ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been written without a number of happy coincidences.

Princeton University, which has been my professional home since 2005, has brought me into conversation with some of the most remarkable writers of our time and facilitates the stability that has allowed me to invest my energy and focus upon my writing. My colleagues there inspire me to want to grow, develop, produce, and contribute to the conversation their voices make in the world.

The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, in its generous commitment to young artists and to the conversation across genres and generations, provided me with the opportunity to work closely with eminent writer and cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger. His guidance, his example, and his friendship have forever changed my sense of myself as a writer and a citizen. He gently but honestly pushed me to find my voice in prose, to invest in characters, and to invite the world beyond myself into this story.

My agent, Markus Hoffmann, helped me to hone the core of this book. I remain indebted to him as the reader whose interest urged me on when it would have been very easy to stall or stop.

My editor, Robin Desser, became the reader for whom I committed to push into the most difficult regions of the story I had set out to tell. Her compassion, insight, and belief calmed and consoled me. And her wisdom and intelligence taught me how prose is built. It would have been quite nearly enough just to share this work with her, but I am immensely grateful that she has helped me to turn my own private material into a book.

Continued and ongoing thanks go to Tina Chang, for her faith, insight, and friendship through these many years.

It is one thing to excavate one’s own private material and another thing altogether to share it with the world, having discovered, along the way, how much other people’s lives and stories are integral to it. I wish to thank my family for trusting me to tell my story, which has brought elements of their stories to light. And I wish to ask forgiveness for anything they would have remembered differently or anything they’d have preferred to forget.

I conceived of this as a book from a mother to her daughter. My luminous Naomi has been in my mind and heart throughout the writing of every line of this story. And now that her brothers, Sterling and Atticus, have arrived, perhaps this book will give them access to their mother and her people that will be important to them as sons and one day as men.

My most urgent, exultant, profound, and loving thanks go to my husband, Raphael Allison. My first reader. My best friend and soul mate. This (and everything else, always) is also for him.