Episode 13: Allegra Goodman
On Making the Exotic Familiar, and Finding the Modern in Ancient Words
Tova Mirvis’ Five Books:
Rifka Bangs the Teakettle by Chaya M. Burstein
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
1984 by George Orwell
Homer’s Odyssey, in the Lattimore translation
Isola by Allegra Goodman
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
Isola is inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, and is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.
Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes an unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island.
Allegra Goodman’s books include Sam, The Family Markowitz, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.
Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In our conversation Allegra will tell us about what it was like growing up in a traditional Jewish household in Honolulu. We’ll hear about her fascination with shtetl life and how her novel Kaaterskill Falls, about an orthodox community in upstate New York, was inspired by George Eliot. And she’ll tell us about the secret Jewish character in her new book, Isola.
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The Five Books: Allegra Goodman On Making the Exotic Familiar, and Finding the Modern in Ancient Words
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to the Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Every week I ask Jewish authors about five books in five categories. We'll hear about two Jewish books that have impacted the author's Jewish identity. We'll hear about one book, not necessarily Jewish, that they think everyone should read, a book that changed their worldview. We'll get a peek into what book the author is reading now, and we'll get to hear about the new book they've just published and how it came about.Today we'll be talking with Allegra Goodman about her new novel, Isola, which was also a Reese's Book Club pick. This is the story of Marguerite. Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned and her guardian, an enigmatic and volatile man, spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France.
That journey takes an unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island. Inspired by the real-life story of a 16th century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival. Allegra Goodman's books include Sam, which was a Jenna's Book Club selection, The Family Markowitz, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls, a National Book Award finalist.
Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in the O'Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and the Salon Award for Fiction and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Allegra will tell us about her childhood in Hawaii and what it was like keeping kosher on the island.
Allegra Goodman:
There was no kosher butcher. So we ordered our kosher meat from California and we would get a quarter of a steer at a time frozen, delivered by ship.We also discuss what it means for children's books to tell captivating tales about shtetl life.
Some of these children's books are criticized for being romantic. But there's also the other problem, which is that you can write about life in the old country as an unmitigated tale of woe. That's a way of romanticizing as well, right? To talk only about peril and struggle and tragedy.
And Allegra will share the inspiration she found in Daniel Deronda by George Eliot.
What I found really attractive then, and I still do, is this idea of sort of coming into your own and being not apologetic about your identity. I think that's an extraordinary thing about Daniel. When he realizes that he's Jewish, he embraces it.
That's all coming up next.
Welcome to The Five Books, Allegra. I'm really happy to speak to you. I'm excited to talk about Isola. I loved this book. It captured me from the first page. I was totally, totally drawn into this whole world and I love historical fiction, so this was a lot of fun.
Oh, thank you!
I just love the origins of how you got to this story. So I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about that.
Okay! So yeah, this is my first work of historical fiction, really historical, from a long time ago. So my family and I were traveling. We took a road trip up from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we live, up to Montreal. It took us a couple weeks and our children at the time, we have four children, and at the time they were, the boys were ten, seven, and three years old, and our daughter was zero. She was a newborn. She was about six weeks old.
And I'm still not sure why I agreed to go on this trip with a newborn, but we all went. And then I had aspirationally taken out from my public library, a whole stack of books about Canadian history for children, which I thought that I would share with the boys as we were traveling. And surprise, surprise, they were not interested in reading these books, but I read all of them because I was up all night nursing the baby.
So one night in a hotel room, I stumbled across this passage in a book for children about Jacques Cartier and his explorations of New France, as they called it, which is of course Canada. And he did three voyages out to Canada, and the third one was in 1541, maybe. And then in 1542, a ship followed him and this ship was full of colonists and it was commanded by a nobleman named Roberval.
And these colonists were supposed to spread Catholicism throughout the land. And the author of this book said, you know, had a parentheses in the middle of this discussion of the ship of colonists. And he said, on the ship, Roberval had a young kinswoman of his who annoyed him. I'm paraphrasing. And he set her down and marooned her on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and left her there, you know, sort of closed parentheses.
And I was really, really struck by this. And I thought, my God, how are they related? Why was she on the ship? And who was this woman? And if she was set down on this deserted island in the sub-Arctic climate, how did she survive, if she survived? And I thought at the time, oh, this would be a great subject for a novel. But then I thought quickly, oh, I don't write historical novels. This idea stresses me out. I'd have to do a lot of research. I'd have to figure out what she ate and what she wore and how the ship sailed and all of those things, and this is daunting, you know. But I never forgot this little gem of history that was cloistered in these parentheses inside of this larger narrative about Cartier. And over the years, I read what I could about Marguerite. And eventually, almost 20 years later, I started writing the story.
I kind of feel like maybe Marguerite found you.
Yes.
Book One: a Jewish Book from Childhood — Rivka Bangs the Tea Kettle by Chaya Burstein.
So this is a children's book. It must be for very young children. I mean, I must have been about seven or eight when I read this book. And it's about a little girl named Rivka who is sort of living in the shtetl, you know, in the old country, and her adventures. And I believe that the reason she bangs the tea kettle is to warn everybody that the Cossacks are coming or something like that. And it's a children's book that romanticizes to a certain extent, you know, what life was like. And there's a lot of joy in it. It's not just about being oppressed and being killed, although there's danger always lurking. Rivka is a spunky child.
And this is probably the first kind of Jewish fiction that I remember reading. And I was living in Honolulu at the time, and we had, in the Reform Temple, which was the only synagogue there, there was a library with a surprisingly good collection of children's books with Jewish themes and Jewish people. And I remember this book as one of the books in that library that I read and it making a big impression on me. And at the time I was sort of reading Little House in the Big Woods. It's about at that level of reading. But I was captivated by reading the story of a Jewish child, not in the big woods, but in a hostile territory with lots of trees and poverty and all of these forces around her and trying to make her way.
Yeah, so I know you — you grew up in Hawaii and you spent summers — some summers at least, right, in Tannersville.
Yes, yes.
What was your Jewish life like as a kid?
In Hawaii, there were not a lot of Jewish people in Hawaii when I was growing up. There was no Chabad there at the time, there is now. But it was a place I would say without a critical mass of Jewish people and without a lot of Jewish institutions. This reform temple was one of the few. So we didn't have a JCC, we didn't have Jewish day schools. There was no kosher butcher on our island. So my mother, we did keep kosher as a family, so we ordered our kosher meat from California and we would get like a quarter of a steer at a time frozen, delivered by ship. So my mother would take our station wagon down to the dock, pick up the meat and we had like a chest freezer in our garage. So it was a different life from say being a Jewish person growing up in New Jersey, you know?
However, we did spend summers in Tannersville, which was a small town in the Catskills which a lot of observant Jewish people went to in the summertime, because my grandparents had a house there. And we also spent time in Los Angeles where my other grandparents lived. And so I had a sense of, you know, the larger Jewish world, but a lot of it was for me with books. And so Rivka Bangs the Tea Kettle was a book that I certainly wouldn't have found in my local public library or in my school, which was, I went to a wonderful school called Punahou, which was founded by Congregationalist missionaries and was certainly not a Jewish school.
Yeah, and how did your family end up in Hawaii?
Both of my parents worked at the University of Hawaii. My father is a philosopher who's now teaching at Vanderbilt, but he taught there and my mother was a biologist and the director of the Women's Studies program and then later went into the administration of the university and became the vice president of academic affairs. So they were very much involved in the university and lived there for 25 years.
That's great. And so your Jewish education, I'm assuming it obviously wasn't a formal Jewish education, but where did that come from?
It was not a formal Jewish education, really. A little bit of Sunday school, but mostly really from home. And my parents founded a minyan in Honolulu when they moved there and we went to services every week, but I didn't have, really, a formal Jewish education or formal Hebrew instruction or any of that stuff.
It's interesting, this book, because there was a book I loved as a child that it sounded a lot like, which was called Sarah Somebody, also set in turn of the century Russia, a little girl who wants to go to school like her brothers. It felt like a similar vibe, and I was captivated by the romanticism of shtetl life. Yeah. It sounds like you were as well. And I know for some people that's like, you know, a huge turnoff and they don't want to see anything, but it captivated me. And I'm wondering if you felt that way as well.
Yeah, mean, you know, we’re talking about like an eight year old. You like what you like when you're eight. I also loved The Wizard of Oz. And to your point, also, the Little House books, which I was obsessed with as a child and later did a lot of reading about the Ingalls Wilder families. And those were very much romanticized. So, you know, the thing that captivated me and I think the thing that is important is seeing somebody who was also Jewish, who was the hero of the story. And I think that was the important part.
And she was getting into everyday kind of scrapes or was it about her Jewish identity?
It was mostly everyday kind of scrapes, but there was a sense of the larger history and I think at the end some of them go to America. Maybe even she goes to America. There is this sort of sense that they have to go to America. I would also add to that when you know, it is true and rightly so that some of these children's books are criticized for being romantic, you know, romanticizing a life of poverty and life of struggle and you — these people were oppressed. But there's also the other problem, which is that you can write about life in the old country as an unmitigated tale of woe, which is problematic as well. And forget that they had a culture, they had a life, they had their own family, their joys and their sorrows. And there was like an everyday life that they were maintaining as well. That's a way of romanticizing as well, right? To talk only about peril and struggle and tragedy. Let's just say neither is realistic.
Absolutely. And tell me just about you as a kid. Did you always know you wanted to write as a small child? Were you writing at that time?
Yes, I wanted to be a writer since I was seven years old and really since I could read independently. I wanted to be a writer. So I was writing. I was trying to write poems and stories and I was quite an ambitious little kid.
And were you writing Jewish characters as a little kid?
Oh, good question. Not so much at that point. It was, but I quickly started writing about Jewish characters. I would say by the time I was a teenager, like a young teenager, I was writing about Jewish people. And my earliest stories were about Jewish people in Hawaii. Starting with my first story, my first sort of serious story, I was about 17 and it was about a Yom Kippur service in Honolulu, on a lanai. And I was just really interested in those paradoxes and those cultural juxtapositions. The tropical setting, the traditional liturgy, the pair of rabbis who were sent out from New York to lead the service, who were these black hat rabbis, which the people in my story call the baby rabbis because they're about 20 years old, 21 years old. I was, I already saw that as a rich subject when I was about 17.
And did you see that as a rich subject from other books you were reading or just that was what you were drawn to?
That's a good question. No, I didn't see anything like that in the books that I was reading. I will say that my parents and my dad in particular sort of introduced me to people like Sholem Aleichem and his stories. And I was really interested in his kind of bittersweet sense of humor. I described it. I wrote a book report about him actually when I was a little girl. And I described it as laughing through tears. And I was interested in that sensibility, and I think that very much inspired me. But none of the Jewish fiction that I read really had a lot of resonance with the Judaism that I was experiencing in Hawaii.
No, I remember reading something you wrote, or maybe it was your grandmother who said about your writing that it was diaspora without tears.
Yeah, my grandmother, my grandmother Florence said that, yeah.
Yeah, so I like that your initial book report even back then was, you know.
Laughter through tears.
Laughter through tears.
Book Two: a Jewish Book from Adulthood — Daniel Deronda by George Eliot.
So Daniel Deronda is a 19th century novel by George Eliot. And I discovered that book when I was, I think I was 18. I must've been a senior in high school. I had read Middlemarch and I was, at the time, and I really still am obsessed with 19th century novels. And as a child, I was really into Charles Dickens and George Eliot and Jane Austen. I read all of them. And I was really, I was… Well, first of all, I was amazed by Middlemarch. That is an incredible novel, as everyone knows. But then to discover that this incredible novelist who's just really a genius then chose a Jewish theme to write about and wrote about a young gentleman in England who discovers as an adult that he is Jewish and hadn't realized it before and what all of that means.
And it's a novel about Jewish identity and self-discovery, but it's also about antisemitism. And in this novel, I'm not the first to say this, but she kind of, before the formal invention of Zionism, kind of imagines Zionism and imagines a Jewish state, which Daniel, in the end of this book, you know, sails off to help found.
And I was moved by this in many ways. First of all, because I admire George Eliot so much. Second of all, because the novel's merits on its own, it's an extraordinary piece of work. But third of all, and this might surprise you, what really moved me was that as a writer, she chose to write about somebody and some people who were so different from herself, that she did all this research to write about Judaism and the Jewish community. She went to synagogue, she — she took lessons and tried to understand a little bit of Hebrew and Hebrew text. And this is the woman who was English, she was brought up in the Anglican church and then had broken away from it but I was just so impressed by her curiosity as a writer. And as a Jewish writer myself, I thought: if George Eliot, the English writer, can write about people so different from her and — and ideas and cultures so different from her and do all this research, why can't I do that as well? So it was also liberating for me to read this novel in that respect.
That's so interesting. And also, you know, she did all this research and that book is credited with having such a huge influence on British Jewry, on Zionism, Balfour Declaration. I mean, the repercussions that are attributed to it are pretty huge.
Absolutely.
Were you aware of that at the time?
When I read it, when I was 18, no, no, no, no. But it was startlingly original and I knew that she wasn't a Jewish person. And I was really impressed by the way she described Shabbat and the way she described the synagogue and the Jewish community. She can get a little romantic sometimes in her descriptions, but I just thought the level of detail, the way she went in there, this is a person who, when she wrote Middlemarch, she knew those people. She came from a town like that. She knew those clergymen and that kind of hypocrisy and the kind of politics that went on. She had their voices in her head. And then to go out of her comfort zone and do something so different, so bold and original really inspired me.
One of the things that people talk about in her depiction of Jewish people is, you know, they're fully fleshed out characters and they're humanized and that that gave British people a different idea of Jews that sort of enabled them to welcome this huge mass influx of immigrants that came in. And I was curious, I read the review of Kaaterskill Falls that came out in the New York Times, Daphne Merkin, who I believe also grew up in an observant home — she said about you and about Kaaterskill Falls, “Meanwhile, she has gone and written a novel with religion as its subject, and that in itself is noteworthy. The ingrown and judgmental Kirshners fill the pages of ''Kaaterskill Falls'' and we come away with the exotic atmosphere of their narrow world.” I just thought it was so interesting, the use of that “exotic” in writing about religious people and religion and then in relation to Daniel Deronda, just wondered what you thought of that.
Well, I think that for George Eliot, it really was different for her that — and she understood when she was writing this that the people who were reading her work would find these people strange and maybe they would shy away from these kinds of people. For them, it would be exotic. When I wrote Kaaterskill Falls, the people that I described were not exotic to me at all because I had spent so much time in Tannersville as you mentioned earlier and going to the synagogue there and playing with the children there as a little girl, I was really a participant observer in a way that George Eliot couldn't be as an English gentlewoman. So I, that wasn't a stretch for me. And people have said to me, oh, “what kind of research did you do to write Kaaterskill Falls?” And I didn't do any research in terms of books, really. I, I was, the research was all in my imagination and remembering the people that I knew there, but that book is very much inspired by George Eliot in the sense that it's a book about an entire community and the politics of that community, not just as an individual. And I, you know, at 21 when I started writing that book was thinking, I really wanted to write, you know, my Jewish Middlemarch. To be heuristic about it.
And you did! Yeah, for sure. And I guess I also just wonder, I mean obviously you didn't see them as exotic, but in the reception of Kaaterskill Falls, was that surprising to you that it was considered exotic?
No, not — it wasn't that surprising of me — to me because I had already written all these stories that were set in the Jewish community in Hawaii, which really was also perhaps even more strange to people. And my decision that I made as a very young writer really early on was to not cater to that, not to translate every single word and give the reader that really intimate feeling as if they themselves are standing there with these people talking to them. Because I think the reader doesn't get enough credit and they can understand quite a bit and they enjoy being immersed in different worlds. You know I think one of the things a novel can do is make the so-called exotic familiar, make it real.
And what is it about it that impacted your own Jewish identity?
What I found really attractive then, and I still do, is this idea of sort of coming into your own and being not apologetic about your identity. I think that's an extraordinary thing about Daniel. When he realizes that he's Jewish, he embraces it. There are many ways he could have responded. He could have been ashamed. He could have hidden it. He could have decided to take that part and put it away. He was all set up to still be a gentleman in England and that society and make it work. But he takes it upon him to really be a Jew and to be a leader. And that's an extraordinary thing for somebody to do. So I guess I admired his courage and his unapologetic stance toward Judaism. I think as a Jewish person, I find that inspiring.
Book Three: A Book That Changed Your Worldview — 1984 by George Orwell.
I suspect a lot of people have read that book and it may have changed a lot of people's worlds, but I guess I read that as a young teenager as well. And I've read it, I've reread it many times since then. And I think 1984 is such an important book in the way that it talks about politics, in the way that it talks about how people manipulate each other, how we use language to manipulate each other. He's just brilliant in that respect. It's a totally unromantic, unvarnished look at what people do to each other when they have a so-called revolution or when they try to remake the state. And I've always been really interested in self-deception and manipulation and personal and national politics. And he captures so beautifully how bad things can get. It's also got this dark humor in it. It's just devastating to read.
And I think it's just as fresh now as when he wrote it. I think it speaks to our time. And that's why I consider it a great work of art. It's not just of its time, but it just speaks to us as well, so clearly.
Yeah, one of the things I think is a little scary right now is we're so polarized and it seems like both sides can read Orwell, you know, in maybe opposite ways. Is there a way that you think it speaks to a particular part of what's going on right now, I guess?
I think you put it really well, just looking at if people can use Orwell for their own devices or take that book and manipulate it and use it for their own political gain. That's such an Orwellian thing to do. That's exactly what he's talking about in the book, you know. How slippery truth becomes and how people rewrite history. And what was true yesterday is now false. What was false is now true. Again, the way he interrogates language and storytelling and shows sort of the dark side of that is just such an important thing to think about. And I think the only answer is really think about it critically as he gets the reader to do.
Do you think books can change people's minds or do you think people find in the books what they already believe?
I think both things can happen. A book can change somebody's mind if they're open to having their mind changed. You know, a lot depends on the reader. It takes an open-hearted and open-minded reader to really delve in and change their mind with a book.
Are you a writer who, I mean, this is an interesting choice. I haven't seen any of your writing really feeling very polemical in any way. Is that something you're interested in or is it just, you know, something that you appreciate in other writers?
No, I'm really interested in it. And I think it is there in my writing. Maybe it's not all in the writing that you've read. I actually wrote a dystopian story for younger readers called The Other Side of the Island, which is very much influenced by these ideas.
I have not read it.
You may see me doing more of it as time goes on.
Book Four: The book you're reading now — Homer's Odyssey in the Latimore translation.
I've been reading the Odyssey. I read the Iliad in the Latimore translation and then I moved on to the Odyssey. And I read a little bit every single morning, first thing, and I’m trying to read it slowly. And it's been many years since I've read these epic poems. And I'm just seeing new things in them all the time and just incredible imagery, incredible meditations on war and on peace and on the question whether we can control our fate or whether our fate is controlled by the gods or by destiny. And I'm just fascinated by it. And again, sort of like 1984, these poems are so fresh and they're so new, even though they're ancient, you know, they don't seem ancient to me when I'm reading them.
I think I was drawn to it partly because I had written about people living a long time ago, and I’m really fascinated by reading ancient work which seems so new. Because of course people who lived a long time ago didn’t think of themselves as ancient, they were modern, you know, and everything they did was the first time. So I think that’s important, if you’re writing any kind of historical fiction, to remember.
Book 5: The Author's Latest Book, Allegra Goodman's Isola.
So as I mentioned, I discovered this true story of a woman who was marooned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1542. And we know this happened and we know that she lived on that island for about two years. The question is sort of how she survived. And she was relatively famous in her own lifetime as a survivor. And there were two contemporary accounts of her ordeal. One by the Queen of Navarre, Marguerite of Navarre, who wrote a collection of stories which were published after her death in a book called the Heptameron, which she modeled on the Decameron, which is, you know, the concept is these noble people get together and they exchange stories and then they discuss the stories. And she said that all the stories in her book were true. And I think the 69th story in her collection is the story of Marguerite when she has her version of it. But her version is only about two pages long. It's very short.
And then there was a priest who claimed to have interviewed Marguerite about her ordeal. And he also has a brief account of her life on the island. And it conflicts with the Queen's account in some details. And it's also very brief, it's only a couple pages. So as a novelist, I had a lot of space to imagine what would have happened to her and to think about that. And so I looked at these and I read as much as I could about her world. And then I, I wrote my own, I would describe it as really a female Robinson Crusoe story.
I was wondering, she's marooned on an island and spends part of that time alone. I was wondering when you wrote it in relation to COVID and if some of those isolation feelings were a part of it.
Oh, yeah. Well, so it had been germinating for a really long time. And I think I really got going on it during COVID. I was also writing Sam at the time, my most recent novel, which is about a young girl in the 21st century who's growing up in Beverly, Massachusetts. And she's a boulderer, she's a climber. And while I was writing Sam, I started experimenting with writing Isola. And I think in part, I was inspired by Sam because she was this climber and I was writing about her trying to get up the sides of these boulders up these rock faces. And it was just thinking about her as a climber and a striver and a survivor that really sort of took me back to Marguerite and made me think about what she was going through. And so in the mornings, this was during lockdown, in the mornings I was writing Sam and in the afternoons I was experimenting, trying to start writing Isola. And once I actually got going on the historical novel, I was writing the two at the same time. So contemporary book and then sort of time traveling in the afternoons and back to the 16th century and writing about Marguerite.
That is wild, I mean, the voice in Sam is so, you-you start off with like this young voice, the perspective really of a child. It's such a wildly different tone. I'm fascinated that you could do that at the same time. It's remarkable.
They're very, very different voices, different people, different worlds.
Yeah.
What I think I did that — was that I was nervous about starting this book. As I said, I've never written a historical novel. And so I just chose not to tell anyone I was writing it. And so I just kept it a secret. I had a contract for Sam. You know, I was, I knew Sam was going to be a book by that time, but this book, I didn't know if it was gonna turn into anything. So I didn't tell my agent about it. And I didn't tell my friends about it. And I didn't tell my family about it, I didn't tell my husband about it. I really didn't tell anyone about it for about 18 months until I finished the first draft. So it was just me and Marguerite on that island. And I came to really enjoy working on a book in secret while I — it was like my stealth project while I was working on my more public project.
Amazing. So Marguerite has a guardian. Hopefully it's not saying too much to say that he squanders her fortune. There's a lot of injustice in how he relates to her. I found it so interesting. I guess I'm curious how you approached that as a modern woman. You know, she seems to both accept her situation and chafe against it at the same time.
Yeah. I felt like as a modern woman writing about this, you know, I felt so frustrated and sad for her and also grateful that we have some laws and protections, at least in this country. You know, this was a period where women were really chattel. You were either somebody's wife or somebody's daughter. And if the person you were attached to was not a good person, the situation was set up for abuse. So that part was eye-opening and scary to write about. But also, in addition to that, there was a lot of his behavior toward her, her so-called guardian's behavior, which seemed familiar to me. He's mansplaining to her all the time. He's teaching her things. He is psychologically abusive. He's scary. He mocks her. He belittles her. That kind of behavior is still happening, still happens even if people have legal protections. So I was exploring a lot of different kinds of misogyny.
Yeah. And it felt both authentic to the character and, you know, there was a lot, I think, that the reader could read into it beyond what the character was expressing, which I appreciated. This obviously is not a Jewish book, but this is a book very much about faith and about God and a lot of the relationship between Roberval and Marguerite is around Psalms. So I wanted to ask you about that, what that aspect was like for you stepping into it and also about Psalms in particular.
Yeah, I think that this book is very much — so Marguerite is tested physically when she's on this island because she very well could freeze or starve. And she's tested emotionally because she's alone for the first time in her life at some point. But she's also tested spiritually. And I was interested in this book as a spiritual journey of this person who grew up in this religious framework. And one of the details that is included in the Queen of Navarre's account of her marooning is that she had with her the New Testament. And the queen says that, you know, although she was emaciated in her body, like her spirit just grew stronger as she was alone. And she would just recite, you know, verses, and from scripture and this strengthened her will and that kind of thing.
And I thought that might've been a little romantic, but I wanted to write about somebody really going through it spiritually. She's, you know, she's in a situation where she feels that God has forgotten her and she doesn't have the kind of faith that her servant Damien has. In my version of her story, she has with her a book of Psalms, which were translated by Clement Marot, the poet, who was a courtier poet. And her guardian, who is religious as well as mercenary, had taken upon it to give her spiritual instruction and always almost punished her with making her recite for him and teaching her punishing aspects of the Psalms and using them almost like a sword against her. But her relationship to that language and those verses changes when she's alone. And I was really interested in that transformation.
As you say, you know, obviously Marguerite is not a Jewish person. She's a Catholic young noblewoman. And there are no Jewish people in this book, but there is a Jewish character, which is that book of the Psalms, which she carries with her. And that's the Jewish aspect of the book. And of course she reads it as a Christian, but truth is, we share a lot of scripture. And I was interested in how she might look at those Psalms differently, especially the ones that involve nature and the natural world and God acting through nature. And that's something that she sort of comes to as she interprets and reinterprets them during her ordeal.
Is Psalms something that you have a personal connection to?
Well, I've always been really— I'm interested in them. Yes. Yes, I like the language and I like the imagery and it's incredible poetry. And this is a period in the 16th century when people were getting interested in translating them into the vernacular. So the big deal about these Psalms that she has is they're in French. They're not in Latin. She can read and memorize and understand them in her own language, in her own way. And I guess as a writer, I'm really interested in the way that language and imagery and poetry can last and endure and also mean different things to different people.
Yeah. And I think what you added into the story that isn't in the accounts that you, you know, provide to the reader at the end is the element of doubt. You know, and it's something she says she appreciates so much about Auguste — Is that how you, I don't know how you pronounce it—
Auguste.
She appreciates about Auguste is that, you know, he believes, but he also has doubts and, she worries about her doubt when she's, you know, presenting her account to the queen and everything, and I'm, I'm just interested in how or why you wanted to present a picture of belief with doubt.
I think to me, it was just that she, it made her, because I thought of her as a real person. I didn't think of her as a saint in any way, or you know, the Queen's account is a moralistic account. And she is a person who has a spiritual life, but is also, can be petty, can be angry, can, you know, can have all of these different feelings and…
Because Claire, guess, is what I was going to say, is presented as — her friend is presented a little bit as the opposite, as someone who's good and true all the way through.
She seems to be, of course she's not been tested like Marguerite has, and you know, Marguerite is remade in this experience. That was the fun part for me is just writing about somebody who's so seriously transformed that when she emerges she's sort of broken and she's also remade.
One part of that transformation that really stuck with me, I guess while she's still on the island and she's talking to Damien, her nurse, and she says something about how now she's like a man, you know, that she's doing what she wants and that's, I'm just going to find it. She tells her, ‘“I'm not wiser, but I am beginning to be brave. I understand what it is to be a man.” “God forbid,” said Damien, but I said “to be a man is to have your way.” “And is that good,” she said, “and is it right?” “It is satisfying,” I told her.’ I thought that was such an interesting transformation. Is that, yeah, wondering more about that?
Well, I was just really interested. This is a person who is very privileged in her old life in France. She's probably never dressed herself, you know, and let alone had to use a knife, had to clean a fish, had to go hunting to do the kinds of things she needs to do to survive. And so on the one hand, it's an ordeal for her, but on the other hand, it's also liberating. And I was interested in exploring those different kinds of freedom and confinement that you might find. She wasn't free when she was privileged in her old life. And here she's in danger, but she has a certain kind of freedom that she will never have at home. And it is like being a man because she can decide how she's going to spend her day. She can go exactly where she wants to go and do what she wants to do without being observed.
Yeah. And then she kills a bear, if we're allowed to say that without spoiling anything for anyone. I was very curious how, I mean, the amount of research that went into this, I'm sure was pretty remarkable, but I was curious about the level of technical detail that you had to get to to understand what it would be like to skin the bear.
It's funny, Emma Donoghue, the historical novelist, we did an email exchange, which I think is going to come out in Lit Hub. And we talked about research and she said she looked at YouTube videos a lot of times to look at different processes. And I do the same. So I looked at people skinning bears and watched them. I also looked at videos of people loading muskets and thought about how she would have fired her musket and reloaded it, which is a long, laborious and dirty and dangerous operation. So I thought a lot about that kind of thing. I also was always looking at the island through her eyes. She really believes that she will never return. Nobody from her whole world has ever been out here. This is a hundred years before the Pilgrims, you know, almost a hundred years. And the Pilgrims knew that there would be, like, another ship coming with more supplies and that kind of, like there was no promise of any of that. So the isolation, the strangeness, were all really interesting to write.
Yeah, and even the strangeness for the inhabitants of the island, meaning, you know, you write about the birds that they didn't know to be scared of the sound of a gunshot. It’s totally foreign.
That's right, the animals themselves are people. Exactly, exactly.
Right, yeah. Okay, well I'm curious what you're working on next. Is that something you can share with us?
Well actually, so my next book, which was also kind of interweaved with these two books, but it's something I've been working on for a while. And it's actually about a Jewish American family called the Rubensteins and it's three generations in this family and they live in the 21st century. I think it starts about 2015 and ends in about 2017 maybe or 2018. So it's very contemporary and it's these three generations and it's the grandparents generation, and then their grown children who are sort of middle-aged, and then their young adult, the young adult grandchildren. So it's these three. And it looks at this family from all different perspectives. And there are — five pieces of this book have been published in the New Yorker. So if anyone has seen some of my stories, “Ambrose” or “The Last Grown-Up” or “Apple Cake,” those are the people in this book. And this book fully explores their lives. So it's very different from Isola, but I'm very excited about it.
That's wonderful. I can't wait to read it. When is that coming out?
Actually it's coming out I believe in 2026 so just next year.
Terrific. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I've been a fan of your books for a really long time, and I'm just delighted to have the opportunity to speak to you. So thank you.
Oh, this was really fun. Thank you for all the things you picked up on. It was, definitely haven't heard that kind of question. Nobody's asked me about the Psalms in the book except for you, Tali. And I appreciate that because it's really the heart of the book.
It felt like it.
That's really the heart of the book. It's not the killing of the bear or the fact that she's marooned, you know.
Yeah, I mean, it felt like this this thread all the way through from, you know —
Totally, you know, and that is, that is actually what makes it the Jewish book.
Yeah, I love that.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. This has been the first episode of our brand new season two. Our guest today was Allegra Goodman discussing her new novel, Isola. You can find a link to the book and all the others Allegra discussed in our show notes. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with your friends and family and rate and review in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.
Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can also send us feedback or author recommendations at team@fivebookspod.org F-I-V-E and you can find us on Instagram at @fivebookspod. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Music by Dove Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dina Friedman.
Thank you especially to the Jewish Book Council, Lauren Wein and Julie Bearer.
