B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, MAY 17 , 2022
obituariesBY ADAM BERNSTEINRobert Goolrick, a New York
advertising executive whose fir-
ing at 54 liberated him to write a
lacerating memoir of childhood
sexual abuse and other family
secrets, followed by acclaimed
novels about endurance in the
face of suffering and tragedy, died
April 29 at a nursing center in
Lynchburg, Va. He was 73.
The cause was pneumonia and
complications from the coronavi-
rus, said actor and producer Bob
Balaban, a friend of Mr. Gool-
rick’s since the 1970s, when they
met on a Kool-Aid commercial.
Starting with his autobiogra-
phy, “The End of the World as We
Know It: Scenes from a Life”
(2007), in which he wrote of
being raped at 4 by his alcoholic
father, then with “A Reliable
Wife” (2009) and “Heading Out
to Wonderful” (2012), best-selling
and darkly sensual novels, Mr.
Goolrick explored human con-
nections that could turn violent
and lurid.
Following to a large degree in
the Southern gothic vein of Wil-
liam Faulkner, William Styron,
Carson McCullers and Pat Con-
roy, among others, the Virginia-
born Mr. Goolrick said he found
through his retrospective ap-
proach to storytelling a modest
reckoning, if never quite a fuller
solace, with a past that retained a
frightening power over him.
More than the loss of inno-
cence, it was the wanton destruc-
tion of innocence that most con-
cerned him thematically. “Child-
hood is a dangerous place,” he
told USA Today. “No one leaves
unscarred.” But he added as a
caveat, noting his own spiral into
alcoholism, cocaine addiction
and self-mutilation: “It’s what
happens after that, later in life,
that is so destructive.”
He had spent much of his
adulthood masking personal an-
guish through what, by all ac-
counts, appeared to be outward
achievement. He became an exec-
utive at major New York advertis-
ing firms such as AC&R and Grey,
where he worked on glossy corpo-
rate campaigns.
A droll raconteur and meticu-
lous dresser from his John Lobb
shoes to his Hermès ties, he was
much in demand as a dinner-par-
ty guest. “Whether he was seated
next to a celebrity or a plumber,
he was always curious about the
way people lived their lives,” said
Lynn Grossman, a writer married
to Balaban and who described
her friend’s far-ranging intellect.
“If he was speaking to the plumb-
er, he could speak with authority
about plumbing in 17th-century
British castles.”
Director and screenwriter Paul
Schrader recalled Mr. Goolrick as
a “source of inspiration and com-
panionship.” Schrader often in-
vited his friend on film sets and
gave him an associate producer
credit on “The Walker” (2007),
about a young man who escorts
older society women. “So many of
those people you give credits for
the money, but with Robbie, it
was because he was someone you
could brainstorm with. He was a
go-to person for feedback and
ideas.”
In an essay after he became a
published author, Mr. Goolrick
reflected on navigating “the com-
plex and often terrifying interior
of an outwardly ordinary life. My
life had been an effort to appear
to be right at all times, and the
effort had exhausted me. My
clothes were immaculate, my
house charming, and my dinner
parties a success, yet inside I felt
completely dead.”
He wrote that he increasingly
relied on gin and cocaine,
prowled Manhattan for anony-
mous sexual encounters with
men and women, and furtively
cut his body. He once slit his arms
while watching the Broadway
show “Dreamgirls,” observing in
his memoir that the seeping pur-
ple-red blood resembled “the
dark glossy lipstick of a beautiful
woman.”
He was at times so high after a
night out, he wrote, he could
barely pronounce his street ad-
dress to cabdrivers. And he was
so unaware of his surroundings,
he was mugged five times on his
own block.
An increasingly difficult col-
league, Mr. Goolrick said he was
“suddenly and vertiginously
fired.” He was subsequently insti-
tutionalized for months follow-
ing a nervous breakdown, but he
left with the conviction that he
could become a writer, a long-
held ambition. Writing, he added,
was “giving to the world.”
“The End of the World as We
Know It,” published by the inde-
pendent house Algonquin Books,
was widely and positively re-
viewed — “barbed and canny,
with a sharp eye for the infliction
of pain,” New York Times book
critic Janet Maslin wrote. Heunveiled a paternal heritage of
bourbon and mental illness and
painted his mother as elegant,
intelligent, emotionally unde-
monstrative, wallowing in her
unhappiness and prone to bleak,
alcohol-infused declarations like,
“You wreck your own life and
then, very gently, you wreck the
lives of those around you.”
The success of Mr. Goolrick’s
memoir led to the publication byAlgonquin of his first novel,
which had been written earlier
and which dozens of publishers
had turned down.
“A Reliable Wife,” praised by a
Guardian book critic for its “high
drama evolving out of avarice
and lust,” summited the New
York Times bestseller list, which
Mr. Goolrick attributed to its
bodice-ripping qualities and pop-
ularity among book clubs. Theplot, set in frostbitten Wisconsin
in 1907, was about a widower
seeking a practical and homely
mail-order bride and instead get-
ting an ominous beauty.
“What interests me in human
life is the possibility of goodness,”
Mr. Goolrick told the Daily Beast.
“With ‘A Reliable Wife,’ I wanted
to make a novel in which trou-
bled people are somehow re-
deemed by love.”Robert Cooke Goolrick was
born in Charlottesville on Aug. 4,
1948, and grew up in Lexington,
Va., where his father taught his-
tory at the Virginia Military Insti-
tute. He graduated in 1970 with
an English degree from Johns
Hopkins University and initially
pursued an interest in filmmak-
ing on a fellowship that funded
his travels to France, England
and Greece.
He eventually entered adver-
tising, a field that he once said
“takes people who have talent but
no specific ambition,” and en-
joyed a steady if restless rise as a
copywriter at major firms. He
moonlighted as a freelance writ-
er, once publishing an article
about his futile attempt to locate
the reclusive novelist Thomas
Pynchon.
The piece ends in a vivid
dream in which Pynchon sends
him a letter — “typed on graph
paper, the paragraphs widely
spaced and not indented” and
concludes with an existential rid-
dle befitting his literary target:
“The world gives nothing. The
world, my dear man, gives all
there is.”
As he became a writer, Mr.
Goolrick left New York to avoid
the cocktail party scene and “lit-
erary freak show” of Manhattan.
From his rented 19th-century
farmhouse in Weems, Va., he
wrote two more well-received
novels, “Heading Out to Wonder-
ful,” about an illicit romance in
1948 small-town Virginia, and
“The Fall of Princes” (2015), about
a Wall Street trader in the 1980s
who falls victim to his debauch-
ery.
Mr. Goolrick, who never mar-
ried, is survived by a brother and
a sister. He said his memoir
caused a schism among the sib-
lings, and he drew accusations
from his parents’ friends of em-
bellishing or lying. He usually
replied citing the first line of “A
Reliable Wife”: “The thing is, all
memory is fiction.”
After the publication of his
memoir, Mr. Goolrick found satis-
faction in offering help to the
many people who sought his
advice on surviving childhood
trauma. He often put them in
touch with support groups that
could offer understanding and
comfort.
“When I was young, I used to
have a nightmare all the time,”
Mr. Goolrick told interviewer
Skip Prichard. “And the night-
mare was that there was some-
thing terribly wrong with me,
something hurt. And I would
open my mouth to tell my mother
or whoever was around that
something was wrong with me,
and nothing would come out. I
was mute. In writing, I found a
way to break that muteness and
to find a voice.”ROBERT GOOLRICK, 73
Author whose books explored su≠ering and endurance
ANDREW WATKINS/ALGONQUIN BOOKS
Robert Goolrick spent much of his adulthood masking personal anguish through what, by all accounts,
appeared to be outward achievement. “My clothes were immaculate, my house charming, and my
dinner parties a success, yet inside I felt completely dead,” he wrote in an essay.In his autobiography,as well as “A ReliableWife” and “Heading Outto Wonderful,” Mr.Goolrick exploredhuman connections thatcould turn violent.“David had a radical love of
humanity,” she said. “He was ev-
eryone’s uncle. At RPM, he even-
tually had 40 people who worked
there, and he hired a vegan chef to
cook for them. That’s the employ-
er that everyone should be, but it’s
the kind of employer that late
capitalism really doesn’t care to
support. It’s pretty much the op-
posite of the small handful of
monopolies that are taking over
the world at the moment.”BY ADAM BERNSTEINDavid Marcuse, whose Com-
mon Concerns bookstore in
Washington became a communi-
ty hive for bohemians and hard-
core liberals in the 1980s by offer-
ing publications, posters and T-
shirts with assertively left-wing
political messaging, died April 7
at a hospital in Baltimore. He was
73.
The cause was sepsis and respi-
ratory failure, said his brother,
Michael Marcuse.
A onetime Pennsylvania Eagle
Scout who became permanently
radicalized as a college student
during the Vietnam War era, Mr.
Marcuse was a serial entrepre-
neur who put his politics and
creative marketing talents in
service of selling books. He owned
several Washington-area book-
shops over the decades, but Com-
mon Concerns, based in the Du-
pont Circle neighborhood from
1980 until its shuttering in 1991,
drew the widest attention.
Like a handful of other Wash-
ington bookstores run at that
time by communist and socialist
groups, Common Concerns
thrived in opposition to President
Ronald Reagan’s administration.
Mr. Marcuse promoted the shop
under the slogans “More Mao
Than Thou” and “Still Subversive
After All These Years,” and
stocked shelves with obscure aca-
demic journals as well as femi-
nist, trade union and Indigenous
periodicals. He also sold
B lack-history playing cards.
“It was the only place I could
find kids’ books that weren’t so
Eurocentric,” one frequent pa-
tron, identified as a scholar from
Mauritius, told The Washington
Post in 1991.
Presiding over the store was
Mr. Marcuse, readily identifiable
during those years with his neck-
covering beard. He was, by all
accounts, a boundlessly good-hu-
mored man and habitue of the
local punk scene who had a thor-
ough knowledge of seemingly ev-
ery alternative press in North
America. He piped in West Afri-can rock music, sold tickets to
Sweet Honey in the Rock con-
certs, and served up pots of coffee
cultivated by farmers said to be
on the side of anti-colonial and
anti-military struggles in Africa
and Central America.
The store was, for many years,
an energetic melting pot of resi-
dents and a locale for poetry read-
ings and other gatherings. His
“Meese Is a Pig” posters and T-
shirts — referring to the Reagan
attorney general who waged bat-
tles against abortion rights, affir-
mative action and pornography
— were the most popular items in
the store, but ultimately not
enough to save it.
Running a small business with
tight profit margins, he could notsurvive a national recession and
the dramatically increased rent
and property tax bills as Dupont
Circle further gentrified. But he
also accepted blame for his inabil-
ity to part with misfit employees.
“I should have fired some people
earlier,” he told The Post in 1991.
“And shoplifting — people don’t
like to talk about it, but it’s a
business.”
David Gerald Marcuse was
born in Ashland, Pa., on June 28,
1948, and grew up mostly in Lan-
caster, Pa. He was young when his
parents divorced, and he was
raised almost entirely by his
mother, who taught English at a
junior-high school.
He received a bachelor’s degree
in political science from Ameri-
can University in 1970, the same
year he helped start the District’s
Community Bookstore that
aimed to serve the Marx-Mao
crowd. He said he included a
smattering of books by conserva-
tive Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-
Ariz.) under the theory that the
core customer should “know his
enemy.”
Mr. Marcuse left that business
after about a year and, initially
from his Volkswagen Bug and
later from a warehouse in Rock-
ville, operated a wholesale book
distributorship called RPM that
focused on small- and alternative-
press texts. He also began a short-
lived retail store, Bookworks, in
Old Town Alexandria, and be-
came manager of Sidney Kramer
Books in Washington.
After Common Concerns
closed, he spent more than a dec-
ade as co-owner with his friend
Charles Dukes of Chuck & Dave’sBooks, Etc., which sold books and
toys in the liberal Montgomery
County enclave of Takoma Park.
Mr. Marcuse, who had trouble
standing because of a painful con-
dition called peripheral neuropa-
thy, later worked as a bus driver
for special-needs children in
Montgomery County Public
Schools.
For many years, he was also a
volunteer driver for social-service
organizations including Shep-herd’s Table and Meals on Wheels,
as well as St. Stephen and the
Incarnation Episcopal Church in
Washington. A longtime Takoma
Park resident, he moved to Rock-
ville four years ago. Survivors in-
clude his brother, of Silver Spring.
His niece, Deborah Marcuse, a
civil rights and employment law-
yer, recalled her uncle as relent-
lessly optimistic despite a career
of health and business vicissi-
tudes.DAVID MARCUSE, 73
Entrepreneur ran liberal bookstores, including D.C.’s Common Concerns
FAMILY PHOTO
David Marcuse attends the March for Women’s Lives in Washington in 199 2. Mr. Marcuse was a serial
entrepreneur who put his liberal politics and creative marketing talents in service of selling books. He
owned several D.C.-area bookstores over the decades.“David had a radicallove of humanity. Hewas everyone’s uncle.”
Deborah Marcuse,
David Marcuse’s niece