Thanks are due first to my brilliant agent, Susan Golomb, for her faith and for her guidance, and to everyone at the Susan Golomb Agency and at Writers House—notably Krista Ingebretson, Soumeya Bendimerad, Julie Trelstad and Scott Cohen.
Thanks to my terrific editor, Elizabeth Beier, and to the team at St. Martin’s Press, including Laura Clark, Katie Bassel, and Lauren Friedlander, as well as Nicole Williams and Anya Lichtenstein.
I am enormously grateful to Jennifer duBois for her generous counsel, earnest encouragement, and for setting the bar impossibly high. Thank you to early readers, notably Adam Krause, Michelle Moulton Badger, and my fellow fledgling writers at Stanford. Thanks are also due to Chris Manby.
I am grateful to London and Paris for the inspiration, to California for the aspiration, and to Massachusetts for the isolation—all of which proved necessary to this process.
Special thanks to my family, whom I love dearly. Immeasurable love and gratitude to my mother, who taught me to recognize beauty, and to my father, an unabashed raconteur.
To Nolan, who was learning to love books while I was learning to write one. You are my joy.
And to Jacob, who believed even before I did. A truer North could not be found.