Author’s Note

My primary source for this novel was growing up in Hollywood, the son of screenwriters, in the decades following Owen Jant’s coming of age in the 1930s. The time before my time drew me to itself like a Venus flytrap I couldn’t escape, a black hole I desperately wanted to shine some light into. Additionally, my shelves hold more than sixty books on one or another aspect of motion pictures, the Great Depression, the San Francisco dockworkers’ strike, the American Communist Party, popular songs, magic, and hemophilia.

A few books seemed to become, along with my own background, part of my DNA. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler, and City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s by Otto Friedrich are both enriching. Though my imagination flew back to the 1930s, specifically a few heady months in 1934, Friedrich couldn’t resist taking informative backward glances to see what went on earlier that made the Forties what they became. Likewise, Gabler’s superb portrait of Hollywood was not restricted to what Jews themselves contributed.

The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley contains almost numberless oral histories and accounts of the dockworkers’ strike in San Francisco. The two books I found particularly helpful are Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s by Bruce Nelson, and The Big Strike by Mike Quin, published after his death. I was using it for research when one day Quin marched right out of his own book and into my story.

One fictional character in Girl of My Dreams is also not original. Bruno Leonard, the professor from New York who harangues the faithful at Gloriana Flower’s party, was first a character in The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger, a novel published in 1934. My justification for this is I think it’s okay to steal from your own mother.