Myla Goldberg Books in Order

If you want the breakout novel: Bee Season
If you like historical fiction: Wickett's Remedy → Feast Your Eyes
If you want memory, suspense, and uneasy childhood friendships: The False Friend
If you want her nonfiction side: Time's Magpie
If you're reading with a child: Catching the Moon

Myla Goldberg grew up in Laurel, Maryland, in a Jewish family, and she has said that writing was what she wanted to do from the time she was about six. One of her earliest writing memories is sitting at her grandparents' kitchen table, making up and illustrating a story about Edgar Allan Poe in crayon.

She was a hungry reader, the kind of kid who could move easily from Dr. Seuss and Judy Blume to Stephen King, V. C. Andrews, Bridge to Terabithia, and Watership Down. That wide appetite shows up in her fiction, which can be smart and structurally playful without ever losing sight of story. She attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, where she was recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and later studied English at Oberlin College.

She never really had a backup plan.

After college, Goldberg spent a year in Prague, teaching English and writing every day. She has described that stretch as a kind of graduate school, the place where she first built a real writing discipline and found an informal workshop community outside the classroom. Prague also stayed with her long after she left, and it later became the subject of Time's Magpie, her book of essays about the city.

Her first completed novel was not Bee Season but Kirkus, a story about an Eastern European circus troupe at the start of World War II. The book got her an agent, but after many encouraging rejections it was shelved. Back in New York, she worked a run of day jobs, including a film production job she eventually lost. The upside was six months of unemployment checks, which she once jokingly described as a grant. That time helped her finish Bee Season, the novel that introduced her to a wide audience and was later adapted for film.

Success did not make her settle into one lane.

Bee Season follows nine-year-old Eliza Naumann as spelling bees, family strain, and Jewish mysticism begin to pull her household apart. Wickett's Remedy moves to Boston during the 1918 flu pandemic and turns public disaster into intimate drama. The False Friend digs into childhood cruelty and the slipperiness of memory after a girl's friend disappears. Years later, Feast Your Eyes took yet another sharp turn, telling the life of a fictional photographer through catalog notes, letters, interviews, and memory, while asking what art costs a mother and what a daughter can ever really know.

Readers who come back to Goldberg usually come back for the same reason: she likes unusual forms, but she uses them to get closer to people, not farther away. Her books keep circling family rituals, spiritual longing, ambition, shame, secrecy, and the odd ways people rewrite their own past. Even when the settings change, from suburban classrooms to flu wards to downtown art scenes, she is interested in what happens when ordinary lives tilt suddenly into obsession or upheaval.

Goldberg now writes and teaches in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband, cartoonist Jason Little, and their two daughters. She is also a musician who has played banjo and accordion with the Brooklyn band The Walking Hellos. That mix of solitude and collaboration suits her. On the page, she is often drawn to private fixations. In music, she has spoken about enjoying the give and take of making something with other people.