Allegra Goodman doesn’t like autofiction. “Other people do it well, but to me the fun part is the change, the displacement, the dream of fiction,” the novelist says via Zoom from her home in Cambridge, Mass. She would never name a character after herself, she notes. But that doesn’t mean she’s not pulling extensively from her own life.

The very title of Goodman’s new story collection toys cheekily with this tension. This Is Not About Us, out in February from Dial Press, collects 17 interconnected stories about the Rubinstein family, a sprawling East Coast Jewish clan marred by mundane forces like divorce, resentment, and stalled professional ambitions. “This is closest I’ll ever come to a serial novel,” Goodman says.

The book grew out of the short story “Apple Cake,” which Goodman published in the New Yorker more than a decade ago. That brief, death-dipped tale details the final days of 74-year-old music teacher Jeanne Rubinstein and the feud that ignites between her surviving sisters, Sylvia and Helen, over a dessert served at her truncated shiva. For 300 pages of This Is Not About Us, the sisters’ plainly ridiculous dispute persists, seeping into the lives of every member of their extended family, even as its origins grow fuzzier with time.

“The older people get, the more stubborn they become,” Goodman says of the rift that binds her book together, grinning from behind a pair of round glasses. It’s the kind of simple-but-profound observation that could only come from someone who’s lived a lot of life. One of the great pleasures of This Is Not About Us is the way it brims with such quiet insight, collected and digested by a writer who’s spent her 59 years on Earth closely considering the people around her.

Case in point, when Goodman was conceiving her 2023 novel Sam—an intensely subjective coming-of-age story about an adolescent girl—she returned to a pact she’d made with herself as a child. “I already knew I wanted to be a writer,” she says, her speech lilting, “so I promised myself that I was going to remember how it was to be really little, and I was going to write about
it when I grew up.”

To guard against accusations of auto-fiction, Goodman is quick to note that she altered the details: Sam lives with a single mother and grew up in New England, while Goodman’s parents were married and taught at the University of Hawaii. “It was the feelings that I remembered well,” she says. “As a fiction writer, I changed the facts.” To Goodman’s shock, the attempt was successful enough to earn Sam a spot in Jenna Bush Hager’s Read with Jenna book club.

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Oahu, Goodman and her younger sister grew up far from a lot of things: mainstream American culture, their extended family, what Goodman calls the institutional Judaism that the New Jersey–based Rubinsteins take for granted. Some would consider the experience lonely; Goodman thinks it was valuable. “It’s great to have a perspective from the margin, or the edge,” she says. “It gave me some space to look at things.”

As a young reader, she was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods, and she recalls adapting that book’s famous opening for one of her very first stories: “On the island of Oahu, there were two girls who lived in a little house, and as far as you could see, there were waves, and more waves, and more waves....”

A quick look at Goodman’s catalog reveals a career-long fascination with the push and pull between isolation and community. The stories in Total Immersion—her first collection, which came out in 1989—draw from the sometimes-humorous singularity of Jewish life in Hawaii. National Book Award finalist Kaaterskill Falls (1998) examines a small, self-contained Orthodox community in Upstate New York. Most recently, of course, there’s Isola, Goodman’s sweeping 2025 bestseller and an unlikely Reese’s Book Club selection, which fictionalizes the life of 16th-century French noblewoman Marguerite de la Rocque, whose jealous guardian marooned her on a desert island.

Still, Goodman insists that her most “primal obsession,” more than castaways or Orthodox Judaism, is family. “Family can be considered
domestic,” she explains. “It can be considered small, while epics are stereotyped as being about war or great world events or historical
trauma or something. But if you think about family, family is also about politics. It’s about how people relate to each other. In its most fundamental way, it’s about what it means to be human. All the misunderstandings people have, all the miscommunications, all the wonderful celebrations—you can see a whole society in a family.”

Thirty years ago, it was another book about family that gave 29-year-old Goodman’s career a boost. The Family Markowitz
has many parallels with This Is Not About Us. Also a novel in stories, Markowitz traces the fractious forces running through a Jewish family scattered between California and Washington, D.C. The tone of Markowitz, though, is lighter, more in the satirical register of Goodman’s early work, while some of the stories in This Is Not About Us skew elegiac. In part, it’s because, in the intervening decades, Goodman has raised four children of her own and lived through many of the familial experiences that a younger writer can only imagine.

“The colors here are deeper, the relationships perhaps a little darker and more complicated,” Goodman says. Sylvia and Helen’s feud, for example, never quite gets resolved before the book winds down. “Is it a healthy thing to do? Of course not,” she says of the sisters’ impulse to turn their grief against each other. “Is it a human thing to do? Yes. Unfortunately, we’re not all super enlightened about our own situation all the time.”

Reading Goodman, though, it’s easy to be swept up by the old-fashioned faith that fiction might help people see themselves more clearly. By the end of the 17 stories that compose This Is Not About Us, Goodman has inhabited the mind of an anxious 80-something matriarch, an imaginative 12-year-old ballerina, a divorced middle-aged lawyer, and even a dog. Small moments that readers initially encounter from the close-third-person perspective of one character will crop up 100 pages later, completely
recontextualized by a different person’s understanding of the situation.

Goodman likens this empathy exercise to acting, though she shuts down the possibility of any late-career pivots. “I often think of writing as a kind of performance practice without physical limitation,” she says. “I can be old, I can be young, I can be male or female. I can cast my ideas into these characters and create a theater in the mind of my reader.”

But unlike a thespian, Goodman toils away on her proverbial island, transmuting experiences of grief and motherhood and disappointment and apple cake into fiction that travels farther than her body ever could. The returns—a celebrity book club pick or time-honored reader feedback—come later. “When you’re in a play, you hear how things went from the audience at the end of the night,” she says. “I wait a few years, but that’s okay. I’m willing to accept that.”