Allegra Goodman’s new novel is the frank, funny tale of a modern American family.

On this episode of Fully Booked, Allegra Goodman joins us to discuss This Is Not About Us (Dial Press, Feb. 10). Hot off the success of her 16th-century historical fiction Isola (a 2025 Kirkus Prize finalist), Goodman presents a contemporary novel about three generations of an unforgettable American family: the Rubinsteins. “Like an exquisitely baked apple cake,” Kirkus writes in a starred review, “Goodman’s delicious and deeply perceptive novel is something to savor.”

Goodmanis the author of the novels The Chalk Artist, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls(a 1998 National Book Award finalist); two collections of short stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion; and a novel for young readers, The Other Side of the Island. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Here’s a bit more from our starred review of This Is Not About Us: “Goodman trains her gimlet eye on the complicated relationships among the members of the fictional Rubinstein family—and finds both humor and pathos in a modern Jewish American clan. In the first chapter, three generations congregate around the deathbed of Jeanne, who at age 74 is the youngest of the three Rubinstein sisters and yet, if she’ll ever release her iron grip on life, will be the first to die.…[I]t’s just the beginning of a novel that chronicles marriages and divorces, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals, holidays and funerals, and finds within milestone events and quotidian moments the meaning—and madness—of family. As Goodman recounts the Rubinsteins’ sibling conflicts, grievances, and grudges, their parenting triumphs and failures, and the many ways they all love and infuriate, push away and yet crave to connect with one another, she holds up a mirror to us all.”

Goodman and I discuss why she calls This Is Not About Us a “serial novel,” the art of shifting tenses between chapters, why she chose family as her primary subject, the relative merits of apple cake and chocolate babka, how to write more than one book at a time, and much more.

Then editors Laura Simeon, Mahnaz Dar, John McMurtrie, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

16 Forever by Lance Rubin (Harper/HarperCollins)

Angry Girls Will Get Us Through by Rebecca Traister, adapted by Ruby Shamir (Simon & Schuster)

Hannibal Lecter: A Life by Brian Raftery (Simon & Schuster)

How To Kill a Guy in Ten Dates by Shailee Thompson (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Born Sick in the USA by Stephen Bezruchka (Cambridge Univ. Press)

Digital Inc. by Richard Curtis

Pivot Point by Tess Manchester

We Met at a Halloween Party by Marcus R. Ferrell

Choose To Believe by Georgina Owino, illus. by Eduardo Paj

The Mullet Man by R.W. Fields, illus. by Johan Bjurman

Fully Booked is produced by Jessica Lockhart and Megan Labrise.