Graduated from Lake Erie College in 1980 with a bachelor of arts degree in modern foreign languages (French and Italian literature and history).

She has spent her career in the arts, first as an actress in film and television; then, as a story editor at Miramax Films. Chosen as a recipient of the Sesquicentennial Fellow award at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio. The combination of the birth of her first daughter and the 1988 writer's strike put an enormous damper on Goodrich's career. In 1991, first husband Pliny Porter got a job in France, so the family went along and she took a job as a reader at StudioCanal, giving input on English-language scripts. When the family returned to the USA in 1993, Goodrich was offered a job in script development at Miramax, which she did for the rest of the decade.