Standout voice in local fiction, Goethals debuts novel “The Doublewide”

From staff reports

Candy Schein—the protagonist of Ann Goethals’s debut novel, The Doublewide—has always stayed quiet and kept her head down. Now age 28 and living in a modest apartment above a pizza parlor, Candy has spent years saving for a dream most people take for granted: a place to call her own. When she finds a “mystic blue” doublewide manufactured house, it sparks something bigger than a dream home—a journey towards self-acceptance and courage that forces her to leave behind the comfort of invisibility.

This novel speaks to anyone who has ever felt overlooked, underestimated, or uncomfortable in their own skin—and it does so with warmth, sharp insight, and a sense of humor. A quietly powerful story of self-discovery, resilience, and finding home in unexpected places, The Doublewide is a novel that readers won’t soon forget.

Ann Goethals has led a life filled with writing, but for over three decades her career centered on teaching English to her high school students in Chicago. Over 32 years, Goethals was a teacher, a mother to two children, and a union organizer in various leadership capacities. Teaching enabled her to indulge in her ongoing love affair with Empire, Michigan where she and her husband are lucky enough to have a home. Retiring in 2020, she rediscovered her passion for writing fiction—which became, to her, “a good way to survive a plague.” Her first novel, The Doublewide, is the result.

Here is an excerpt of The Doublewide, in which Candy tours the doublewide for the first time:

The Mystic, as she had already started calling it to herself, was big: it was a doublewide, after all, and all this time she had been looking at and imagining a single. She was single, after all, and would be forever; she knew that. Her world was small but roomy and she had come to appreciate the various empty places she had carved her life into. Besides, her world of choice was so big. The outdoors. Lake Michigan. The dunes. The hills. The woods. The storms. The snow piles in winter. The wildflowers in the spring, leaf storms in the fall. There was so much that was so spacious around her, that it had come to feel good and right to have a small life and she had imagined a small house. Randy was talking and Candy forced herself to listen.

“So, let’s get the bad news over with first, shall we? And then we can go on to enjoy the many, many, wonderful characteristics of this home.” Randy, and all the manufactured home websites for that matter, never used the word “mobile” or “manufactured” or “house.” It was always “home.” Randy was now rounding the corner to the back of the doublewide, which faced away from the lot. Candy followed. And there it was. A corner crunched in like it had taken a punch from a mailbox or something. It didn’t look particularly violent, like it had gotten snagged or anything. It was more like a crease with an open cut in the middle. Candy looked at it. And then looked some more. She pasted a frown on her face, trying to look as skeptical as possible.

Randy’s voice had now dissolved into a kind of background murmuring that contained words she sometimes caught: structural, water, took a corner, insurance, warranty.

“Can I go inside?” was all Candy thought to ask.

They climbed up the temporary, plywood stairs and Randy tried to make some sort of ceremony out of opening the front door. Candy didn’t need it. She walked into a huge white space. There were many windows, and light spilling in on the floor, which was finished in that kind of plastic-coated wood. It looked like oak, or maple. Something blond. Like her. And it made the whole place, along with the white walls and the sun shining in, luminous. Bright, open, but indoors. It was the largest, sunniest, indoor living space she had ever been in. Like the lofts she had seen in magazines. She’d never been in a loft outside of a barn, but the pictures in the magazines of the renovated factories had been amazing. This light was like that. She turned around like a kid at a carnival, trying as hard as she could to keep the shit-eating grin off her face.

I spoke with Goethals about the process of writing her debut novel after a career of teaching high school students how to write. “I was continually surprised at how much the process gave back to me. Any artist will tell you that the act of creation is also the act of self-creation, or re-creation.” In the process of writing The Doublewide, Goethals also felt inspired by Candy’s character and resilience. “She is cripplingly shy and introverted at the beginning of the novel. But she puts one foot in front of the other, makes the call, shows up at the site, learns to ask for help. That is courage. No swords, no dragons to slay, just making your way in a world that you have been estranged from.”

Goethals will hold a reading and Q&A on Saturday, Aug. 30, at 3 p.m. at the Glen Lake Community Library in Empire. She will also be at Pages and Grapes Bookstore in Grand Rapids on Sept. 6. You can follow her at AnnGoethals.com.