Sweet, Not Saccharine
an interview with Matthew Goldberg
If the literary canon is to be given the microphone on the state of heterosexual American marriages, the consensus would be: everyone secretly hates their spouse. Wives are spurned, stifled, and surreptitiously horny for Something or Someone Else. Husbands, if granted any internal mechanisms at all, are distant and mercurial, harboring secrets of frequently volatile natures.
“Rock Bottom” blows the entire operation wide open. At every juncture, when one might mistakenly expect the protagonist—a middle-aged husband whose marriage is navigating turbulent waters—to pull away from his wife, instead, he leans in. It’s rare to encounter a character who, in one of the more challenging periods of their life, chooses kindness over bitterness. The protagonist’s devotion, combined with the story’s charming, stenographic narration, gives “Rock Bottom” a rare, heartwarming levity.
I had the privilege to speak with the author over Zoom about how the story was initially conceived, how it was revised away from its more cynical origins, and what the pursuit of happiness asks of our characters.
Jessika Bouvier: Could you walk me through the evolution of this story? Did the form and content come to you already intertwined, or did one aspect follow the other?
Matthew Goldberg: The characters and concept came first. It was always about this middle-aged couple who were falling out of love, struggling with their marriage crumbling, and also circling this idea of Maslow’s Hierarchy. The story changed substantially—the original draft began sort of in medias res, so you drop into meeting the character in the midst of the PurposeFul program. Then there was this long, extended flashback, and we hopped back to them in the midst of the program. At some point, reading it back, I realized the pacing was completely off. I also felt two things: one, the narrator needed to be softer, more hapless. In the early versions he was much more cynical. And then I found that the journal aspect, with those raw, more fragmented thoughts, really cracked the voice open.
All of this came through revision. It took about five years for the story to get to this stage. The original version was much shorter—I wrote it in 2019, I think?—at which point I workshopped it with my writing group, then did the MFA and workshopped it some more. Over time, as I kept revising, it kept growing.
JB: Oh, wow. I’m interested in what you said about the narrator actually, that he started off cynical. What made you decide to make him “softer,” as you said? Was it an external bit of feedback, or something you ascertained on your own?
MG: The feeling came from inside, definitely. As I’ve gotten older and maybe a bit wiser, I’ve transitioned into making my characters more sympathetic, I guess. Less curmudgeony, more sweet. Across my body of work, a lot of my characters’ conflicts are rooted in misunderstanding, this sort of failure to communicate their internal conflicts in a way that makes sense to outside parties. I like to place them in strange situations because I think it tends to strip away their practiced defenses, or at least make those defenses less effective. I also feel like it raises the emotional stakes. Readers can feel a character’s longing more acutely because they’re not hiding behind irony or hostility.
JB: I loved how much disbelief both the characters and readers are asked to suspend in “Rock Bottom.” Drugged popcorn, two Handlers built like mini-fridges, paying way too much money to subject yourself to vague degrees of physical torture for the promise of soup, much less (spoiler!) accidental murder. How do you approach the balancing act of believability in a story like this, where absurdism and reality walk hand in hand?
MG: For me, the key is making sure the reader never stops to ask logistical questions. The moment someone pauses to think—Wait, how does that actually work? or Why would anyone agree to this?—that’s usually a sign that something is out of balance. A lot of times the problem isn’t the absurdity itself, but rather the pacing or tonal precision. Those moments tell me the scene needs another pass, another injection of forward momentum, or a recalibration of what information I’m giving the reader and when.
I tend to think of it like juggling or walking a high wire with multiple balls in the air. You can add something outrageous only if everything else is calibrated to support it. Revision is really where that balance gets achieved, making sure no single element pulls too much attention to itself and breaks the illusion. When it works, the reader isn’t questioning plausibility, they’re just moving forward, accepting the rules of the story and seeing how far they’ll stretch.
JB: Did you end up adjusting aspects of the PurposeFul program in an effort to make it more or less bizarre based on feedback?
MG: The PurposeFul program arrived more or less fully fleshed out from the start. The Handlers, the popcorn, even the Good Engagement Guide. It was all there in the first draft. Actually, versions of PurposeFul already exist in real life. We don’t really question when parents agree to have their troubled kids effectively kidnapped from their homes and sent to “wilderness therapy camps,” or that shows like Beyond Scared Straight operate with full buy-in. Once you start looking at those models, the leap doesn’t feel that huge.
I think the only piece that changed significantly was the Zimmerman character, who became much more fully realized in the final version. I thought that including a kind of Guru figure to give the program a face or a voice of authority might help both the characters and the reader buy into the logic. But the bigger shift was realizing that, despite the strangeness of PurposeFul, the central conflict was the dissolution of the marriage. The propulsion comes from emotional stakes, and the program turns into a kind of pressure cooker for the relationship rather than the entire point of the story.
JB: This question relates more to what you were saying earlier about identifying what aspects of your characters need to change. Rather than see the narrator change from tough guy to sweet guy by beating him up with emotional conflict, which I think is more stereotypical, the narrator in this story starts out pretty battered already—like taking a bruised pear and roughening him up even more.
MG: A bruised pear who gets progressively more bruised.
JB: Exactly. When you’re thinking about character—as you were saying earlier that you’ve tended to be gentler, or make them more gentle—how do you approach the task of tough love? Is such a thing as too much suffering in the name of story, too much struggle?
MG: Struggle is so important. I don’t think you can meaningfully explore character without putting someone under pressure, and I also don’t think you get to anything like lasting happiness without struggle.
I actually taught a Happiness class at Temple for a while, and we talked about what people mean when they say they want to be “happy.” We looked at Maslow’s hierarchy, and also the Greek distinction between hedonic happiness, which is pleasure-based, and eudemonic happiness, which is rooted in purpose or self-understanding. That thinking fed pretty directly into PurposeFul. The program became a way to see what happens when comfort is removed and survival takes over—fear, hunger, that predator-versus-prey mindset. The suffering isn’t meant to be punitive or sensational. It’s more about testing whether something real or durable can come out the other side.
JB: To pivot into a sillier subject, what celebrity couple do you think stands the best chance of surviving the PurposeFul program? Or, conversely, who do you think would crumble?
MG: I have to admit, I don’t know celebrities all that well. My brain went straight to Friends, though. Ross and Rachel would fare horribly. Their whole relationship runs on miscommunication and insecurity, which is pretty much exactly what a program like PurposeFul would expose and amplify. Monica and Chandler might do okay. They’d still struggle, but probably together, which counts for a lot in that kind of extreme scenario. A sense of humor also helps.
JB: What aspects of your relationship to writing, be it your process or something else, do you wish you got to talk about more?
MG: I’m not sure I have a fully formed answer to that, but I do wish there was more space to talk about the kind of thinking that happens underneath stories. I’m drawn to fiction that’s actively engaged with ideas, that goes beyond capturing verisimilitude in relationships or identity, or a narrow version of emotional truth.
What I sometimes find missing is a willingness to ask what that emotional truth is actually in service of. The late anthropologist David Graeber has this line—“the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”—and that idea really sticks with me. You can be incredibly smart and effective, but if you’re applying those skills in the wrong direction, you’re just kind of wasting your talent. Having some kind of guiding life philosophy matters to me, and I like fiction that wrestles with meaning without turning it into an obvious argument or a lesson.