Meredith Goldstein

Meredith Goldstein is an advice columnist and entertainment reporter for The Boston Globe. Her column Love Letters is a daily dispatch of wisdom for the lovelorn that gets about 1 million page views every month on Boston.com. Love Letters appears in the Globe’s print edition every Saturday. Goldstein also writes about fake rock stars, former boy banders, female werewolves, self-help books, last picture shows, and how to sound like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.

Her new, debut novel is The Singles.

From Goldstein's Q & A at her publisher's website:

Q. You’re the Love Letters columnist for The Boston Globe. How did that inform your writing? Were you able to use any situations you’ve advised people on in that capacity in the novel?

Despite the fact that I spend eight hours a day reading people’s dramatic love problems and advising them about what to do next, my column didn’t influence the book - at least not as much as I thought it would. I think that’s because I write Love Letters with my head on straight. In Love Letters, I’m the voice of reason. But when I stepped into the minds of my Singles characters, I could be irrational and erratic. I could be oversensitive and cruel. I tried to compartmentalize as much of my Love Letters brain as I could while I was writing the novel. I was Meredith Goldstein, the girl who’s been to (and flipped out at) dozens of weddings alone, as opposed to the Meredith Goldstein who always knows what’s best.

Q. Was it difficult for you to make the switch over to writing fiction since you’re a journalist by day? How was the process different for you? Do you prefer one to the other?

It was more challenging than I thought it would be. After writing about a third of my first draft of The Singles, I suddenly realized that my characters hadn’t spoken yet. I was afraid to make up dialogue, because in journalism you would absolutely never, under any circumstances, make up a quote. It took me a while to realize that I could make these characters speak, and that writing fiction allowed me to be a...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Meredith Goldstein's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Singles.

My Book, The Movie: The Singles.

Writers Read: Meredith Goldstein.

--Marshal Zeringue