A Best Book of the Year, The White Review & Favorite Book of the Year, Harvard Review
“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. Makenna 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 Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?
“Makenna Goodman writes with blazing clarity and admirable wit about the joys and sorrows of raising children. Her depiction of the longing, self-loathing, and quiet rage that accompanies sidelined ambition is brilliantly complex."
—JENNY OFFILL, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
"The Shame impresses one with its intelligence and artistry. What goes on inside a woman remains the new frontier.”
—SUSAN MINOT, author of Evening
“The Shame is startlingly original. . . . Part of its pleasure is in the construction―the recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make. . . . More importantly, this is a novel about how you can feel driven to take risks that don’t matter in order to avoid taking the risks that do matter.”
―ALEXANDER CHEE, Paris Review
"The Shame is a wickedly smart, wry, raw interrogation of one mother’s choices. In sentences packed with wit and insight, Makenna Goodman’s entrancing debut explores the envy and self-doubt that come with selecting one sort of life over another. The reader shares the narrator’s desperate curiosity about how her madcap adventure will end."
—HELEN PHILLIPS, author of The Need
“Very funny and gutting.”
―LAUREN GROFF, author of The Vaster Wilds
“Cutting, furious, funny…”
—MEGHA MAJUMDAR, author of A Burning
“Sharp and witty.”
—THE WHITE REVIEW, A Best Book of the Year 2020
“A swift and sensual debut…Goodman’s sentences pulse, they are alive.”
—NINA MACLAUGHLIN, Boston Globe
“A slender, one-long-afternoon-at-the-shore read.”
―RUMAAN ALAM, author of Leave the World Behind, in New York Magazine
"The language, wow, but also the searing truths."
―CHELSEA BIEKER, author of Madwoman