Parenting & Family Quote by Ellen Goodman

Goodman’s line lands like a cold legal truth dressed up as gossip: you can terminate contracts, vows, even daily presence, but you can’t terminate authorship. The opening triad escalates from office to bedroom to nursery, moving from socially acceptable severance (firing) to morally radioactive rupture (abandoning your children). That climb isn’t accidental; it forces the reader to notice how casually we talk about “moving on” until the subject is the people who actually carry your imprint.

The punch is the metaphor: “co-authors.” It reframes relationships as a book you’re writing together, not a series of disposable roles. In Goodman’s journalist sensibility, the language is crisp and civic-minded: she’s not romanticizing family so much as insisting on consequence. Even if you disappear, the story keeps your byline. The secretary has a work history, the spouse has a shared past, the children have a biography with you in the first chapters. “Forever” is the ethical trapdoor; it refuses the comforting fantasy that private choices stay private or that time dissolves accountability.

The subtext is aimed at a culture that treats adulthood as perpetual reinvention. Goodman punctures that self-help optimism with something closer to intergenerational realism: the people closest to you aren’t just witnesses to your life, they’re collaborators in its meaning. Leaving doesn’t erase the collaboration; it only changes the genre into something darker, and everyone still has to live with the published version.