This brief tale has been long in the making. A little over 35 years ago, I had an inkling for a story I might try to write about a woman who attempts to kill herself in a back-road car crash. She survives, and the amnesia resulting from the wreck keeps her from remembering that she had once wanted to die. Her circumstance—somatic, neurological, psychological, emotional—is freighted with a problematic subtext of danger and denial, but it also suggests a clearing, a chance, a different path forward, a way to live. Why I was haunted by this fictional figure would take me many years to fathom, but as other characters and their stories developed around her, I came closer to articulating the question I’d been leaning into: why do some of us survive travail and some do not? And so my first thanks go to Juke, eidolon survivor, the seed of Paradise Close.
A book muddled, parsed, and written over several decades owes a tremendous debt to a host of family members, friends, colleagues, students: thank you for your inspiration, your stories, your support, your acceptance, your forgiveness. This is in many ways a book shaped by other books, and I would be remiss in not expressing my life-long gratitude for the words and example of other writers, the living and the dead. I’m also grateful for the extraordinarily generous pre-publication endorsements of Paradise Close by real novelists.
Special thanks to Libby Burton, secret sharer of Paradise Close as it tentatively emerged from its closet four or five years ago. What a gracious force you are in the cosmos. To Robin Cole: thank you for your volant birds. Dinah and Rita: how beautifully you’ve embodied this text. Allison, Annalee, Meryl, and Jonah: I appreciate your advocation on behalf of this book in the world. To hodges adams: thank you for the Ariels.
New Jersey; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Vietnam; Virginia: all-too-real gardens with my imaginary toads in them. Apologies for my taking more than a little poetic license with more than a few of the geographical, historical, and meteorological details (there was no East Coast Blizzard of ’71).
I cannot adequately thank Karen and Michael Braziller, founders and publishers of Persea Books, for believing in me and my work as it has evolved, lo these many years, from poetry to anthologizing and now this foray into fiction. Your vision and commitment to your authors is a rare and treasured gift.
And finally, to Gabe Fried, my editor of nearly two decades: “. . . when sudden / Such a Praise began / ’Twas as Space sat singing. . . .” No adequate words for it.