EPTIMANIA TOOK ROOT AT THE BEAUTIFUL ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION villa above Bellagio, Italy, where I spent a month of tranquility and creation with ten other fellows in late 2007. Down the hill, the Foundation was simultaneously hosting a conference on developing low-cost drugs to battle African diseases. One evening, our two groups came together for cocktails, and I spoke with a young doctor—a genuine hero from a small village in Mozambique—who had traveled out of Africa, out of his country for the first time in his life. He told me why he was in Bellagio; I told him why I was there. But even after I had told him twice, he couldn’t believe that I was being housed and fed and supported in order to write a story.
It is extraordinary. And I have received extraordinary support from many sources. My editor Allyson Rudolph championed my book to Overlook Press and its celebrated owner Peter Mayer. My agent Ayesha Pande guided me with elegance and acumen through a marathon of rewrites in unerring belief and affection for Septimania. The poet Robert Pinsky not only introduced me to The Inferno of Dante, but also generously gave me permission to incorporate freely his extraordinary translation.
But it is the unquestioning belief of my family—of my children, Rebecca, Gabriel, and Mimi, of my wife, Stephanie, and my parents, Judith and Isaac, who have followed the changing fortunes of Malory and Louiza with patience and the advice of their wider lives—that has sustained me the most and has taught me the true meaning of copeability.