In Helen of Nowhere, the second novel by the American writer Makenna Goodman, the titular character—the owner of a countryside home being shown to a disgraced professor by a real estate agent—exists as a kind of ghost, her presence lingering over the set piece of the house. It is a book about men, women and the construction of the self; the way our surroundings do and do not reflect us. “She never had a mirror in the house,” the agent says of Helen early on. “Inside every person is a landscape, Helen would say. Why look at your reflection in search of the truth?”

Rhian Sasseen: Helen of Nowhere is divided into five “acts,” each taking the form of a monologue from the perspective of the characters, akin to a play. What role does the theater play in your writing? 

Makenna Goodman: Theater as an influence crept into the later stages of writing this book. The more I worked on it, the more exposition I stripped out. What began as a simple dialogue became a more complex conversation between characters. It became clear that the only approach that would work for the book was a Socratic dialogue, but I needed to find the right form to signal to the reader who was talking.¹ Creating acts and a character list allowed me to do that.

The book is set in an empty house, which called out to me visually—I found myself moving props around in my mind while writing. I wanted the reader to build a visual world in their own mind. Essentially, I was staging a play for them, but without the clunkiness of reading stage directions. I am not a scholar of theater, by any means. I do enjoy reading plays—I love Caryl Churchill, Annie Baker and the films of Agnès Varda, which are very theatrical. I find I am moving more toward theater as I love the feeling of an audience, the energy of a group making something together that exists in body as well
as mind.

RS: How did you approach writing this novel? With its strong emphasis on the voices of these characters, did it differ from the writing process of your previous novel?