Acknowledgments strike me as a grand gesture of omission, so let me keep it short and necessary: Thanks to my editors at The Times-Picayune—James O’Byrne, Mark Lorando, and Ann Maloney—for letting me find my way through this mess.
To the Warriors of Laurel Street, my newspaper brothers and sisters, who fought in the trenches with me.
Thanks to the readers who gave me purpose, a mission, and my reward.
To my family—my heroes—for taking care of me and my kids during our homeless days.
To Katherine, Jack, and James, for giving me a reason to stay alive, keep writing, keep moving, keep getting up, day after day when, truth is, for a long time, I didn’t want to.
To Kelly, for the journey. It was a race worth running.
To the doctors, therapists, and counselors who have tried so valiantly to put me back together again.
To Katherine Fausset, my agent at Curtis Brown, Ltd.; Colin Fox, my editor at Simon & Schuster; and his colleague Michele Bové, for believing in this story, this book, these words—and giving them a national audience.
And to New Orleans, my sweet, bedeviling mistress; cunning, baffling, powerful.
Never surrender.