Breaking Her Fall

"Breaking Her Fall is a corker-- vivid, brilliantly marbled with harmonies and textures and people vibrant with life." -- Richard Bausch

Just before eleven on an ordinary summer night in Washington, D.C., Tucker Jones picks up the phone, expecting to hear that his teenage daughter, Kat, is back from the movies. But the caller is another parent, a man who tells Tucker that Kat was actually at a party-- and makes a shocking allegation about what happened to her there. From that moment Breaking Her Fall sweeps irresistibly forward to it s wrenching, and redemptive, conclusion.

In a blind rage, Tucker races to the party to find Kat already departed, but his full-boil interrogation of the boys still present spills over into a confrontation-- and ends with one of the boys crashing into a glass tabletop. In a second, his rage turns to remorse, and he soon finds himself under arrest. Tucker could easily lose his home and his business, but he is most concerned about losing his daughter.

Stephen Goodwin writes with insight and rare power about the way that passion rearranges lives. As Tucker and Kat and everyone around them seek to repair the damages of that night, Breaking Her Fall charts their uncommonly difficult passage from despair to reconciliation and hope with extraordinary grace.

Stephen Goodwin comes from a large family whose roots are Irish Catholic, Russian Jew, Pennsylvania Dutch, and English. He was born in Pennsylvania, raised in Alabama, and went to high school in Rhode Island. He attended Harvard College and served a tour of duty in the army before receiving his M.A. at the University of Virginia, where he studied with Peter Taylor. His first novel, Kin, was published in 1975, followed by The Blood of Pardise in 1979. Goodwin is a co-founder of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and served as its first president, and he was Director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1987-1989. His articles and short stories have appeared in a number of magazines, including GQ and The Sewanee Review, and he has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merril Foundation, and the NEA. He has been a member of the writing faculty at George Mason University since 1979.