Thank you to my parents, Barkley Murray and Ken Bonnaffons, both gifted storytellers, who supported me unconditionally and taught me to take risks. My sister, Blythe, helped me learn how to make things up and became a wonderful friend.
Thank you to my brilliant agent, Henry Dunow; I couldn’t imagine a savvier advocate for my work. I’m grateful to Lee Boudreaux for her enthusiasm and for her smart, insightful editing of these stories, and to Jean Garnett for helping this book make its way into the world. Thanks to the team at Little, Brown, including Reagan Arthur, Carina Guiterman, Deborah P. Jacobs, Pamela Marshall, Julianna Lee, Pamela Brown, Carrie Neill, Elora Weil, Sabrina Callahan, and Craig Young.
I received wonderful mentorship from Jonathan Lethem, Darin Strauss, Irini Spanidou, Breyten Breytenbach, LeAnne Howe, and Reginald McKnight. Thank you to Deborah Landau at New York University, and to the University of Georgia Creative Writing Program for providing me with a nurturing community of writers.
Thank you to the producers of This American Life and the editors at Kenyon Review, The Sun, the Literary Review, Southampton Review, and Anderbo, for your edits and for sharing my work. Special thanks to Rick Rofihe. Thank you also to the MacDowell Colony, where some of this work was written.
Thank you to the readers who provided feedback on earlier versions of these stories, especially Axel Wilhite, Kseniya Melnik, Sativa January, Mariah Robbins, and all my other classmates at NYU and UGA. The inimitable Boris Fishman provided indispensable help with this collection, both creative and practical. I’m grateful for Helen Rubinstein’s wise, unsparing eye and for her writerly friendship. Thanks to Bari Weiss for supporting and sharing my work. David Busis is my first, most trusted, and most consistently waffled reader; I wouldn’t be a writer without him. To Steve, who understands both glow and dark sparkle: thank you.
Friends, extended family (blood and chosen): dear ones, you know who you are. I’m astonished at how lucky I am to be loved by you. My gratitude to you, individually and collectively, would fill another whole book if I tried to record it with all the specificity and depth it deserves.