Makenna Goodman: Motherhood and Isolation

Makenna Goodman’s debut novel The Shame centers on Alma, a woman adrift in rural Vermont with a desperate longing for something beyond the child-rearing, homemaking, and isolation that comprise her existence. One evening, she makes a sudden decision to get in the car and leave, driving from central Vermont to Brooklyn. “I was free,” Alma reflects as she drives down the dark interstate. “Behind me in the back seat were two empty car seats. No one was asking me for a snack, no one’s nose needed to be wiped, no one demanded the same song be played at top volume over and over.” But as she drives, recent and long-standing regrets coalesce into a series of flashbacks. Through these glimpses into Alma’s past, Goodman reveals the claustrophobia of Alma’s days, her uncertainties about parenthood, and her desperate loneliness, until what Alma is running from—and toward—merge, and the stakes become clear.

Goodman’s writing is lush and propulsive, creating a compact world like a fast-moving car in the night. The book joins a conversation about the near-impossible choices of motherhood explored by writers like Sheila Heti in and Helen Phillips in , and that Jenny Offill gives a jolt in all her work—most recently, . What these writers have in common is not a focus on the “domestic,” a word that’s been used to damn women writers for a century, but on insistently complex characterization. Goodman’s work, like theirs, is not merely topical, but a landscape of the interior. Heti has called “a delicious, important moral corrective of a novel.” As in Heti’s work, here the material reality of Alma’s life