Joanna Goodman

Joanna Goodman's novels include the #1 national bestseller, The Home for Unwanted Girls, which was on The Globe & Mail’s Fiction bestseller list for more than six months, as well as The Forgotten Daughter and The Finishing School, both national bestsellers. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, B & A Fiction, Event, The New Quarterly, and White Wall Review, as well as excerpted in Elisabeth Harvor’s fiction anthology A Room at the Heart of Things.

Originally from Montreal, Goodman now lives in Toronto with her husband and two kids.

Her new novel is The Inheritance.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I always write my novels with a “working title” that never makes it to publication. Once the novel is complete, the real title inevitably reveals itself to me. With The Inheritance, my original working title was The Gold diggers. I meant that to be tongue-in-cheek, since the novel is about a mother and daughter’s decades-long battle to inherit from her billionaire father, who died intestate. Because Arden was his illegitimate daughter, the courtroom drama spans from the early eighties to the present, thrusting them into the spotlight and making them vulnerable to being seen as scammers and gold diggers.

Just before the book came out, I changed the title to When We’re Millionaires, which I felt catapulted the reader into the heart of the book’s theme, which is the idea of life being on hold while we chase down our goals, as opposed to actually living in the present. (When I lose ten pounds. When I have a New York Times Bestseller. When we inherit millions…)

All the characters in The Inheritance are in a kind of purgatory as they wait year after year, decade after decade, for this money to come in. I loved the idea of exploring how Virginia, the mother, would hand down that legacy to her daughter - well intentioned, but is it the right choice?

In the end, The Inheritance best captured the soul of the book in its entirety, from the literal courtroom inheritance case to the idea of legacy as an inheritance. Its conciseness won the day.

What's in a name?

So much can be conveyed about a character or a place with just a name. Getting it right can be the difference between an iconic character versus a forgettable character. I spend a ridiculous amount of time choosing the names of all my characters, and when called for, fictional towns like Denby, New York.

The main characters in The Inheritance are the mother, Virginia Bunt; eldest daughter, Tate Bunt; and youngest daughter and main protagonist, Arden Bunt.

I actually address older sister, Tate’s name, in the novel, because it says a great deal about her mother:

"Beauty mattered a great deal to Virginia. Tate was named after another very beautiful person, Sharon Tate. At the time, they didn’t know that Sharon Tate been stabbed to death, only that she was gorgeous."

As for Arden, the younger sister, I chose the name because it’s unique, pretty and unconventional, qualities embodied by Arden herself. I love that it rhymes with garden, conjuring up all kinds of feminine imagery. The name Arden also speaks to her mother’s quirky, individualist nature. No common names for Virgina’s daughters! Naturally, their names would be as wacky and idiosyncratic as Virginia is.

Their last name, Bunt, was named after someone I know. The moment I met her and heard that name, I knew it was going to show up in one of my novels. The name Bunt is like a punch. It has so much going for it - it’s short, powerful, comedic. Virginia, Tate and Arden Bunt are names that I really believe enhance the characters and add to their dimensionality.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Teenage Joanna would not be the least bit surprised by The Inheritance. I wrote my first novel at nine years old, and then started many novels throughout my teen years. I used to write blurbs and reviews of these novels as though they were already published. So, the fact of this novel’s existence would not be a shocker. As for the content of The Inheritance, young Joanna would expect that adult author Joanna would be writing exactly this kind of novel. I write pretty much the same themes and types of characters I wrote and read back then. My characters are always women and girls, and they are always struggling with acceptance, self-worth and purpose. I used to read tons of Judy Blume back in the day, and what I loved best about her writing was her female characters. They were so real and authentic, and they were always living through familiar struggles that I could relate to, which is exactly the kind of books I write.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find it so much harder to write endings. The beginning is the very best part. I’m fresh and excited and the idea is bursting out of me. The first few chapters of The Inheritance literally wrote themselves, mostly because I already knew my characters, and it was just a matter of introducing them to the reader, and establishing that inciting incident to kick th ebook into high gear. While I always have a clear idea of the ending, it often happens that my characters and my story veer in a completely different direction than the original outline, and I can be as surprised by the endings as my readers are. Without revealing too much about how The Inheritance ends, suffice to say, by the time I got to the last chapter, my original ending fell by the wayside, which feels a bit like flying without your pilot’s license. It’s scary.

The other challenge in writing a good ending is achieving the perfect balance between leaving readers with a positive, uplifted feeling that is also plausible and realistic. I’ve never been a fan of the classic happy ending, and yet it really matters to me that I end on a note filled with possibility and hope; more like a version of a happy ending, grounded in real life. This for me is inevitably requires the most amount of editing and fine-tuning.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

In a word, yes. I often joke that every lead character I write is some version of myself, or, at the very least, she will go through a similar struggle to ones I have experienced in my own life. Frankly, I can only write what is authentically real to my own experience. In that sense, I always have a deep connection to my characters. In The Inheritance, I feel the most connected to Arden as the mother of a teenage daughter, and also as the daughter of a mother who handed down a very complex legacy that I’ve had to navigate as an adult. So while Arden and her experience as the illegitimate daughter of a billionaire are completely fictional, her experience as a mother and daughter are very much connected to me.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The greatest influence on my writing is travel. I travel a lot for work and am always inspired by something on a trip - whether it be the place itself, an experience at a museum or the type of people I encounter, there is something about stepping foot outside my own familiar world that seems to unlock a flood of creativity and inspiration. So much of The Inheritance was inspired by one of my trips to New York City. On that particular trip, we walked and walked, from the City Center, with all its court houses and government buildings, to Wall Street, and then through Chinatown and little Italy. We also went to Brooklyn on that trip, and I knew immediately that Arden would grow up in Brooklyn, and that her stepfather, Hal, would have a home there. Just about everything I experienced on that trip wound up in the novel - whether it was the Surrgoate's Court where the inheritance case unfolds, or Joshua’s apartment in Battery Park, or Hal’s little house in Midwood, all those seeds were planted on my travels.

Visit Joanna Goodman's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Inheritance.

My Book, The Movie: The Inheritance.

--Marshal Zeringue