Before I acknowledge all the people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, I’d first like to explain this book’s approach to naming names—I did, except when I didn’t. In some cases, I was trying to protect someone’s privacy. In other cases, I was avoiding shameless name-dropping. And in some places, I was cheerfully inconsistent. While I had no problem using my daughter’s name in the essay “The Thirty-First Stocking,” I later decided to be more careful about what I share about my kid in public.
Now, some gratitude.
Ann Hood and Sean Manning were two of the first people to lure me into writing about my own life. When I decided I wanted to try freelancing more, Taffy Brodesser-Akner was generous enough to provide contacts and expert advice in pitching. In fact, she usually pitched the pieces for me. Sari Botton was not only polite about my unprofessional pitch, she was a dream editor for the pieces that appeared in Longreads. Carrie Feron, my longtime editor at Morrow—twenty-four years and counting—was the one who suggested I write this book. Vicky Bijur, my longtime agent—twenty-four years and counting—cheerfully dealt with the tangle of rights and permissions for the seven essays that had been previously published. Carrie and Vicky are backed up by two equally remarkable women, Asanté Simons and Alexandra Franklin, respectively.
My husband and my daughter are pretty good sports about being pulled into my new world, as are most of my friends. A shout-out to all the moms at my daughter’s school, but especially to Joyce Jones, who listened to me talk out some of these ideas on the drive to and from our weekly tennis lesson.
And, seriously, thank you to the communities I have found on social media, public and private. They are imperfect places, to be sure, with serious consequences for the world. But it’s a rare day when I don’t get one good laugh out of something online.