Thanks first of all to Esther Newberg and Zoe Sandler, my brilliant agents at ICM, for their guidance and continual reassurance. Thanks to everyone at Scribner, especially my editor, Daniel Loedel, who understood the book immediately and made it so much better.
I’m grateful to the Millay Colony and the NYC Center for Fiction for the space and resources to write.
Thank you, Lee Ellenberg, for answering my questions about working in late night.
Thanks to my mother, Shelley Somers, and my sisters, Bailey, Molly, and Taylor Somers, who are also my best friends. Thanks to the Liebermans.
Thanks to my husband, Josh Lieberman, for his love and support, for taking care of our young daughter so I could write, and for reading the book at every stage and making suggestions, occasionally good ones. Thanks to Josh, too, for the use of Mates, a riff we’ve been doing together for ten years that I’m somehow still laughing at. I can’t believe it made it into print.
Finally, I want to thank my father, Bill Somers, who died just a few months shy of the publication of this book. I only ever cultivated a sense of humor to try to amuse him, so if I am at all funny, he’s why. He taught me that humor has a lot of functions, not least of which is sticking it to people, but it also makes a good bulwark against despair. Thanks, Dad.