Author taps Fresno landmarks, landscape in latest novel. ‘Write about places you know’

Gary Goldstein needed a setting for his latest novel, “The Mother I Never Had.”

He was looking for a hometown-kind-of-place, somewhere full of secrets and ghosts. Ideally, it would be an overnight drive from Los Angeles; somewhere far enough for Goldstein’s character to be running from, but close enough for the eventual return that makes for the mystery of the novel.

Fresno was a logical, and practical, choice.

“By name, it has its own image that people conjure up,” says Goldstein, whose book was released this week by Hadleigh House Publishing. It is available now at Barnes and Noble and other booksellers.

“It sounds funny. Like Kalamazoo,” he says.

But Fresno is also full of history and has a wistful quality, something that Goldstein picked up on while visiting friends and family in the area over the years.

The author grew up on Long Island, went to college in Boston and now lives in Los Angeles.

Fresno is his husband’s hometown and a place Goldstein has visited enough to feel comfortable incorporating it into his work.

His niece and nephew have been part of the local theater scene, so he knows about Children’s Musical Theaterworks and the Good Company Players. He knows about the Tower Theatre and its recent controversy. And he knows the Tower District itself including places like Goldstein’s Mortuary and Delicatessen, which gets a passing mention in the novel, mostly because of its name.

“As a writer, it’s very kind of vivid to write about places you know,” Goldstein says.

A book club in Clovis has already chosen “The Mother I Never Had” for its November reading list and Goldstein will sit in on their meeting via Zoom. He hopes other local book clubs might follow suit.

“I love that I have spent real time as a real person in Fresno.”

The writing didn’t come without its research.

Goldstein’s credits mostly include work on TV and movies. He’s written a number of holiday films for Hallmark Channel, including “Hitched for the Holidays” and “Lights, Camera, Christmas!,” which is slated for release Nov. 5. But he is also a contributing film critic and arts feature writer for the Los Angeles Times and has spent years researching and writing about documentaries.

“I’ve become very specific about the facts and getting it right,” he says.

For “The Mother I Never Had,” that meant checking timelines. Was the Elbow Room restaurant a place that people went to hang out when the book’s main action took place 30 years ago?

Did the grocery store that used to be in the Fig Garden Village become a Whole Foods? Or, was the Whole Foods just built near the spot at some point?

“This is how the minutia goes,” says Goldstein.

So, there were phone calls and fact checks and any time Goldstein was in town visiting he would drive through the neighborhoods described in the book, just to make sure he got the geography of it all.

All of this lest someone, even one person, read the book and say, “He’s not from here. He doesn’t know.”

“You want to honor the places that you are writing about,” Goldstein says.