"Family stories grow to be bigger than the experiences themselves,"
writes Judy Goldman in her memoir, Losing My Sister. "They become home
to us, tell us who we are, who we want to be. Over the years, they take
on more and more embellishments and adornments until they eclipse the
actual memory. They become our past--just as a snapshot will, at first,
enhance a memory, then replace it." As she remembers it now, Goldman's
was an idyllic childhood, charmed even, filled with parental love and
sisterly confidences. Growing up in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Judy and
her older sister, Brenda, did everything together. Though it was clear
from an early age that their personalities were very different (Judy was
the "sweet" one, Brenda, the "strong" one), they continued to be fairly
inseparable into adulthood. But the love between sisters is complex.
Though Judy and Brenda remained close, Goldman recalls struggling to
break free of her prescribed role as the agreeable little sister and to
assert herself even as she built her own life and started a family. The
sisters' relationship became further strained by the illnesses and
deaths of their parents, and later, by the discovery that each had
tumors in their breasts--Judy's benign, Brenda's malignant. The two
sisters came back together shortly before the possibility of permanent
loss became very real. In her uniquely lyrical and poignant style,
Goldman deftly navigates past events and present emotions, drawing
readers in as she explores the joys and sorrows of family, friendship,
and sisterhood.
Judy Goldman is the author of two novels, Early Leaving and The Slow
Way Back, and two books of poetry. Her work has been published in
Real Simple
magazine, and in many literary journals--including Kenyon Review,
Southern Review, Ohio Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah,
Prairie Schooner--as well as in numerous anthologies. Her commentaries
have aired on public radio and she teaches at writers' conferences
throughout the country. She received the Fortner Writer and Community
Award for "outstanding generosity to other writers and the larger
community." She's also the recipient of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for
Fiction, the Mary Ruffin Poole Award for First Fiction, the Gerald Cable
Poetry Prize, the Roanoke-Chowan Prize for Poetry, the Oscar Arnold
Young Prize for Poetry, and the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for Poetry.
The Slow Way Back was shortlisted for the Southeastern Independent
Bookseller Alliance's Novel of the Year. Judy lives with her husband in
Charlotte, North Carolina.
