Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Raised—in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; Ph.D., Stanford
University
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Goodman was raised a Conservative Jew in Honolulu, Hawaii. She graduated from Punahou School in 1985. Her mother, the late Madeline Goodman, was a genetics and women's studies professor then assistant vice president at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for many years before moving on to Vanderbilt University in the 1990s. Her father, Lenn E. Goodman, is a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt.
Goodman attended Harvard University, where she earned an A.B. degree and met her husband, David Karger. Both were regulars at Harvard Hillel, and prayed in Harvard Hillel Orthodox Minyan. They then went on to do graduate work at Stanford University, where Goodman earned a Ph.D. degree in English literature.
Goodman's younger sister, Paula Fraenkel, is an oncologist. Fraenkel's experience in research labs is one of the inspiratons for Goodman's 2006 novel Intuition.
Goodman and Karger live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Karger is a researcher in computer science at MIT. They have four children, three boys and a girl.
Writings
Goodman wrote and illustrated her first novel at the age of seven, which was an instant hit in the Goodman family. She is, however, more widely known for her adult writings, which include The Family Markowitz (1996); Kaaterskill Falls (1998); Paradise Park (2001); Intuition (2006); The Other Side of the Island (2008); The Cookbook Collector (2010). She as also written a short story collection, Total Immersion (1989) and other assorted short stories. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)