Robert Goolrick, advertising exec turned novelist

Robert Goolrick, a New York advertising executive whose firing at 54 liberated him to write a lacerating memoir of childhood sexual abuse and other family secrets, followed by acclaimed novels about endurance in the face of suffering and tragedy, died April 29 at a nursing center in Lynchburg, Va. He was 73.

The cause was pneumonia and complications from the coronavirus, said the actor and producer Bob Balaban, a friend of Goolrick’s since the 1970s, when they met on a Kool-Aid commercial.

Starting with his autobiography, “The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life” (2007), in which he wrote of being raped at 4 by his alcoholic father, then with “A Reliable Wife” (2009) and “Heading Out to Wonderful” (2012), best-selling and darkly sensual novels, Goolrick explored human connections that could turn violent and lurid.

Following to a large degree in the Southern gothic vein of William Faulkner, William Styron, Carson McCullers and Pat Conroy, among others, the Virginia-born Goolrick said he found through his retrospective approach to storytelling a modest reckoning, if never quite a fuller solace, with a past that retained a frightening power over him.

More than the loss of innocence, it was the wanton destruction of innocence that most concerned him thematically. “Childhood is a dangerous place,” he told USA Today. “No one leaves unscarred.” But he added as a caveat, noting his own spiral into alcoholism, cocaine addiction and self-mutilation: “It’s what happens after that, later in life, that is so destructive.”

He had spent much of his adulthood masking personal anguish through what, by all accounts, appeared to be outward achievement. He became an executive at major New York advertising firms such as AC&R and Grey, where he worked on glossy corporate campaigns.