PBS Books Readers Club welcomes New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman of Sam and Isola to discuss her brand-new novel This Is Not About Us. The episode premieres on May 27th at 8PM ET as a PBS Books Facebook Live event, on the PBS Books YouTube channel, pbsbooks.org, and the PBS app.
This is Not About Us opens as the youngest of the three Rubenstein sisters passes away, and a petty dispute at her funeral over an apple cake splits the remaining sisters apart. What follows is a family saga spanning three generations, unfolding life into vignettes that drop in on long marriages and divorces, teenage milestones and middle-age reckonings. Each chapter adds another layer to a family portrait that’s complicated, constantly shifting, and never quite complete.
Witty, wise, and emotional, this novel moves through the messy, tender rhythms of a modern Jewish American family, including sisters who irritate and sustain each other, parents who mean well but fall short, and children who grow up and away. Goodman writes with clear-eyed warmth about the bonds we fracture and the ones we can’t quite let go, finding humor and heartbreak in equal measure.
Allegra reflects, “Showing these different perspectives— being an 11-year-old girl, and being a woman in her 70s who’s dying of cancer, and being the aggravated middle-aged sons who are trying to figure out how to celebrate her life when she doesn’t want to be celebrated in the way that they do – That’s really my art and that’s my job… to get inside of people.”
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