When he was just a kid, Tod Goldberg sat in his optometrist's office. The cold, metal examination machine, looking exactly like something out of a sci-fi movie, dwarfed the tiny first-grader's head.

The doctor turned to Goldberg's mother and said the boy was terribly dyslexic — there's no way he would ever read or write beyond a fourth-grade level.

“Don't you say that,” said Jan Curran, Tod's mother.

He's going to read, she said. He's going to write.

And he did.

Goldberg has now authored several books, including “Living Dead Girl,” a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

His newest book is a collection of short fiction, “Other Resort Cities,” released earlier this month.

In the flesh

If you were only familiar with his writing, the real-life Tod Goldberg would be far from what you'd expect.

When Goldberg walks into a local Starbucks, he's the guy that makes everyone look up and take notice. He has a boyish face with a warm, wide smile. He easily makes others laugh.

“People are always surprised by how nice he is,” says Linda Woods, Goldberg's sister. “He's really silly and fun. He has a sparkly-ness.

“You read his books, though, and they're so deep and dark and mysterious, and that's so unexpected.”

Take, for instance, Goldberg's latest book. The 10 pieces are thick with themes of emptiness, isolation, broken dreams.

“It's not all loss and sadness,” Goldberg says. “There's a funny story about a Mafia hit man who pretends to be a rabbi. It's kind of a comic story about death.”

At a young age Goldberg became obsessed with the idea of kidnapping, abduction and leaving things behind.

“I think sometimes I wanted to be out of the life I had,” he says.

Goldberg was only 5 years old when his mother, Jan Curran, was given six months to live. His family created a contingency plan for what would happen to the kids — besides Tod and Linda there's Karen Dinino and Lee Goldberg.

“That had an enormous effect on me,” he says. “There was the very real sense that somebody would take us away.”

The unthinkable never happened. The children were never taken away, and their mother is still alive.

But Woods says that dark period is what fueled their common desire to be creative, tell great stories and do beautiful things.

“We all had that fear of what would happen to us, and we didn't have anyplace else to put what was happening,” she says. “Lee and Tod put it into their writing. I put it into art. And Karen is saving the world.”

Lee Goldberg now writes books and TV shows, including the “Monk” novels and some episodes of the series.

Woods and Dinino, also a civil rights attorney, co-wrote the best-selling books “Journal Revolution: Rise Up and Create!” and “Visual Chronicles: The No-Fear Guide to Creating Art Journals.”

They remain close enough that Tod Goldberg can rattle off his siblings' phone numbers by heart.

“That's something that's hard for other people to grasp. We didn't need to compete. We only entertained each other,” Woods says. “But we grew up with an unspoken knowing that we would never abandon each other. That made us closer in the end.”

Becoming a writer

Tod Goldberg had the odds stacked against him.

In addition to his dyslexia, he's also color blind.

That was problematic, because the workbooks that were supposed to teach him to read were color-coded.

“I was all messed up,” Goldberg says. “There's no reason I should be writing today.”

What the doctors and teachers didn't know was the power of the Goldberg clan. They rallied around him — “They actually formed a secret cabal without my knowledge to get me to read,” he says. “They didn't want me to be the butt of jokes forever.”

One way they secretly encouraged him to work through his dyslexia was by writing each other notes and leaving them in mailboxes attached to their bedroom doors.

Woods still has some of her brother's letters where the b's are d's and some words read backward. He'd sign them, “Love, Dot.”

“Back then, there weren't a lot of tools to help you through dyslexia,” Woods says. “We just did the best we could.”

Goldberg was also a natural storyteller and had a vibrant imagination, a fact that didn't go unnoticed. At one point, a teacher at Palm Springs High School told Goldberg that instead of writing book reports, he could write stories instead.

It wasn't until he was in college that Goldberg realized writing could be a career.

“A professor said, ‘Look, you can do this if you want to do it,'” he says. “And I wanted to do it.”

Maggie Downs is a features reporter for The Desert Sun. She can be reached at (760) 778-6435 or maggie.downs@thedesertsun.com.