Allegra Goodman

What sparked Intuition?
I was interested in writing a novel about loyalty and betrayal. Infidelity is commonplace, but I began to think about other sorts of betrayal, including intellectual dishonesty.
 

Please set the scene of the novel for us.
A cancer research lab in Cambridge, Mass. A young post doc achieves spectacular results and everyone is thrilled – except for one lone dissenter, who also happens to be his girlfriend. She suspects that his results are too good to be true.
 

Do you have a particular attachment to any of the characters or places in the novel? If so, which one(s) and why?
I am attached to each of my characters. There are no clear cut heroes or villains in my book. I am close to all of them, and I adopt their points of view. However, if I had to choose one character who is particularly important to me, I'd pick Marion Mendelssohn, the co-principal investigators in the lab. She is a middle aged scientist who has suffered and survived in a field extremely tough for women.

Ironically – and this shows how old gender roles persist – I originally planned just one principal investigator, Sandy Glass. My sister, Paula Fraenkel, who is a young hematology researcher and clinical oncologist, told me when I began writing this book – 'Allegra, no one has written about women scientists and what they go through.' I immediately saw that she was right.
 

What are you reading at the moment?
I am reading the new translation of War and Peace, Simon Schama's Power of Art, and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis.
 

What are you working on now?
I am in the middle of a new novel. I work on it whenever I can, and dream about it at night.