In 2007, when she was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in English, Jessica M. Goldstein had one goal: to become an enriched writer. With no specific plans in mind — only a seemingly distant dream of writing a novel — she dove into nonfiction and journalism classes that transformed her career and identity as a writer. “I always wanted to write fiction, too, but I really was getting so much out of the experience of being a journalist, getting to talk to new people every day, being out in the world, having to think about and explore things outside of my own,” Goldstein says in an exclusive interview with Her Campus. “It was a lot about seeing whatever opportunities were in front of me and evaluating them all on this question of, what will make me grow the most as a writer and a person?’ And hopefully, at the same time, make my life financially sustainable, but also emotionally sustainable.”
Through Goldstein’s persistence and dedication to take on whatever writing opportunities she could find (despite a sea of application rejections and job ghostings), she landed an internship at Seventeen Magazine. At the time that the movie 17 Again came out, Goldstein says she created a bit of her own luck by writing a 17 Again movie review for her school’s campus magazine and sending it to Seventeen. “Because I had applied with a movie review, they assigned me to the entertainment department,” she says. Ultimately, it set her on the path to becoming a culture reporter — a success which she attributes to always writing about what truly captivates her. “I do think it’s me just being true to who I am, which is somebody who is so passionate about the stories that we consume,” Goldstein says.
This self-acceptance for what she was truly passionate about did not always come easily to Goldstein, though. “I [was always] interested in arts and culture, but I also felt this insecurity about that interest, like it wasn’t serious,” she says. “I do not believe that, by the way, but when I was younger and still finding myself, I was like, ‘Well, if I wanted to be a serious journalist, I’d want to write about war and the government.’ Even though I think those things are also important and should be written about, it wasn’t what lit me up.” Despite these insecurities, Goldstein followed her heart and has now written numerous culture and humor pieces as a freelance writer for publications including The New York Times, Vulture, and Marie Claire.
This writing experience helped inspire the creation of Goldstein’s first fiction novel, Retro, which hits shelves on June 23. In Retro, Ash, an out-of-work actress, gets a job as a tour guide for a time-travel company. While not her dream job initially, she becomes captivated by her work and finds herself in the center of a love triangle between her office crush in the present and a private eye in 1937. Being swept up in her new life, Ash decides not to pay attention to the threat her job poses to her real life and her memory.
While the inspiration for her debut novel partly came from her love of the contrast between a time-travel element and an office setting, it was the emotions and questions brought about by 2020 that motivated Goldstein to write it. “As the pandemic really intensified, I was struck by how pervasive this overwhelming sense of everything was better before was becoming, ” she says. “At the same time, I was really struggling to feel hopeful about the future … I want to be more excited about tomorrow than yesterday … but everywhere I look, it’s like, I wonder if anyone’s going to be able to afford a house.” This fond remembrance of the past and anxious anticipation of the future raised questions about how to stay hopeful and who decides what is meaningful. “All of those really big 4 a.m. dorm room conversations gave me that bigger energy of, oh yeah, there’s a novel here.” Goldstein says.
Goldstein used the discipline and research skills she’d acquired from her background in journalism to guide her through the writing process. “I’ve never had just the one job, and having that [freelance] training of ‘I’m gonna write from this time to this time, I’m gonna hit this word count, I’m gonna meet this deadline,’ is criminally underrated,” she says. “I talked to a bunch of experts to get certain period details right. And knowing that it takes reading the entire Oxford History of the American West to get three facts, watching a whole documentary for one quote, like just knowing that and having experienced that, it was like, of course this is what the process is like.’”
Together with these important skills, Goldstein’s experience and knowledge from interviewing actors eventually helped her develop the main character, Ash. This extensive research into the past and the dedication to making Ash’s experiences plausible were especially important to Goldstein in this story, given its fictional aspects. “If I’m asking you to believe in time travel, everything else better be bulletproof,” she says.
In writing the novel, Goldstein began to follow her natural curiosity as a reader to build the rest of the Retro world. “The deeper in it you get, the more that the story has its own life, and your characters have their own animating forces that make them do things and say things that are coming from you, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels much more like listening than talking,” she says. Using this instinctual driving force she found within herself, Goldstein continued to build outward to discover Ash’s personality and the details of the world she lives in.
At the time of reaching half her goal word count for the novel, the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 made it difficult for Goldstein to find culture journalism work. However, this led her to finally dedicate herself to finishing her novel. “I basically made a part-time job schedule for my novel, and I would clock in and out of the novel factory. It was three days a week, and that was the truly game-changing thing.” Since her job as a novelist and freelance writer came with a more flexible schedule that resembled college more than a 9-to-5, she was able to plan her day around these three-hour novel-writing shifts.
This commitment is now tied to Goldstein’s No. 1 piece of advice to young creative artists: to make your art real and significant to yourself first. “If you’re thinking about doing a big, ambitious, creative thing — like writing a novel, or making your movie, or recording your album, or whatever that is — take it as seriously as you take your commitments to other people,” she says. Although recognizing it may feel “embarrassing” at first, Goldstein believes that through this, you’ll actually gain more respect from your peers. “Don’t denigrate. [Don’t] create a part of yourself and minimize it, and treat it like it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t exist. Every piece of art that you have ever loved only exists because the person who made it believed in it when it did not exist yet, and they believed in it for a really long time.”
Within her advice for young journalists, Goldstein recognizes the unfortunate struggle of becoming a writer today. “It’s really hard out there, so be kind to yourself,” she says. “The best way to prepare yourself emotionally and psychologically for what it will be like is to have the same attitude you would have if you were walking around Nashville with your guitar and your demo tapes.” Still, Goldstein doesn’t want to discourage, and instead remains hopeful. “There’s a lot of work to be done,” she says. “I would love for it to be done by the compassionate, intellectually curious people who read this site.”
While Goldstein’s dream of writing a fiction novel has come true, the goal she set during her first year at the University of Pennsylvania still stands. “The goal is always to be able to be growing creatively, all of the time,” she says. “That’s the vision — in whatever form that takes.”