The Wife Who Came in from the Cold

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With his Northern gothic novel A Reliable Wife, acclaimed memoirist Robert Goolrick creates an unforgettable heroine—a mail-order black widow.

When a grown man goes by the diminutive “Robbie,” you can usually assume he’s a) very in touch with his inner child or b) Southern. And Robert “Robbie” Goolrick, is clearly both. A former ad copywriter originally from Virginia, Goolrick is the author of the much-touted debut novel, A Reliable Wife.

"I like the stories of ordinary lives. I think that the simplicity and the tenderness of the ordinary life is a remarkably sacred thing."

Wife is not Goolrick’s first book—that would be his critically acclaimed 2007 memoir The End of the World as We Know It.In one way, at least, Wife—which was the No. 1 pick of independent book sellers and has been sold in a dozen countries—is very different from The End of the World, a disturbingly calm account of his growing up and being sexually abused by his father in a respectable Virginia family. The new book is a novel, for one thing, and it takes place in Wisconsin in 1907. Still, the story of a powerful man estranged from his grown son, a man who sends away for a wife and gets more than he bargained for, echoes the themes in Goolrick’s memoir and his life.Like World, Goolrick notes, it concerns the relationship between two men and a woman and property.And like World, it springs from Goolrick’s childhood memories and themes, and reads like the kind of dramatic Southern story Goolrick says he grew up hearing from his parents and their friends.

You were an advertising copywriter for most of your adult life. How and when did you decide to become a memoirist/novelist?

I worked in advertising for almost 30 years, a number of places, principally at Grey Advertising. I was brutally fired when I was 53 years old.And when you’re 53 years old in advertising and you’re fired, there is nowhere for you to go, and the people who have called you up and praised you for 25 years just don’t take your calls. I was kind of like that guy in Into Thin Air, I decided I had to save myself.

A Reliable Wife. By Robert Goolrick. 291 pages. Algonquin Books. $23.95. And I had always had in mind that I would write. One day I sat down and said, "This is it, I have to do this." I actually wrote the novel first but my agent at the time couldn’t sell it: More than 25 publishers turned it down.So then I wrote the memoir in about two months, and she sold that to Algonquin right off the bat.

There are plenty of advertising executives—James Patterson, Augusten Burroughs—who became successful novelists and memoirists.There’s obviously some connection there. . .

I have to say that while I was never very proud of it, advertising does teach you how to write. You have to take a lot of information and condense it into a very small space and a very small number of words. You have to write in a compelling style. . .the style of my own writing is probably more poetic than my style of writing advertising, but it’s not so far away. I really learned how to write in advertising. . . I am very grateful for that. But I think you have to find something to do that is both joyful in the process and satisfying about the product. I didn’t mind the process in advertising, but I don’t have any real admiration for the product. I suppose there are some who do, but I was never one of them.