Robert Goolrick, "who after being fired as an advertising executive in his early 50s wrote a blistering memoir of his Southern family and a bestselling novel about a wealthy widower whose mail-order bride turns out to be nothing like the woman he had hoped for," died April 29, the New York Times reported. He was 73.
In The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes From a Life (2007), Goolrick "uncorked a lifetime of secrets in stylish, penetrating prose," and said after being "vertiginously" pushed out of advertising, he was freed to expose the "terrifying interior" of his apparently ordinary life.
Goolrick graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1970 and eventually settled into a career as an advertising copywriter, rising to executive positions at AC&R Advertising and Grey Advertising (now the Grey Group) and working on campaigns for products including Mumm Champagne and Foster's beer. "Advertising taught him to write economically, but it did not satisfy him," the Times noted.
"I think advertising takes people who have talent but no specific ambition and uses their talent in specific ways," he said in 2013. "When I was young, I suppose I had a good deal of talent and imagination, but I really didn't have any direction."
When Grey fired him in 2002, Goolrick reinvented himself as a writer, working on his first novel, A Reliable Wife. Although he completed the novel, his memoir "was the first to be acquired and published, by Algonquin. After its success (it has sold about 40,000 hardcover, paperback and e-book copies), Algonquin purchased A Reliable Wife, which turned into a blockbuster, selling more than a million copies. It spent nearly a year in 2010 and 2011 on The New York Times's trade paperback bestseller list, including three weeks at No. 1," the Times wrote.
Goolrick published three more novels: Heading Out to Wonderful (2012), The Fall of Princes (2015) and The Dying of the Light (2018). Columbia Pictures optioned A Reliable Wife in 2009, but to date no film has been made.