Maria Goodin Writer of a single play?

Mary Goodin gave us in 2013 Your sweetest lie. In this, so far only novel, emptied her heart and her experience as a volunteer at a mental illness center.

There are times, that people have a story to tell the world and only one. In the case of Goodin, who dealt with a social drama in a gastronomic novel, he built a different story, in which reality mixes with fiction, twists, separates and becomes entangled again with an engaging ease.

Who is Maria Goodin?

Maria was born in England, where she continues to live, in Hertfordshire. With a degree in English literature, she has worked as an administrative, teacher and therapeutic massage therapist. Public Your sweetest lie in England with the title nutmeg, based on a story with the same name, followed in Australia with the title The Storyteller's Daughter and later in the United States with the title From the Kitchen of Half Truth. After being marketed in English-speaking countries, it was translated into Italian, German, Swedish, and Spanish.

Who of us could assure the veracity of his memories?

How do we know if the things we live are real or the product of our imagination?

Your sweetest lie It is a book of those that you read in an afternoon, in which the pages turn without realizing it while the doors that contain the emotions are opened and the hunger grows to continue entering the story. This is not the only hunger it generates because gastronomic delights become another protagonist.

The novel has no characters deep, we only know them to the extent that they support the story that Maria wants to tell. They are not round characters and yet they become unforgettable even if time passes and other books occupy the most accessible place in our memory.

The protagonist, Meg, is passionate about science who grew up amid the smell of stew and glazes that come off the stove of a mother who wrapped her childhood in fantasy and fairy tales. The fantastic and wonderful world in which her mother raised her as if she were Alice in Wonderland, has only brought her disgust since her schoolmates began to make fun of her.

«In my first memory I am very small and I am sitting on the kitchen floor with my mother who is about to cut some climbing beans. Suddenly they escape from their hands and they start to climb up the furniture »« - »« The beans tickle me and I can't stop laughing »

While many adults miss the fantasy world of childhood, Meg finds it difficult to distinguish which are her real childhood experiences and which are the stories that her mother imagined for her. He does not know how his childhood was, so he does not like to talk about it. She is afraid of contrasting it with the rational thinking of the people around her. As an adult woman, she does not want to hear anything that cannot be explained by reason, she needs the security that logic gives. Their doubts and their eagerness to cling to what is provable, makes us wonder how many of the things we remember are true, how many a product of what they have told us and that our memory has set as its own, and how many a mixture between the two.

Meg's frustration with her mother will give way to the discovery of the reality cleverly concealed by the curtain of illusion with which her mother wrapped her as a child. Is a story as sweet as it lasts, a disjointed, rhythmic and constant diary, which speaks of love above all things and that teaches us that memory and truth do not usually coincide, but it also makes us understand that that does not make the memory less true or the truth more real. For better and for worse, we live and feel what our brain believes: Whether it happened or not is irrelevant.  

It is a story to read alone, ready to laugh, cry, get excited. Believing that the goodness of a person can shine on the evil of the world even though it cannot end it.

What will the future bring us from Goodin?

I would like to read Maria Goodin again, maybe I need more time or maybe this was her only story, her gift to all children who grow up in an environment in which they should never live, her tribute to all mothers who protect their children in the most extreme situations. If so, thank you for your novel, Maria. Be that as it may, it has managed to form a chapter of our past, although sometimes we may think that we have only imagined it.