When Gray fired him in 2002, Mr Goolrick reinvented himself as a writer.
He soon embarked on his first novel, “A Reliable Wife,” an erotic tale set in rural Wisconsin in 1907. A wealthy businessman advertises for a woman—for “practical, not romantic reasons”—but the wife. who responds is beautiful, not clear as he expected, and turns out to be deceitful and dangerous in the end.
“I had been working on ‘A Reliable Wife’ for a long time and when I finished I found I couldn’t stop writing,” Mr. Goolrick told Publishers Weekly in 2009. “So I wrote the first chapter of the memoir — and went on.”
Although he was the first to complete the novel, Mr. Goolrick the first to be acquired and published by Algonquin. Following its success (approximately 40,000 hardcover, paperback, and e-book copies were sold), Algonquin purchased “A Reliable Wife,” which became a blockbuster, selling over a million copies. It spent nearly a year on the DailyExpertNews bestseller list in 2010 and 2011, including three weeks at #1.
Writing in The Washington Post, the critic Ron Charles called “A Reliable Wife” “a Gothic tale of such smoldering desire it should be read in a cold shower” and “delightfully wicked and tense, presented as a series of sepia scenes, punctuated by flashes of bright red violence.”
mr. Goolrick published three more novels — “Heading Out to Wonderful” (2012), “The Fall of Princes” (2015) and “The Dying of the Light” (2018) — but they didn’t sell nearly as well as “A Reliable Woman.” ”
Columbia Pictures chose “A Reliable Wife” in 2009 but no film has been made to date.
Besides his brother, Mr. Goolrick’s sister, Lindlay Maitland Ford, behind.
Mr. Goolrick began “The End of the World as We Know It” with a statement about his family’s alcoholism.
