Alma lives in a rural village where she grows a garden, raises animals and cares for her young children while her husband teaches at a nearby university. Celeste lives in the city, where she makes ceramics, travels in style and curates a worldly sensibility while raising her sons. Both women seek a rooted contentment beyond the scope of their own access, a life of creativity, agency and fulfilment. Only one of them is real. The Shame follows Alma as she hurtles down a dark highway, alone, in a search to find out which one it is. A modern fable both blistering and surreal, The Shame explores the remote landscapes of desire and envy, revealing how in a world increasingly shaped by digital fabrication, what we imagine, and how we act on it, can either free us or become our undoing.From the author of Helen of Nowhere comes another wild ride through the caverns of the contemporary psyche.
Makenna Goodman is the author of two novels, The Shame and Helen of Nowhere, and has written for international publications including the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, The White Review, BOMB, The Common, ASTRA Magazine and Mousse Magazine. Also an editor, she is based in Vermont.
'The Shame is a delicious, important moral corrective of a novel for our moment of performance, obsessive witnessing and self-doubt, written in gripping and beautiful prose. Goodman draws a dark and suspenseful tale out of the feelings of envy women have for one another, fanned in this moment of high capitalism – a shame many of us know and feel, that reading this novel somehow helps disperse.'— Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries
Alma lives in a rural village where she grows a garden, raises animals and cares for her young children while her husband teaches at a nearby university. Celeste lives in the city, where she makes ceramics, travels in style and curates a worldly sensibility while raising her sons. Both women seek a rooted contentment beyond the scope of their own access, a life of creativity, agency and fulfilment. Only one of them is real. The Shame follows Alma as she hurtles down a dark highway, alone, in a search to find out which one it is. A modern fable both blistering and surreal, The Shame explores the remote landscapes of desire and envy, revealing how in a world increasingly shaped by digital fabrication, what we imagine, and how we act on it, can either free us or become our undoing.From the author of Helen of Nowhere comes another wild ride through the caverns of the contemporary psyche.
Makenna Goodman is the author of two novels, The Shame and Helen of Nowhere, and has written for international publications including the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, The White Review, BOMB, The Common, ASTRA Magazine and Mousse Magazine. Also an editor, she is based in Vermont.
'The Shame is a delicious, important moral corrective of a novel for our moment of performance, obsessive witnessing and self-doubt, written in gripping and beautiful prose. Goodman draws a dark and suspenseful tale out of the feelings of envy women have for one another, fanned in this moment of high capitalism – a shame many of us know and feel, that reading this novel somehow helps disperse.'— Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries