{"product_id":"seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time","title":"Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e Fresh out of college and following a brief and disastrous stint playing minor league baseball, David Goodwillie moves to New York intent on making his mark as a writer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Arriving in Manhattan in the mid-nineties, Goodwillie quickly falls into one implausible job after another. He becomes a private investigator, imagining himself as a gumshoe, a hired gun—only to realize that he's more adept at bungling cases than at solving them. When, in his stint as a freelance journalist, he unveils the Mafia in a magazine exposé, he succeeds only in becoming a target of their wrath. As a copywriter for a sports auction house, he imagines documenting the great histories hidden in priceless artifacts but finds himself forced to write about a lock of Mickey Mantle's hair. Even when he seems to break through, somehow becoming the sports expert at Sotheby's auction house—appearing on major news networks, raking in a hefty salary—he's lured away by the promise of Internet millions...just in time for the dot-com crash. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Teeming with the vibrancy of a city in hyperdrive, \u003ci\u003eSeemed Like a Good Idea at the Time\u003c\/i\u003e recounts a dizzying and enthralling search for authenticity in a cynical, superficial—and suddenly dangerous—age.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In his heartbreaking and hilarious struggle to become a big-city writer, Goodwillie becomes something more: an important voice of the lost generation he so elegantly describes.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Workman Publishing","offers":[{"title":"9781565128286","offer_id":22018950663,"sku":"9781565128286","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1210\/1100\/products\/9781565128286-optimized_625cd0e3-0227-41c4-9e1f-ee0fb3259d7d.jpg?v=1698219501","url":"https:\/\/workman-feed-prod.myshopify.com\/products\/seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time","provider":"zzz_Workman Publishing","version":"1.0","type":"link"}