Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Washington Square Review, The Rumpus, and Passages North among other publications. Her fiction was anthologized in Tiny Crimes (Catapult, 2018). She received a fellowship from Tin House Workshops in 2022.
Big Shadow is her first novel.
At Electric Lit Balcewicz tagged seven novels featuring "questionable geniuses, part saviors, part villains, all due for exposure. The common thread is that they keep the wool over someone else’s eyes, and the smoke and mirrors of their genius-status has the power to greatly affect others." One title on the list:
The Shame by Makenna GoodmanRead about another entry on the list.
The Shame follows Alma, a woman who decides to leave her family and home in Vermont and pursue a barely planned, tenuous new life in Brooklyn. The magnetic mountain to which the narrator is drawn is Celeste, whose life Alma has glimpsed through her social media posts (the platform is not named, though the posts have an Instagram-like feel). A significant part of the novel is focused on Alma’s growing immersion in Celeste’s life in her picture-perfect apartment—or rather “life” in quotation marks, as it is of course merely the life Celeste presents through the funhouse mirror that is social media. In the narrator’s mind, the woman is elevated to an ideal, a god, a new religion. Celeste’s mythology is sufficiently believable that Alma is able to leave behind her young children just to be with her—or, more likely, to be like her. The drive to New York, which encompasses the “present moment” of the novel, and the narrator’s time in the city, as she seeks to find and finally meet her savior, is full of tension. What will the meeting result in? What can a meeting with an ideal result in? Is Celeste a worthwhile savior? The novel leaves us asking why we idealize others when all signs point to there being reasons to suspect our impulse—what this says about us and our own condition.
--Marshal Zeringue
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