I find it difficult to refrain from acknowledging a considerable number of people, from Miss Janzen, my first-grade teacher, who persisted in the conviction that learning the alphabet would prove helpful later in life, to Pete Steres, my best friend in junior high, with whom I lived only ostensibly in suburban Los Angeles but more truly in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
I don’t mean to be overly romantic. I mean only to acknowledge the fact that multitudes, throughout a writer’s life, have inevitably helped, in a multitude of ways, to produce a novel.
More specifically, my boundless gratitude to Andy Ward, my editor. As editors go, incisive readers and stern taskmasters are increasingly hard to find. Thank you, Andy, for being both, for caring so ardently that a novel be the most potent, precise, far-reaching possible version of itself, and for being almost always right.
Frances Coady is not only the literary agent of my wildest imaginings, she’s a brilliant reader, a confidante, and a friend. Frances saw this book through more changes than I care to remember, and never lost patience or heart. Whether she likes it or not, this book is almost as much hers as it is mine.
Bonnie Thompson, my laser-eyed copy editor, saved me from countless embarrassments, from questions of punctuation to matters of fact. I remain in awe of her capacity for attention to particulars, whether it’s the difference between a semicolon and a dash or the fact that, although poetic license always wins out, there was, actually, no moon in the Brooklyn sky on the night of April 5, 2019.
My gratitude to those who read early drafts, and made invaluable suggestions: Ken Corbett, Marie Howe, Francine Prose, and Sonia Feigelson. For the last four years, Sonia’s uncompromising intelligence, along with her organizational capabilities, have literally kept me afloat.
While writing this book I was surrounded by friends whose fascination with literature, whose pure love of it, helped produce an atmosphere in which writing a novel seemed, in theory at least, a plausible human act. Their faith often outmatched my own. Thank you to Amy Bloom, Susan Choi, Marcelle Clements, Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes, Richard Deming, Anne Fadiman, Jonathan Galassi, Meg Giles, Yen Ha, Courtney Hodell, David Hopson, Billy Hough, Sarah McNally, Christopher Potter, Sal Randolph, Marc Robinson, Nathan Rostron, George Sheanshang, Fiona True, Nina West, Leslie Wilder, and Ann Wood.
Among the most significant gifts anyone can offer a writer is a period of uninterrupted time. Thank you to the Fundação D. Luís I–Centro Cultural de Cascais, particularly Filipa Melo and Salvato Telles de Menezes. Thank you to the Santa Maddalena Foundation, whose director, Beatrice Monti Della Corte, is not only an inspiration but an intimate lifelong friend.
Thank you to Evan Camfield, who put up with my endless niggling over words, phrases, and fonts; to Lucas Heinrich, who created the beautiful cover; and to Richard Phibbs, for an author photo in which I look considerably better than I actually do.
My students at Yale University have proven, year after year, to provide a critical link between life as lived and the attempt to do justice to it using only language, ink, and paper. The privilege of conversing regularly with remarkable younger people helps keep the act of writing and reading feel vital and critically important, a conviction that does not necessarily accompany a writer every hour of every day.
I’ve had the good fortune, all my life, to be encouraged by my family. Thank you to Don Cunningham, Dorothy Cunningham, and Kristie Clarkin.
Nothing would be possible, not this book or anything else, without Ken Corbett.