DAVID GOODWILLIE
SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME
A MEMOIR
by David Goodwillie
“Not just a memoir, Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time is a painful and witty evocation of a very specific collective delusion called New York in the Nineties.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land
From its NASDAQ-fueled heyday to the tragic hours of 9/11, the provocative and mind-jolting story of Manhattan in its most recent golden age comes to life in David Goodwillie’s exhilarating new memoir, SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME (Algonquin Books; June 2, 2006; $24.95). Film rights to David Goodwillie's Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time have been optioned by Anne Chaisson at Dirty Rice ("Roger Dodger" & "P.S.") with Dylan Kidd and Goodwillie to adapt screenplay and Kidd to direct .
Filled with art, sports, and culture, and littered with sex, drugs, and celebrity, Goodwillie’s tale is a classic American story: With naive aspirations of literary renown, a young man moves to New York City. He arrives at the dawn of a decadent new age that celebrates youth and rewards dreamers with riches beyond imagining. But eight jobs later, he learns that success comes at a heavy price.
After his attempt to make it in minor-league baseball, Goodwillie arrives in Manhattan in 1995 and begins a journey through a series of implausible careers. He’s a private investigator with no talent for finding anyone; a copy writer for a sports auction house; and a journalist trailing the Mafia, only to become their target. Even when he breaks through as the most unlikely of experts at Sotheby’s, he’s lured away by the promise of Internet riches . . . only to find that he’s missed the party once again.
SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME teems with the temptations and contradictions of New York itself: tenements and penthouses, one-night stands and serious romances, gratuitous success and crashing failure. With a good measure of innocence and irony, Goodwillie takes readers on a quixotic search for meaning—the struggle to lead a creative, worthwhile life—and offers a memorable tale propelled by wit, humor, and a finely tuned sense of style.