Allegra was born in Brooklyn in 1967 but grew up in Hawaii where she attended Punahou, an independent school founded in the 19th century by Congregationalist missionaries. She began writing in high school and at the age of 17 she submitted her story “Variant Text” to Commentary magazine and it was soon published. She studied English and philosophy at Harvard; her first book called Total Immersion was published on her graduation day.
Allegra then attended graduate school at Stanford where she earned a PhD in Literature; during that time her second book, The Family Markowitz, was published.
She later moved to Massachusetts when her husband got a job at MIT. She has continued to publish books and still lives there with him and her 4 children. Her latest book is called The Cookbook Collector--out this month.
Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.
Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.
Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.
Have you read any of her books or stories?
