To Write 'Retro,' Jessica Goldstein Retreated Into Books About the Past
The author unpacked her own nostalgia as she crafted her genre-defying debut novel about a time-travel agent.
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In this author-curated rendition, Jessica Goldstein—pop culture journalist, humorist, and author of Retro—shares the books that inspired her debut novel.
Author and pop culture enthusiast Jessica Goldstein has always been obsessed with understanding why a piece of media, a celebrity, or a social media trend becomes popular at a particular moment. In recent years, she’s been especially fascinated with the proliferation of nostalgia—be it the endless cycle of rebooted IP or political propaganda.
Cue her debut novel, Retro, in which she examined that phenomenon in a genre-defying adventure story about a struggling actress, Ash, who takes a job at a time-travel agency. While sending clients on imaginative vacations in the past—and getting embroiled in a private investigator’s case in the 1930s—Ash also effectively avoids her personal life in the present.
Goldstein tells Marie Claire that writing the novel gave her a fresh perspective on nostalgia. “I’m into it as a way to stay connected to the things that made us who we are, the people we used to be and love, a time when our sense of self was less cluttered by adult obligations and noise,” she says. “But I’m totally anti-nostalgia as narcotic to distract us from participating fully in the present so we can get the future we deserve.”
To craft the novel—that’s as much a mystery and workplace send-up as it is a sci-fi romp—Goldstein was inspired by the through-a-portal-to-another world stories she grew up with: The Wizard of Oz; Alice in Wonderland; The Phantom Tollbooth. “Writing a novel is kind of like holding a magnet to your heart, and everything you care about just gets drawn in like metal filings to the edge,” she says. But she wasn’t rigid about genre to guide her style, often finding that recent bestsellers or neo-noirs were shaping her along the process.
“It really affirmed my belief in reading as widely and deeply as you can and not being rigid about only using your reading time ‘productively’...You just have to trust that your curiosity is taking you someplace worth going.”
Here, Goldstein shares the books that inspired Retro (available now)—spanning childhood classics to detective novels to nonfiction books about the tech industry.
"This is a perfect book about a boy named Milo who is bored every day all of the time, until he receives a mysterious package: the tollbooth through which he travels to the Lands Beyond, winding up on a rescue mission to save Princesses Rhyme and Reason. The things Juster does with language in this just blow me away. Incredible and strange as a kid; stunning as an adult. A+ Jules Feiffer illustrations, too!"
"I love spies and this is one of the greats! Like Retro’s Ash, the protagonist of TLDG is a young actress who is a bit lost—very susceptible to the offer of a role in 'the theater of the real,' a.k.a., as a spy working for Israeli intelligence. Her handlers encourage her to lose herself in the part; the longer she lives her cover, the less sure she becomes of what counts as her 'real' self and what’s just a performance."
"This is a slender, spare novel about a woman who is placed, via a magical realist temp agency, into a series of impossible jobs—a mate on a pirate ship, a department store mannequin, a ghost, some boy’s mom—while she waits around for any part of her life to become permanent. It’s all surreal and strange, so great on how flexible your sense of self can feel when your professional status is so vulnerable and ever-shifting."
"[In] Retro, Ash falls in with this hard-drinking private eye she meets in 1937 L.A., so I read a ton of noir to get the mood and language just right. This was one of my favorites. Crackling dialogue, sultry encounters, everyone is smoking and drinking basically all of the time. The plot is totally beside the point. It’s all about atmosphere, baby!"
"Saunders’ short stories are so good on how bizarre and dystopian work can be, and this collection includes one of my favorites (and a big Retro influence): the title story about a man who plays a caveman in this exhibit at a deeply unsettling amusement park. He has to live there and act in character all the time (no speaking English, etc.). I love the way the story shows the ugly, exhausting work of creating recreation for paying customers."
"Retro is a start-up run by this megalomaniacal tech billionaire. Wiener’s memoir of her time working in Silicon Valley—she arrives as a skeptic, gets sucked in and then taps out—really intrigued me. She writes so sharply about the super-specific and weird-but-normalized culture of this very particular time and place. Really helped me see how Retro would operate, with all those big tech perks and powers."
"The epigraph from Retro comes from this classic treatise on how everything would, in the age of television, be packaged as entertainment, distracting all people from the things that really matter and risking everything we hold dear. Everybody was so worried we were turning in 1984, but Postman, correctly, warned that we were headed towards Brave New World instead: a future in which everyone is too hooked on the devices that entertain us to even protest the world’s wrongs. Published in 1985 and truer than it ever was!"
