place?
Well, there was a lot of culture shock involved, leaving New York and getting used to rural life again. And the first year was horribly lonely, and I had nothing but me and my work, because when you're a writer, you don't go out to work. So it's very hard to meet people.
But now I have great friends and I have a wonderful life. I find there comes a point in your life where, as wonderful as New York is, you just don't need it any more for a while.
I also realized there was going to be sort of a fuss made about A Reliable Wife, and I didn't want to be one of those people in New York who just spend their entire lives going to literary cocktail parties. I wanted to focus on the work. I'm not young, and so it's very important to me to focus more on the work than on being the author of the work.
Tell us a little about your next novel.
It takes place in 1969, and it's about something that's always fascinated me. In 1969, I was 21 years old, and two remarkable things happened that summer--the worst thing that happened to my generation and the brightest thing that happened to my generation. And those are that on August 15 of that summer, the Manson murders happened. And four days later, the festival of Woodstock began. So it's sort of about the convergence of those two events in the culture. --Kelly Faircloth, freelance writer