How autobiographical is The Good People of New York?
The Good People of New York began as two short stories, “The Rather Unlikely Courtship of Edwin Anderson and Roz Rosenzweig” and “Think About if You Want” which became, respectively, chapters 1 and 20. When I wrote “The Rather Unlikely Courtship…” I was definitely trying to imagine in fiction the story I’d heard so many times of my parents meeting outside a friend’s apartment, scrounging around on the ground to find the key she’d tossed out the window to them. When I wrote “Think About…” (originally published in The North American Review as “A Brownstone, Park Slope”) the mother’s name was Sheila and the daughter’s name was Miranda. It was some time later when I thought: you know, I think maybe Sheila is actually Roz later in life. And then I went about filling in what had happened in between. I started chronicling Roz and Edwin’s early marriage using other anecdotes I’d grown up hearing from my folks. But somewhere along the way Roz and Edwin stopped being my parents, who are stil
