Thank you first and foremost to the incredible Kate Nintzel for her passionate work on this book and for seeing straight through to the heart of every line to help each scene become the best it could be. A profound thank-you to my fabulous agent, Deborah Schneider, for believing in this book and in me, and to Brian Lipson and Cathy Gleason for their enthusiasm, hard work, and support. Special thanks also to the amazing Molly Gendell and the entire team at Mariner for all their wonderful work to bring Cecily to the world: Lindsey Kennedy, Allison Carney, Stephanie Vallejo, Renata DiBiase, Mumtaz Mustafa, Kate Falkoff, and Marleen Reimer.
Thank you to my brilliant friend Terence Sullivan, who makes so much possible and who supported me through and lent his incredible intuition and genius to the final edit and to so much else. Thank you to Lara Zielin and Molly Holleran for reading early drafts and providing helpful and essential feedback and encouragement. Thank you to my parents, Marya and Bob Farrell, and brother, Bill Brown-Farrell, for reading early drafts and cheering me on. Thank you to Dustin Black for his optimism and faith. And huge thanks to my author friends Lesley Kagen and Brian Freeman for helping me along the road.
Thank you to Dave and Beth Moulton for showing me life in Vero Beach, and to Christopher Daly for overall inspiration and support. Thank you to Alphonzo Heath for being the genesis of so much in my life and my writing. Thank you to Mark and Kim Jespersen for their extraordinary support over the years, and to all my friends and extended family—especially Christine Skorjanec, Carrie Sutherland, and my aunts Sonya Christensen Steven and Nadia Christensen—and the Maine friends who’ve become my chosen family—Joyce Jones, Knight Coolidge, Audrey McGlashan and Rich Hurlbert, Megan Kelley, Andrea Vassallo, and Erica Berman, in particular—for the wide net you’ve provided under the tightrope of my life this past decade and beyond. This book simply wouldn’t have been possible without all of you.
This book came to me like a dream, and then I needed to fill in the details! I’m incredibly grateful to Ann Fessler for writing The Girls Who Went Away, which I read years ago and which never left me, and to Dani Shapiro for writing her brilliant memoir Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, which so gracefully explores and explains the emotional impact of an unexpected DNA result. For the world of the 1930s circus, I drew inspiration from the beloved novel Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, and, for the exact details I needed, relied on the amazing depth of information available on the website circushistory.org, as well as specifically the article “Logistics of the American Circus: The Golden Age,” published in Production and Inventory Management Journal (Vol. 46, No. 1, 2010) and written by Vincent A. Mabert and Michael J. Showalter. For Cecily’s time at the sanatorium in Rhode Island, I relied on the documentary film On the Lake: Life & Love in a Distant Place, directed by David Bettencourt and produced by G. Wayne Miller.
To create Cecily’s time at the fictional “Wayward,” I leaned heavily on the nonfiction book Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory by Karin L. Zipf (Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Though I changed some details about life in the reformatory to fit my story, and invented the McNaughton Home so Cecily would have a chance at escape, Cecily’s story, unfortunately, hews closely to the facts of what was happening in the U.S. in the 1930s and beyond. In North Carolina between 1929 and 1950, more than two thousand girls and young women were involuntarily sterilized, often without their knowledge or consent, and, between the late 1920s and mid-1970s, this was the fate of more than sixty-four thousand nationwide. Most often, these girls and young women were BIPOC and/or classified by the standards of the day to be “feebleminded” or “immoral.” Often, they had been victims of rape or incest. For detailed information, I recommend the University of Vermont website https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics and Linda Villarosa’s 2022 New York Times Magazine article “The Long Shadow of Eugenics in America” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/magazine/eugenics-movement-america.html).
Any errors or distortions of fact I invented to fit the story are, of course, my own.
Finally, a profound thank-you to my readers, and to the heroic booksellers and librarians everywhere who champion the love of fiction. You are, in the end, what makes this writing life of mine and this book possible. I could not be more grateful.