A Year-Round Guide to Franklin and Nantahala

Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations

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Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations

Our State Book Club With Wiley CashJoin The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.


Over the course of their 57-year marriage, Judy Goldman and her husband, Henry, have carried on a long-running argument: They can’t agree who the lucky one is. Goldman insists that it’s her; Henry insists that it’s him.

“I believe each person should feel he or she is the lucky one,” Goldman writes in her 2019 book Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap. “If only one partner feels that way, the marriage is in trouble before the invitations even go out.”

The Goldmans sent their wedding invitations only a month after they met in 1967. They were married just eight weeks later at her childhood home in Rock Hill, South Carolina, before the couple moved to Charlotte, where Henry had recently opened an optometry practice. They’ve lived in the Queen City ever since, and now, their two adult children live nearby with their own families.

While the Goldmans felt certain of their future together after their first date, their marriage, like all marriages, would face challenges, perhaps none greater than the fallout from an elective procedure that Henry underwent in 2006 after years of back issues.

What was pitched as a routine injection for pain relief instead resulted in Henry immediately losing feeling from the waist down. While Henry was still in the recovery room, Goldman tore paper towels from a dispenser and wrote on them with shaking hands, trying to chronicle the events of the day. Her words were driven by uncertainty, anger, and, at the core of all of her emotions, fear.

Illustration of a couple with wedding rings intertwined over them

illustration by Andrea Cheung

In the years that followed, the couple navigated challenges with Henry’s recovery, all the while plagued by regret regarding the procedure and frustration with his medical care. Goldman wrote it all down, revealing both the joys and difficulties of a life lived together, for better or for worse.

“I don’t mind the act of revelation,” she says, “whether it’s in person or on the page. I just feel like all of our stories are pretty similar, and so there’s very little fear for me when I reveal difficult things about my life. All of us have difficult things in our lives.”

At the time of Henry’s procedure, Goldman had already published two collections of poetry and two novels, but she found her footing in memoir. “Poetry is very intimate, and when I went to fiction, I was trying to make things up. But I’m not good at making things up, so my two novels were just thinly veiled true stories of my own,” she says. “When I began writing memoirs, it felt like I was coming back home.”

Goldman has published two memoirs in addition to Together. Losing My Sister (2012) tells the story of her relationship with her older sister, Brenda, from their childhood to their shared medical diagnoses in adulthood, exhibiting the various ways in which we can lose family members. Goldman’s most recent memoir, 2022’s Child, is about her lifelong relationship with Mattie Culp, a Black woman who worked as her family’s live-in housekeeper when Goldman was a child. In this book, the author explores the love she and Culp shared amid the structural racism of the time.

All of Goldman’s nonfiction asks tough questions of her, forcing her to confront unsettling truths — something most writers would find incredibly difficult, especially when writing about one’s own marriage.

And yet, this is a couple who’s been having the same argument for nearly 60 years. Who’s the lucky one? After reading Together, most readers will agree with them both.


Love Story

Book jacket for Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap

photograph by Matt Hulsman

Judy Goldman’s second memoir, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap, contains two strands. The first chronicles the disastrous fallout from a back procedure that left her husband paralyzed from the waist down. The second tells the story of their marriage. Goldman’s talents as a storyteller and poet are evident as she braids these two threads together, infusing them with narrative momentum and a deep attention to language. She writes with a precision of detail that makes her prose read like poetry. In probing her own character and how she influences the lives of the people she loves, Goldman is unflinching in her portrayal of the glories and challenges of a life lived together.


More to Explore: Hear from Judy Goldman in new episodes out February 4 and 18. Listen at ourstate.com/book-club-podcast.

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This story was published on Jan 15, 2025

Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash is an award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of four novels and the founder of This Is Working. He has published widely on issues ranging from the environment to history to foodways to music and is also the host of the Our State Book Club podcast. He serves as the executive director of Literary Arts at UNC Asheville and lives in North Carolina with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their daughters, Early and Juniper.