The acknowledgements for my essay collection rambled on for three pages, so I am going to try to keep things concise here, but I am very grateful to a lot of people so we may end up with a ramble no matter what we do. Thank you for your patience (we’ve begun).
Enormous thanks to my wonderful agents, Marya Spence and Claire Conrad, as well as their assistants at Janklow & Nesbit. Their support during every stage of this process has made impossible things possible; I would never have found Merris without Marya. It is also through my agents that I ended up with the dream team of Kishani Widyaratna and Jessica Williams, who guided the book to its final form with such wisdom and humor. I’m very grateful to them, their assistants, and the publicity and marketing teams of 4th Estate and William Morrow, as well as to the many, many people involved in printing, distributing, and selling this novel. Thank you in particular to Sari Shryack, Mumtaz Mustafa, and Jo Thomson for designing the book’s beautiful covers. Thank you to Louise Glück for use of her gorgeous poem in the epigraph.
Many people provided early feedback that made this book better than I could have managed on my own. Thanks to Katie Baker, Emma Herdman, Nathan Foad, Adam Howard, Marisa Meltzer, Liz Watson, Amy Reed, Catherine Liao, Helen Gould, Neha Patel, Emily Whalen, Hali Hamilton, Emily Stubbings, Celeste Yim, DJ Mausner, Sarah Hagi, Mark Lund, Rose Johnson, Caroline O’Donoghue, Dolly Alderton, Adam Burton, and Josie Long, for conversations, emails, and advice that changed the book’s shape. In particular, Tess Degenstein, Kathryn Borel, Laura Dawe, Lauren Oyler, and Joel Golby fielded a LOT of texts about the book and still read it, in full, in some cases several times over. Thank you so, so much.
Thank you to Paul Bogaards for his support and advice throughout the unfamiliar process of putting something like this out into the world. Thanks to Abby Singer and Rob Kraitt of Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, Cara Masline and Katie Newman at 3Arts, and their assistants for their continued support.
I am most grateful to my close friends and family for their support during crises fictional and real. Special shout out to the original Five Poots group chat; my almost comically supportive parents, Peter and Janice; my kind and funny sisters, Alice and Melissa; and Stephen Carlick, who hears every idea and joke the first (and fortieth) time, and whose calm care has been one of the great surprises of my life.