Small Town Secrets and Their Role in Shaping Characters | World Literature & Critical Reading - Reading the World | قراءة العالم | World Literature, Critical Reading, & Culture

Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for clarity, accuracy, flow, and readability. Minor repetitions, false starts, and transcription errors have been corrected while preserving the substance and tone of the conversation.<h1>Episode Transcript</h1>Reading the World with Susan GoochAli Alhajji: What does a small town remember? What does it conceal? And how do love, ambition, secrecy, and reputation shape the stories people tell about one another?Welcome to Reading the World. I’m Ali Alhajji, and today I’m speaking with novelist Susan Gooch about fiction, place, family, scandal, and what it means to write lives that are always being interpreted by the community around them.This is Reading the World, a podcast about literature, culture, and higher education as ways of understanding how meaning is made. At the center of the show is a simple question: what does it mean to read the world? Not only to read books, but to interpret the structures through which life becomes legible—language, memory, place, power, silence, desire, and the narratives people inherit about themselves and about others.My guest today is Susan Gooch, author of The Carrington Affairs and The Nonnegotiable. What interests me about Susan’s work is that it returns to the small town not merely as a setting, but as a social world—one in which people are known through family, history, rumor, loyalty, aspiration, and secrecy. Her novels move through romance, public life, private cost, and the difficult work of understanding another person beyond the story already told about them.Susan, welcome to Reading the World.Susan Gooch: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. And what you just said really does capture what my novels are about. They’re also set in my actual hometown.Ali Alhajji: It’s wonderful to have you here. I’d love to begin with place, because your fiction seems deeply rooted in it. Your novels return to Searcy, Arkansas—and first, let me make sure I’m pronouncing that correctly.Susan Gooch: It’s Sir-see. That’s how we know who’s not from Searcy.Ali Alhajji: Thank you—Searcy. So let me begin with a broad question: what does the small town make possible for you as a novelist? What is it about that setting, socially, emotionally, narratively, that keeps drawing you back?Susan Gooch: For me, part of it begins with being Southern. One of my favorite writers is William Faulkner, and I take a lot of pride in being a Southerner. A small town feels almost like a snow globe to me—something beautiful that holds a world in place and lets you study it closely.I’ve lived in Searcy for twenty-five years. I’m actually a native Tennessean, and before moving here I lived in London, England. But when we came to this little town, I saw all the things I wanted for my children. In places like this, it can sometimes feel as though time paused long enough to preserve the good things about how many of us grew up.Community matters here. Family matters here. All three of my children grew up here, graduated from the same high school where I taught, and eventually moved back here to raise their own families. That says something about the place. It’s a beautiful community. We have strong schools, people care about one another, and there’s a real interconnectedness to daily life.And one thing about a small town is that everyone knows everyone. If people care about you—and often they do—they keep your secrets. There’s a kind of currency to that. If you expose other people, you expose yourself. So there’s also a kind of mutual protection built into small-town life.Ali Alhajji: Yes, exactly. In big cities, you can live side by side without ever really knowing the people around you. In a small town, that’s much harder.Susan Gooch: Exactly. When I lived in Dallas, you might not know your neighbors next door. Here, I can’t go to Walmart, the grocery store, or lunch without seeing someone I’ve taught with, taught, or whose children I taught. I taught thousands of students over the years in this community. When you only have so many students in the district, you know the families, the siblings, the history.That’s part of why I retired before my first book came out. It’s a little racy—not inappropriate, but definitely adult fiction—and I didn’t want to be in an elementary classroom with students asking, “Ms. Gooch, tell me about your book.” But I also think people here appreciate that I’ve written about the town with affection. The novels show a community that shops local, supports local churches and universities, and cares for one another.Ali Alhajji: That’s exactly what makes small towns so narratively powerful. They don’t just hold people—they remember them. One of the things that interests me about small-town fiction is that people are never read neutrally. They’re read through family, history, gossip, old loyalties, social standing—sometimes before they even speak. Did that matter to you as you built this world? Were you consciously writing a place where interpretation is always happening?Susan Gooch: I don’t know that I consciously decided that at first, but it’s definitely embedded in the world of the book. The novel begins at a country club, and I actually live on the Searcy Country Club golf course. My house backs up to it. I know that world intimately.That’s one of the things I believe strongly as a writer: write what you know. Not because imagination is limited, but because when you know a world deeply, you know its nuances. You know how people dress, how they behave, what they eat and drink, what the unspoken rules are. I didn’t have to research any of that.There’s even a joke in that world about being an “outfit repeater.” In a small town, if you go to the same parties with the same people, they notice what you wear. You can wear the same dress again, but you’d better change the shoes or accessories. That may sound small, but it tells you something about visibility, memory, and presentation in these communities. In a big city, you might never see the same people twice. In a small town, you absolutely will.Ali Alhajji: I also want to ask about affection and honesty. Writing a place one loves can be complicated. There’s always the temptation either to idealize it or reduce it to its tensions. How do you balance those things as a writer?Susan Gooch: That’s a great question. Sometimes, in a small town, silence can be the loudest sound in the room. If someone has done something that the community judges—an affair, a betrayal, something public and painful—you may not hear anyone say it out loud, but you feel it in the silence. People stop speaking. People withdraw. That silence becomes a form of judgment.I sometimes describe small-town life as learning to “play nicely in the sandbox.” That doesn’t mean everyone is your best friend. It means you understand that other people also occupy the sandbox, and you respect their place in it. So when I write a small town, I try to do that. I try to respect its different groups, its different histories, its different positions.There are still differences here—economic differences, class differences, visible and invisible social divisions. One of my characters is very wealthy; another is the daughter of a housekeeper. We may not talk about those things openly, but they are still there. And in a small town, because people can’t disappear into anonymity, those judgments and silences carry real weight.Ali Alhajji: That leads naturally into The Carrington Affairs, because the novel seems deeply interested in what a community knows, what it hides, and what happens when what has been hidden begins to surface.What struck me about the book is that scandal is not just a dramatic event. It’s also a crisis of interpretation. Once the past starts to emerge, everyone has to reread what they thought they knew. When you began writing the novel, what interested you most: the emotional story, the public scandal, the family system, or the political setting?Susan Gooch: Definitely the emotions. I come at story from feeling first. I started writing this book in 2012. My daughter was in Europe in law school, and we were very close, so I knew I was going to be sad that summer. I decided to write. At the time, I wasn’t writing to be published. I wrote it for myself.And what was already around me in life was a lot of emotional turmoil. Some of my friends were dealing with marriages under strain, affairs, painful discoveries, often in very public ways. Not the specific story of the novel, but the emotional energy of betrayal and exposure was very much around me.My writing process is that I think the whole story through before I really write it. I build scenes in my head, make lists, and imagine how one event leads to another. In the earliest version, I focused mainly on Taylor and Greer. I assumed Poppy and Bennett might belong to a different book later on.Then life moved on. I took a job in administration and put the book away. Years later, in 2023, I was in an airport with friends, trying to find something to read, and I couldn’t find anything I liked. I finally said, half-jokingly, “I wrote a book that’s better than this.” My friends were shocked—they didn’t even know I’d written one. We pulled it up in my email, and all of us started reading it there in the airport. They told me I had to finish it.But I also knew the world had changed. A story set in 2023 wouldn’t work the same way because social media exposes everything. So I had to rethink the setting and protect the secret structure of the story by putting it back in 2012. That gave the book the space it needed for secrecy to function.Looking back now, I can articulate much more clearly what I was doing. At the time, I was mostly writing out of emotion. Now I think much more intentionally about politics, power, and the dynamics inside every situation, because politics exists everywhere. It’s part of how we live together.Ali Alhajji: I want to stay with secrecy for a moment, because secrecy in fiction is rarely just about withholding information. It shapes people, distorts relationships, creates emotional weather. How did you think about secrecy in the novel? Is it primarily destructive, or were you also interested in the way silence can feel protective, even when it becomes costly?Susan Gooch: Today I would say very clearly that it’s both. Sometimes we keep things from people because we think we’re protecting them. Parents do that. But later, when children find out they weren’t told everything, they can feel deeply betrayed. So silence can be both shelter and wound.In the third novel in the series, The Dirty Birds Book Club, secrets play a major role again, and by now I understand much more deliberately how to build those layers. One of the things you learn when you really write fiction is that every word matters. If you mention something, it should have a purpose. It may not reveal itself immediately, but it should matter later.So with secrecy, I try to plant things that raise questions in the reader’s mind, even if they don’t realize it consciously yet. Why is this detail here? Why am I being told this? What will it mean later? When those connections come back into view, that’s when the story really begins to resonate.Ali Alhajji: And finally on The Carrington Affairs: were you consciously asking readers to revise their sympathies as they moved through the story? To move away from easy judgment and toward something more difficult?Susan Gooch: Absolutely. I hear all the time from readers: “At first I was completely on Taylor’s side. I couldn’t stand Poppy. Then I got deeper into the book, and now I don’t know.” That’s exactly what I wanted.In life, especially in a small town but really everywhere, you only ever see one angle at first. You only know the direction you’re facing. You don’t know what’s behind you until you turn around. If we could pause more often, communicate more honestly, and really try to understand the other person’s position, it would change so much. It would soften bias. It would change judgment.That’s true in education too. Real learning is built on relationship and human connection. That’s why I care so much about the emotional dimension of storytelling. I wanted people to feel that Taylor, Poppy, Bennett, and Greer are all human beings carrying burdens, acting from motives that may be flawed but are still understandable. Sympathy shifts once you begin to see more.And perception may feel like reality, but it is not the same thing as reality.Ali Alhajji: That movement from judgment toward a more demanding understanding seems to continue in The Nonnegotiable, though in a different key.The title itself is so strong because it suggests that love is never only emotional. It also raises questions of principle, selfhood, vocation, and limits. What did that title open up for you as a writer?Susan Gooch: That book actually began with my mother’s response to The Carrington Affairs. My mother is a very traditional Southern Baptist woman, still married to my father after more than sixty years. After reading the first novel, she basically said, “You’ve written a book about people who get divorced. Can you write a book about people who stay married?”That stayed with me.A lot of The Nonnegotiable comes out of my own life. I met my husband on a blind date when I was sixteen. We’ve been together ever since. I got married very young, had children young, and when I graduated college I thought I was going to law school and had a very different vision of my future. But life teaches you that you can’t have everything all at once. You have to decide what matters most. You have to know your nonnegotiables.For me, my marriage was never negotiable. That shaped everything else. It affected careers, moves, parenting, and priorities. Marriage isn’t just a feeling. It goes up and down. There are difficult seasons. But if you give up too quickly, you also give up the possibility of returning to the good. Sometimes love requires reprioritizing the other person, honoring what matters to them, learning how to compromise without losing yourself.That’s what interested me in the book. These characters are both smart, ambitious, and full of potential. But if they want a life together, they have to ask what kind of compromise love requires—and what remains essential.Ali Alhajji: I’m very interested in the relationship between intimacy and ambition. Fiction often treats love and ambition as if one must simply absorb the other, but lived life is rarely that neat. Was that tension central to this novel?Susan Gooch: Very much so. Once people have a child, especially, their lives can’t continue moving apart indefinitely. Before that, two people can still follow separate trajectories and keep reconnecting. But once a child enters the picture, priorities change. Lives have to align differently.That doesn’t mean ambition disappears. It means love asks harder questions. Who sacrifices what? What does partnership actually require? What does it mean to remain connected, not just emotionally, but structurally, in how a life is built?I think younger people especially are often told they can have everything exactly as they imagine it, but life doesn’t really work that way. You can have love and purpose and a good life, but compromise is part of that. I worry sometimes that we’ve stopped teaching people how to compromise, how to stay connected, how to build something together.Ali Alhajji: What links both books for me is that they ask how a life becomes legible under pressure—pressure from love, family, social expectation, ambition. And that brings me to your life as a teacher and a reader.You come to fiction through education, reading, and a long engagement with literacy and literary life. How did your years as an educator shape the novelist you became?Susan Gooch: I never originally wanted to be a teacher. My mother was a teacher, and I’m also dyslexic, so learning to read was very hard for me. My mother was a reading specialist, and she knew exactly how to help me build fluency. Without her, I would never have gotten where I did.The first book that really entered me at a deep level was A Tale of Two Cities in eighth grade. I still remember the feeling of certain scenes. That was when I understood that books can live in your body and memory for years.I ended up studying English in college and thought I’d go to law school, but then I became a mother, and my middle son had severe learning disabilities. Helping him changed everything for me. I became certified as a teacher partly because I wanted him to be supported by someone trained to do that work. And once I entered education, I discovered it was a calling.Later I earned graduate degrees in reading, administration, and gifted education. What stayed central for me, though, was helping students understand structure—both in reading and in writing. I used to teach writing through something I called “the suitcase.” I would show students that a piece of writing needs structure, support, and purpose, just as a suitcase needs the right things packed inside it. Once they understood that, their writing changed.That shaped me deeply as a novelist. Good writing needs structure. Beautiful language alone isn’t enough. The story has to hold. And I want readers to feel that in my own books, even if they’re not consciously naming it.Ali Alhajji: That’s fascinating. At Reading the World, I’m always interested in literature as a way of making parts of reality more visible. Stories reveal things that ordinary discourse often simplifies or hides.So let me end here: when you write fiction, what part of the world are you trying to help readers see more clearly?Susan Gooch: Probably three things.First, no one gets through life unscathed. No matter how good you are or how hard you try, you will be hurt and you will hurt other people. The question is not whether you fall—it’s how you get back up.Second, things can always get worse, which means we have to learn how to find gratitude, peace, and contentment even in difficult seasons. This too shall pass. There is always something to be grateful for and something to hope for.And third—and probably most important—at the end of the day, all we really take from this world is love. The love we make, the love we share, the relationships we build. Sometimes the hardest person to love is ourselves, but if we don’t learn to do that, it becomes very hard to love others well.We get caught up in ambition, career, social standing, appearance, and all the things society tells us matter most. But in the end, what remains is love. That’s what I want my books to leave with readers.Ali Alhajji: That’s a beautiful place to end, because it brings us back to the deepest work of fiction: not merely to tell a story, but to change how we see.Susan, thank you. This has been such a pleasure.Susan Gooch: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak about my books. They feel like my new babies. I always joke that I have my three grown children, and now I have these books too. And I’m grateful for the way you read them—I feel like I learned something about them talking with you.Ali Alhajji: You’ve been listening to Reading the World. I’m Ali Alhajji. My guest today was Susan Gooch, author of The Carrington Affairs and The Nonnegotiable. This was a conversation about the small town as a social text, about secrecy and public life, about ambition and intimacy, and about the way fiction teaches us to read not only characters, but the worlds that shape them.Thank you for listening. And as always: read closely, listen carefully, and avoid the shortcut.