THE INVISIBLE LONE RANGER SUIT and Other Forest City Stories
Essay Collection / Phelps Publishing / 1987 / Illustrations and design: Roger Baker

The first of my essay collections. Of particular importance for me is the long feature on The Nelligans, in which actress Kate Nelligan and three of her four siblings – Mary Jo, Terri and the late Father Joe Nelligan – recount their tumultuous, heartbreaking and inspiring coming of age. I had transcribed hours and hours of one-on-one interviews with these wonderfully insightful and funny people and sometimes had all four of them recounting the same incident. How was I going to get all their best bits in without repeating the same material over and over again? And how could I minimize my own presence as an explainer and an arranger and just let them tell their own story? After I’d written about ten paragraphs of introductory narrative, I took the scissors to my transcripts and laid out the rest of the 15-page story like the script of a play, freely cutting from one speaker to another. My father who almost never commented on my work told me it was ‘terrific’. And with my own eyes I saw Douglas Cassan, my editor at London Magazine, pull ads off the proof sheets to make room for the whole thing. Working on this piece also made me start thinking about trying my hand at writing plays. - Herman Goodden

REVIEWS
“Goodden has an incisive wit which always manages to stop short of sarcasm. The title piece is a modern version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, with the author as both culprit and dupe. His hilarious and also sobering trilogy on his experiences in jail at age 22 (for running a red light on his bicycle and not being able to pay the fine is juxtaposed with such later pieces as his feelings at watching his eldest child start school. Whatever the age of his personal perspective essays, they are stamped with the same deft wit and ‘mot just’ which Londoners have come to regard as vintage Goodden.”
- Sheila Martindale, Canadian Author and Bookman

“A writer who has developed a unique and recognizable voice.”
- Western News

“Goodden has the gift of compulsive readability.”
– Ian Hunter, London Free Press