Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

THE SHAME

Makenna Goodman

What if you could change your life? Would you do it? How would you do it?

Alma and her family live close to the land: they raise chickens and sheep, they make maple syrup. Every day Alma's husband leaves for his job at a nearby college while she stays home with their young children, cleans, searches for secondhand goods online, and reads books by the women writers she adores. Then, one night, she abruptly leaves it all behind--speeding through the darkness, away from their Vermont homestead, bound for New York.

In a series of flashbacks, Alma reveals the circumstances and choices that led to this moment. The joys and claustrophobia of their remote life through the passing of each season. Her fears and uncertainties about motherhood. The painfully awkward faculty dinners. Her feelings of isolation and failure. And her growing fascination with Celeste: the mysterious ceramicist and self-loving doppelgaenger whose internet personality begins as inspiration for Alma before turning into a powerful obsession.

Bold, moving, and darkly funny, The Shame is an ambitious debut about technology, capitalism, motherhood, and the search for meaningful art--a haunting bedtime story and blistering road novel for our times.

Makenna Goodman is the author of The Shame: A Novel. She is a freelance editor of fiction and nonfiction, who has developed award-winning and best-selling books on food, agriculture, health, and the environment. She lives in Vermont.

Available products
Book Published 2020-08-01 by Milkweed

Comments

A haunting, unsettling story of motherhood, marriage, capitalism, making a life (and a living), and the nature of relationships.

The Shame is startlingly original . . . Part of its pleasure is in the constructionthe recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make . . . More importantly, this is a The Shame by Makenna Goodman Publication date: AUGUST 11, 2020 Fiction 216 pages $15 Paperback 5.5 x 8.5 ISBN: 978-1-57131-136-8 Distributed by Publishers Group West Publicity Contact: Claire Laine claire_laine@milkweed.org 612-332-3192 Milkweed Editions 1011 Washington Avenue S Minneapolis, MN 55415 milkweed.org novel about how you can feel driven to take risks that don't matter in order to avoid taking the risks that do matter.

The Shame allowed me to forget my life, forget my name, and when I looked up, and was in my life again, I looked at it through a refreshed, deeper, and more creative, more imaginative lens.

A slender, one-long-afternoon-at-the-shore read."

How to endure, how to escape, how to allow for a separate life within the mess of living the one you are in. These are the questions that make this not just a book about motherhood, but of relationships to people, the earth and the stranglehold of capitalism . . . A book for any woman that has ever felt captive in any aspect of life.

A novel that felt like a distant relative of the all-time great novel Revolutionary Road: The Shame is just as exacting and defiant, and at times, as existentially gutting. I loved it.

"[A] probing debut . . . Goodman credibly describes the weight of motherhood as a backpack full of stones.' Those who feel like they're losing themselves in the daily grind will appreciate Alma's escape fantasy."

"[A] swift and sensual debut . . . Goodman's sentences pulse, they are alive, with the mess and ambivalence and artistic ambition and desire for more that saturates Alma's mind as it asks, with fear: Is this all? Is this enough?"

A stay-at-home mother pulls up stakes and leaves her family in the middle of the night in this gripping, brief novel. Has Alma simply tired of the homesteading life, or is there something more to her decision to run? The Shame traces through this mystery with poise, leaving readers raw, nonetheless.

Goodman devastatingly charts Alma's anxieties about being a good-enough mother, a good-enough spouse to take to cocktails and dinner with colleagues, a good-enough advocate of all the trendy issues . . . The tension builds, pushing Alma to plan her escape, but her journey forces her to face reality outside the filters afforded by social media. An intimate, compelling portrait of a woman under psychological tension.

Alma's reckless fantasy, of complete domestic abandonment, speaks volumes about the emotional and physical labor of homestead motherhood. Goodman's debut, an engrossing page-turner, is equal parts psychological case study and searing commentary of parenting and capitalism.