Growing up, Goldberg knew she wanted to be a writer, but she didn't imagine it would be for television. Her family didn't even own a TV until she was in the fourth grade. That's why she was more interested in reading Russian novels and listening to music, which was easy, thanks to her record shop-owning parents. After her dad passed away, Goldberg says she shipped "like 4,000 records" to her house in California, where she lives with her 8-year-old daughter.

It also didn't hurt that her childhood neighbors happened to be members of The Band, whose kids she hung around with. "I grew up in that community of musicians and music and folk singers like Woody Guthrie, that folk tale is very romantic to me," she says. "And I think that’s a religion in a way, that wanderer looking for something more."

Goldberg has done her fair share of wandering, starting as a playwright before writing films. Her 2014 directorial debut was Refuge, starring Krysten Ritter. The movie is an adaptation of Goldberg's 2008 play of the same name, about a woman who raises her two siblings after her parents abandon all three of them. But being a screenwriter for hire wasn't always that fulfilling a job.

"I ended up doing love stories or teen movies," Goldberg says, chalking this up to being a female writer, and the industry assumption that those are the stories she can tell best. "So the wonderful thing about TV is I can tell adult stories. Telling stories about things that I, like other people, are going through in their lives," she says. "I feel like I got to do that on Parenthood, and we get to do that [on The Path], which makes me happy."

She thanks her agent for bringing this happiness into her life. He is the one who actually suggested she start writing for television — mostly, as a way for her to get out of her house after the divorce. "The pajama thing had gotten extreme," Goldberg says. The job also introduced her to Parenthood and Friday Night Lights creator Jason Katims, who is the executive producer of The Path.

It was working with Katims, whom Goldberg calls her "mentor," that made her want to write something for herself — something that got at this idea of faith and love and how they intertwine. "I feel like one thing Jason believes in," she says, "is no matter what story you’re telling, you want the emotions to be true. You want the characters to be true."

The honesty of her characters is what Katims says drew him to Goldberg's work in the first place. "There’s a quality about Jess’s writing. It’s very emotionally complex and honest — it creeps up on you," Katims wrote in an email to Refinery29. "What stood out to me was that [The Path] in one way was about this cult, but to me it was really about a family entering into this very scary and challenging moment."