Reading a Judy Goldman memoir is like curling up into an easy conversation with someone you’ve known for years—easy in the way she talks to you, though never in the choice of subject matter. Whether she’s writing about loss, the challenges of marriage, the complexity of race, or most recently, the most taboo topic of all: aging, she splits opens her own life, so readers can explore their own.
In her latest book The Rest of Our Lives, which is in stores this month, Charlotte’s own Goldman entices readers into a treacherous topic like she’s handing you a frothy latte to go with it. She entertains with stories from her past while revealing the unexpected ways history can repeat itself. She challenges herself, and by extension her reader, with questions about the future, while facing the fleeting nature of the present. “Stalled at the intersection of now and next,” she boils down what is ultimately most important.
And as always, Goldman keeps readers rooted in the power of place. For that alone, Charlotteans both young and old, and even a little older, this read is a must.
"We tend to think of old age as something foreign, alien, but really, it just echoes all those important stages we passed through on our way from then to now, bringing a fear of the unfamiliar as well as the exhilaration of trying out a new existence. I’d like it to guide 80-year-olds, 40-year-olds, and everyone in between!" - Goldman