Isola: A Novel
Isola: A Novel
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Allegra Goodman on Isola: A Novel
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A footnote she could not put downThe discovery happened not in a library or an archive but in a Canadian hotel room at some point in the middle of the night, during a road trip from Boston to Montreal. Goodman had borrowed children’s books on Canadian history expecting her older sons to read them in the car. They weren’t interested, so she read them herself, nursing a newborn. One of those books contained a single aside about a young French noblewoman marooned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the aside was enough.
I stumbled upon this passage about this young woman, Marguerite, who sailed to the new world, was marooned, and it was literally like in parentheses, in an aside, in the middle of a chapter about Cartier’s voyages to New France, which is Canada. And I was like, wait, what, what... I was thinking, this is such a great thing to write about.
That night in the hotel room was more than twenty years before the book came out. Goodman set the idea aside, wrote other novels, and watched the newborn from that road trip grow up and leave for college. She eventually named the force that kept her from starting: historical fiction frightened her, and she was a contemporary novelist. But she could not fully let go of Marguerite either.
Stories and books have to be written when they’re ready to be written... even if I had all the time in the world when I was younger, 22 years ago, I might not have been able to write this novel. I might have need to grow up a lot more and to have experienced a lot more in order to bring that to this book.
The immediate trigger, when it finally came, was finishing her previous novel. Sam (2023) follows a young woman who climbs and strives and endures, and writing it produced an unexpected side effect: it pulled Goodman’s attention back four centuries.
I think that writing Sam gave me that final push I needed to write Marguerite’s story. Sam is a climber, a striver, and a survivor. She is also a young woman coming of age. While writing about Sam the 21st century girl, I began to think about the challenges of coming of age in the 16th century.
The parallel is not incidental. Goodman has said she has always been obsessed with islands, and Marguerite’s story had orbited her imagination for two decades. What Sam gave her was not a new idea but a body of practice: she had just spent years inside a young woman’s survival instincts, and that was the preparation she needed.
How she wrote it
Twenty tries to hear one sentenceGoodman normally writes in the third person. For Isola she wanted first person from the start, shaped partly by a childhood fixation on Robinson Crusoe, but she could not locate Marguerite’s voice by typing. She put down her laptop, picked up a notebook, and rewrote the same opening sentence by hand, again and again. The voice didn’t arrive until the twentieth attempt.
After about twenty tries, Marguerite began to speak to me. ‘I never knew my mother. She died the night that I was born, and so we passed each other in the dark.’ Once I had that line, I knew that I could write the rest of the book.
Before writing much beyond that opening, Goodman spent roughly a year reading in every direction the sixteenth century pointed her. She studied portraits by Sofonisba Anguissola, listened to lute music, read a biography of the Queen of Navarre, and watched YouTube videos of gannets diving and people loading muskets. While in London she boarded a replica of the Golden Hind, and what that afternoon gave her was not a historical fact but a physical sensation she could not have found in a book.
Standing on that ship, climbing from one level to the other, I understood in my body how cramped voyages were at that time.
Most of that year’s reading never surfaces directly in the prose. But Goodman has been precise about what the unseen research does: it lives behind the story, shaping what the character assumes, fears, and knows about the world she came from.
That relationship between research and prose is something she has articulated carefully. The year of reading did not end when the writing began; it continued to feed the novel to its final pages, including days spent elaborating the exact fabric and embroidery of a court dress Marguerite wears in a late scene.
I probably spent a year reading and imagining. I did not use all my research on the page, but all of it informed the novel, behind the story and between the lines.
There are two contemporary accounts of Marguerite’s ordeal, and they contradict each other. Goodman studied both early and treated the conflict between them as a craft problem as much as a historical one. The gap between the two accounts raised a question about whose purposes a story serves, and she found a way to make that question part of the novel itself.
As a story teller I was particularly interested in the way that narratives serve their authors — not necessarily their subjects. I play with that in my book.
For two years while writing, Goodman told no one what the project was. The secrecy was not superstition; it was a working method. Finishing a full draft before anyone else had a stake in it meant she could follow the story wherever it needed to go without external pressure shaping her choices mid-draft.
I held my idea close for a long time and didn’t speak about the project to anyone until I had completed the whole first draft. Writing for a couple of years in isolation and in silence gave me confidence and also the time I needed to work out ideas on my own.
On what the book is wrestling with
Not how to survive, but whyThe double meaning of Isola is visible in the title’s origin. Goodman found the word on the Italian map that Jacques Cartier used, where every island is labeled isola. But the way the letters arranged themselves when she looked at them pulled the title toward something interior.
I was drawn to the word because it looked to me like I-Sola, I alone and Marguerite’s isolation lies at the heart of the book. At one point she says that she herself became an island, living as she did alone. Her solitude breaks her and also is the making of her.
Goodman has said she chose to write about a privileged young woman specifically because privilege offered nothing useful on the island. The thought experiment at the center of the book is stark: strip away every social advantage a person has been given, and then ask what remains.
I really wanted to write about what isolation is like for a young person who has been privileged and surrounded by servants. What might you discover? What might you say to yourself? What might you come to believe?
The Robinson Crusoe parallel runs through how Goodman discusses the book, but she is precise about where it breaks. Marguerite is stranded on an island, as Crusoe is, and both survive. The difference is what rescue means for each of them. In a Zibby Events conversation, Goodman made the asymmetry explicit.
She was obviously in great danger on the Island, but she was in danger at home... she was not safe where she was... Robinson Crusoe, when he gets saved, he can go back to being a white male, you know? At home. She can’t. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Endurance is learnable; the reason is notGoodman has described Isola as, at its core, a philosophical novel in a survival story’s clothing. The question her earlier fiction circled was how to live well. This book pushed that question to a more fundamental register.
As a novelist, I’ve always been interested in questions like, sort of, how do you live? What’s the best way to live? And, but also more than that, sort of why do you live, what is it for?
Writing the book required Goodman to resist market logic. She is known as a contemporary novelist, and Isola is her first historical novel in seven books. She has acknowledged the industry prefers consistency from an author. Her answer to that preference was essentially to ignore it.
In terms of the industry and marketing of a book, people love consistency, right? But if you’re an artist, you love to work on what interests you and what you’re passionate about. So, I’ve always been sort of more on the side of writing what I’m interested in, or, you know, writing what draws me imaginatively.
That commitment to following imaginative pull over category expectation is visible in every choice the book makes: the unfamiliar century, the first-person voice Goodman had never used in a novel before, the twenty-two-year wait for readiness. Marguerite’s survival on the island required her to discover what she actually believed when no one was watching. The novel got made the same way.