The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick

Those skills are on display again when Charlie first sets eyes on Sylvan, the young and beautiful wife of Boaty Glass. He is obsessed with a married woman, and he buys it all for her.Īs fans of A Reliable Wife will remember, Goolrick is skilled at portraying passionate, encompassing love-and lust. However, Charlie’s desire to own land stems from more than just a love of dirt and creeks. The author calls Heading Out to Wonderful his “love letter to Virginia,” and it vividly evokes the wild and gentle landscape that comforts Charlie’s soul. Now he lives in an old farmhouse in White Stone, a town that’s home to fewer people than one floor of his New York apartment building. “I didn’t want to be one of those people who does nothing but go to literary cocktail parties all the time,” he says. But his novel, about a woman who answers a wealthy man’s personal ad in rural Wisconsin in 1909, has sold more than a million copies.Īfter he realized that “there was going to be a fuss made about A Reliable Wife,” Goolrick left his home in New York and moved to Virginia, where he was born. His first book, a memoir called The End of the World as We Know It, met with positive reviews and modest sales. He becomes almost like a second father to Sam, Will’s five-year-old son, and grows attached to the Virginia countryside, which “just stole his heart at every turn of the road.” When a piece of land “made his heart beat in a certain way,” he would buy it, paying in cash.Ī Reliable Wife was something of a sleeper hit for Goolrick. Brownsburg is a quiet town with a population of 538, a place where “no crime had ever been committed,” people believed in God, doors were never locked and “where the terrible American wanting hadn’t touched yet, where most people lived a simple life without yearning for things they couldn’t have.”Ĭharlie soon finds work at Will Haislett’s butcher shop and is welcomed into his family. The novel opens in 1948, when Charlie Beale wanders into Brownsburg with nothing but a suitcase full of money and a set of fine knives. But everything else-from the main character’s profession to the gasp-inducing climax-is the same. In Heading Out to Wonderful, the setting has been changed to the town of Brownsburg, in the Valley of Virginia.

Goolrick, who is 63, heard the story after college, when he lived on a remote Greek island. “There was something about it that fascinated me.” “When I heard this story, I thought to myself, this is actually-absolutely-the best story I’ve ever heard,” Goolrick recalls. He is in town to preview the novel at Parnassus Books, author Ann Patchett’s new bookstore. “Essentially, in every way, the story is true,” Goolrick says while sitting in BookPage’s office in Nashville. Readers who loved A Reliable Wife, the bestseller that titillated book clubs across the country, might be surprised to learn that Robert Goolrick’s warm second novel has a lush Southern setting-and is based entirely on a true story.

The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick