This Is Not About Us: Fiction
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Allegra Goodman on This Is Not About Us: Fiction
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A decade waiting for the right momentThe impulse behind this book predates its first sentence by years. Goodman had finished ‘The Family Markowitz’ in 1996, when she was in her early twenties and the book was quick, satirical, light. What she wanted now was something structurally similar but deeper in its ambitions: a form that could hold multiple generations, each rendered from the inside.
I had for a long time been thinking, I would really like to write a latter-day Family Markowitz. I would call it like a serial novel, in fact, with a larger narrative arc, in which I could explore the different generations from within their points of view, from the inside. [paraphrased from audio]
That word ‘serial’ matters. She was not thinking of a short-story collection with thematic resonances, but of something closer to a novel with rotating narrators, a structure that could accumulate into a portrait of a whole family over time.
The specific story that became the book’s opening had a gathering at a deathbed as its occasion. Writing it, Goodman found that she had introduced more characters than the story could contain, and she wanted to keep following them.
I started thinking, even as I was writing that story, that I would love to pursue each of these members of the family and find out more about their lives. The book kind of grew organically, like a tree, from that apple cake episode at the beginning. [paraphrased from audio]
Goodman finished ‘The Family Markowitz’ before she had watched anyone she was close to age, grieve seriously, or lose a marriage. By the time she was writing these new stories, that had changed, and the change is audible in the prose.
The tone of these new stories is sometimes more bittersweet. They’re still funny, but they’re more layered. And perhaps that’s my getting older, knowing people who’ve suffered more, knowing people who’ve died, seeing people grapple with divorce and loss. And so those colors come through in the new collection.
How she wrote it
Sundays at a strip-mall StarbucksTwo of her children’s extracurricular schedules created the book’s writing life. The slot she carved out while they rowed outlasted their rowing by years, eventually spanning the entire childhood of her youngest.
I write my novel Monday through Friday, I don’t write at all on Saturdays, and then I write stories on Sundays. I started this practice years ago, when two of my children were taking a rowing class at the community boathouse on the Charles River on Sunday mornings. The class was about two hours long, and I spent that time writing at a Starbucks in a strip mall on Soldiers Field Road.
Because the stories appeared in magazines as she wrote them, Goodman had an unusual feedback loop: reader responses that arrived before the book was finished, naming characters they wanted to see return. One story came into existence specifically because her editor at Dial Press noticed a gap.
It was my editor at the Dial Press, Whitney Frick, who suggested that I write a story about Pam. She pointed out that in the book all the cousins had stories of their own, but Pam was left on the periphery. I thought she had a good point.
Writing seventeen stories with wildly different narrators, from teenagers to the elderly, required Goodman to fully vacate her own perspective each time. She treats point of view as total immersion rather than as a technical tool, and the discipline shapes how the same family events read differently depending on who is narrating.
When I take a point of view, I really inhabit it. I just commit fully to it. So I’m not myself. So if my protagonist is going to an art museum, I’m not writing about my own views of the art on the wall. I’m seeing that museum through her eyes. [paraphrased from audio]
The family’s surname, Rubinstein, does double duty. It is a private tribute to the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, whose Chopin recordings Goodman’s mother loved. It also gave her a structural image for what she was attempting on the page.
The name Rubinstein means ruby stone, and I often felt as though this family was a multifaceted gem that I was turning toward the light. With these stories, I explore a family from the perspective of age and youth, husband and wife, parent and child. The reader can see these people from all sides.
On what the book is wrestling with
Crisis, cake, and the things we don’t sayThe Rubinstein family’s estrangements and reconciliations are not catalyzed by dramatic revelations but by minor social failures: a cake not acknowledged, a plan cancelled, a gathering that falls apart. Goodman’s claim is that these small events are not triggers for the real conflict but are themselves the real conflict, fully felt.
Fiction comes alive with details and particularities. In my book, a cake can cause a feud. A cancelled outing can end a relationship. But, of course, the feud is not really about the cake. The end of the relationship is not really about a change in plans. These little domestic details stand in for big feelings and contribute to a larger picture.
Goodman resists the convention that family crisis clarifies or ennobles. The book’s most painful sequences involve characters who know they are behaving badly and continue anyway, and she is not apologetic about depicting that.
Is it a healthy thing to do? Of course not. Is it a human thing to do? Yes. Unfortunately, we’re not all super enlightened about our own situation all the time.
The passage above has a corollary that Goodman makes explicit elsewhere. She told the Elena Bowes Substack that the book is not interested in the common redemption arc where shared hardship draws people together.
When people are in crisis, they don’t always rise to the occasion. Sometimes it drives us apart instead.
The Rubinstein family’s Jewishness is one more arena where the book refuses consensus. Rather than depicting a family defined by shared religious intensity or shared secular indifference, Goodman wanted all those positions present simultaneously, within the same household.
I was interested in exploring a Jewish family which is not uniformly observant but is nonetheless affiliated. Some want to learn, to teach, and to connect. Some feel a sense of apathy. Some want to pull away. And then there are those, like Steve and Dan Rubinstein, who dread Passover when they feel all these impulses at once.
What she wants us to sit with
A whole society visible in one familyGoodman is pushing against a hierarchy in literary culture that treats war, historical trauma, and political upheaval as inherently weightier subjects than domestic life. Her argument is not that family fiction deserves more credit but that the distinction is wrong from the start.
Family can be considered domestic. It can be considered small, while epics are stereotyped as being about war or great world events or historical trauma or something. But if you think about family, family is also about politics. It’s about how people relate to each other. In its most fundamental way, it’s about what it means to be human. All the misunderstandings people have, all the miscommunications, all the wonderful celebrations — you can see a whole society in a family.