Goldberg is an accomplished amateur musician. She plays the banjo and accordion in a Brooklyn-based indie rock quartet, The Walking Hellos. She has performed with The Galerkin Method and the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. She formerly collaborated with the New York art collective Flux Factory.[3] She has contributed song lyrics to the musical group One Ring Zero.[4]
Career
While in Prague, Goldberg completed her first novel, Kirkus, a story of an Eastern European circus troupe engulfed by the onset of World War II. She gave it to an agent who shopped it for 18 months, but it was not published by the time she had begun working on Bee Season, so it was shelved.
After returning to Brooklyn Goldberg took several jobs, including working on a production of a Stephen King horror movie. She was let go from that job, which brought an unforeseen benefit - the six months of unemployment benefits checks gave her sufficient time to finish Bee Season ("It was a grant, as far as I was concerned", she told an Oberlin student interviewer in 2005).[2]
In 2005 Goldberg published a second novel, Wickett's Remedy (2005), which is set during the 1918 influenza epidemic. Her third novel, The False Friend, was published in 2010. It describes a woman whose memory is jogged, causing her to revisit a tragic event in her youth. "It's about memory, hometowns and the adults children turn into," Goldberg told an interviewer.[6]Feast Your Eyes was published in 2019.