I have so much gratitude to the City of Flint for teaching me in more ways than I can name. I am especially thankful to Jan Worth-Nelson and Ted Nelson for sharing their wisdom, humor, coffee, and home with me, along with their wealth of extraordinary stories.
I aimed to tell this story as comprehensively as possible to date, drawing on original reporting and analysis, including hundreds of hours of interviews. Some material in this book was first published in articles I wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, the New Republic, Elle, Politico, the Boston Review, and, in collaboration with Josh Kramer, Splinter. I also drew from extensive work by mostly local journalists and authors. Among others, I am indebted to the reporting, research, and recording of Curt Guyette; Kate Levy; Lindsey Smith; Steve Carmody; Kate Wells; Mark Brush; Rebecca Williams; the staff of Flint’s East Village Magazine, as well as Flintside and Flint Beat; Ron Fonger; Jake May; Dominic Adams; Roberto Acosta; Oona Goodin-Smith; Nancy Kaffer; Paul Egan; Ryan Garza; Elisha Anderson; Jim Lynch; Stephen Henderson; Leonard N. Fleming; Jonathan Oosting; Karen Bouffard; Scott Atkinson; Belt Magazine; Bridge Magazine; Andrew R. Highsmith, author of Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis; and Gordon Young, author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City. I also depended upon documents and internal communications that were first uncovered through open records requests by local reporters and the Flint Water Study team, and by numerous investigations and legal proceedings, as well as the emails released by Governor Snyder.
Thank you to Katherine Flynn, my agent at Kneerim & Williams, who made this project possible and delivered a great reading list, and to Riva Hocherman of Metropolitan Books, whose passion for telling the story of Flint impressed me from the start. Thank you also to Sara Bershtel, Grigory Tovbis, Chris O’Connell, and the rest of the Metropolitan team for making this book far better than it would have been otherwise. I am very grateful.
Thank you to Jessica Hasper for her persistent and creative research, which added so much to this book, and thank you to Chad Livengood, a top-notch reporter who made time to fact-check much of the manuscript. Thank you to Donovan Hohn for sharing insights from his wonderful reporting about Flint for the New York Times Magazine. Thank you also to Erick Trickey and Rick Perlstein for helping me to get my hands on materials that helped to flesh this story out. And thanks to Fred Chao for his hard work in drawing the map of Flint.
Readers of portions of this manuscript provided much-needed feedback, skepticism, questions, and support. Thank you especially to Noah Hall, who knows just about everything about water, and to the dedicated Chris Miller, who asked for more chapters. Thank you also to Elin Betanzo, Michael J. Brady Jr., Amy Elliott Bragg, Patrick J. Clark, Kim Crawford, Gary Flinn, Sarah Fuss Kessler, Yanna Lambrinidou, Stephen Mills, Eric Scorsone, Bill Trenary, Jan Worth-Nelson, and the participants in Travis Holland’s Friday afternoon writing workshop for Knight-Wallace fellows at the University of Michigan. Speaking of, I am not sure how I could have done this project without the Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship. It provided the joyful community I needed to restore my spirit, while at the same time opening up the extraordinary resources of a public university (which happened to have a Flint campus).
Thank you to my family for being a constant source of support and love. That goes especially for my parents, Patrick and Patricia Clark; my sister Elizabeth Appleton; my brother Aaron Clark; my brother-in-law Stephen Appleton; my sister-in-law Amanda Clark; and my amazing nieces and nephews, who are a boundless supply of imagination and play: Rosemary, James, Joan, John, and Paige.
Finally, I want to thank my Grandma Rose, a great champion of reading and writing. I wish I had the chance to put a copy of this book in her hands. I didn’t know it until after I began working on this project, but her father, Dan McGrath, was one of the famed sit-down strikers in Flint. They were a passionate, determined bunch; their strength was in working together. But in the middle of January 1937, McGrath got a special pass to quietly exit one of the occupied plants: my grandmother was being born.