"...A compelling account of life in Manhattan in the late 90's golden days before the towers fell. The former minor league ballplayer and aspiring writer chronicles his stints as private eye, investigative reporter, and sports expert at Sotheby's auction house with verve and wit but also insight into this country's proclivities." -- The Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Read the full review]
"In his exuberant and rollicking first memoir, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, David Goodwillie sinks his teeth into the New York City of the late '90s...[It's] a memoir that restores lighness, honesty and enthusiasm to the genre." -- The New York Post [Read the full interview]
"Want some buzz along with your beach read? Pick up the hot memoir du jour, Goodwillie's Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. It's a darkly humorous story...filled with art, sports, culture, sex and celebrity, and you just might want to keep reading after the beach is only a memory." -- The Boston Herald [Read the full review]
"[Goodwillie's] fluid writing a gift for dialogue make the book a clever, compelling, page turner." -- The Washington Post [Read the full review]
"A mezmerizing memoir and searing sketch of a decade in decline...[Goodwillie] conveys his wisdom via syntax that is simultaneously sobering, insightful and amusing." -- The Louisville Courier-Journal [Read the full review]
"A chatty, earnest, hilarious, and addictive account of what it was to be young last decade." -- Esquire.com [Read the full review]
"Goodwillie writes with wit and sober hindsight about life among the young dot-commers who were outearning their parents and fluent in the mechanics of stock options before attending their first college reunion." — Newsweek [Read the interview]
"Goodwillie is wonderful in describing not only this sad and lucrative trade [sports memorabilia], but the next step along the road to pure abstraction: dot-commery...In all this he has his great subject for these latter days." -- The Boston Globe [Read the full review]
"A candid story about good luck, bad decisions, and missed opportunities...[Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time] is a revealing document of an electric, proposterous moment that slipped away as fast as the NASDAQ fell." -- Chicago Reader (Critic's Choice) [Read the full review]
"An honest (and often earnest) record of a young person's experience coming to the city and thrashing about in its sea of opportunities...Mr. Goodwillie is an endearing narrator." -- The New York Sun [Read the full review]
"In his breakout first book, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, a breathless, humor-tinged account of postcollegiate life in the fast lane, David Goodwillie takes an unflinching look back at life in New York City during [the 90s]." — Elle [Read the full review]
"[S]mart, finely tuned storytelling... A memoir of bilious excess, related with humor and just the right amount of acidic sadness." — Kirkus Reviews [Read the full review]
"In sharing his career and relationship struggles, Goodwillie does more than just recount personal anecdotes—he reflects critically, yet ultimately affectionately, on the nature of American society." — Library Journal [Read the full review]
"After six years spent wondering if he has anything to say, he has certainly amassed enough raw, dizzying experience for this memoir of the World's City lurching into a new millennium." — Booklist [Read the full review]
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
"An astonishingly entertaining book about ... hell, the price of ambition? The vagaries of love? The essence of youth? Sure, all of those things, and a few dozen more, wound together brilliantly in a rollicking tale that is laugh-out-loud funny and, somehow, fiercely poetic. A wondrous debut." — Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics
"David Goodwillie casts himself as the classic innocent in the scary-absurd big city. It's a hell of a ride, with a wry, sure-handed narrator at the wheel." — David Gates, author of Jernigan
"Not just a memoir, Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time is a painful and witty evocation of a very specific collective delusion called New York in the Nineties."
— Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land
"Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time reminds me of the person I never was, and makes me miss him." — Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory and The Bird is Gone
"In Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, David Goodwillie presents a beautifully layered self-portrait--last-ditch jobs and wise women, parties and loss and artistic revelation--that is also a portrait of a city that didn't yet fathom it was young and innocent, didn't dream in all its full-blast boogie that it might be vulnerable, the last New York before 9/11." — Bill Roorbach, author of Temple Stream
"A lively—and elegantly written—account of a want-to-be writer's knockabout adventures in the Manhattan of the 90's: parties, jobs, friendships, gratuitous success, looming failure. And something more: belated, hard-earned arrival at what might pass for wisdom." — P.F. Kluge, author of Eddie & The Cruisers and Alma Mater
"By the end of David Goodwillie's sweet and sour, funny and sad memoir, you'll have felt and experienced every high and low he has." — Ron McLarty, author of The Memory of Running