Many, many times over the past couple years, I was convinced this would never become a real book. And honestly, without the care, brilliance, cheerleading, and patience of these people, it wouldn’t be. Endless gratitude to:
Tracy Harford-Porter, Tom Underberg, Pamela Rentz, Rory Kelly, Jessica Hilt, Jenn Hsyu, and Desirina Boskovich—who make up the powerhouse writing group GAS Factor and were my very first readers. I threw one hundred pages of mess at them and said, “I dunno, is this worth a damn?” and they kindly said yes.
Jessi DiBartolomeo for answering my text about this bananas idea with “DO IT” and for letting me use her family name. Mary Winn Heider for the walks, the shop talk, and the friendship. Joshua Briggs for being a thoughtful reader and title brainstormer. Kira Walsh for emailing me obits and great ideas.
The WesCrew and my Chicago community for your unwavering support and enthusiasm, for always showing up, for asking how the book is going, for knowing when not to ask how the book is going.
Mary Robinette Kowal, Wesley Chu, Cory Doctorow, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Mike Zapata, and Juan Martinez for modeling what it means to support each other’s careers and be good literary citizens.
Jane and Bert Robins, Myrna Neims, the rest of the Neims crew, the Robinses, and the Mattinglys, for being my lineage.
The Illinois Arts Council for the Artist Fellowship in Literature that came at JUST the right time.
ORDCamp for letting me be part of an amazing community where I can ask literally anything and know one of you is an expert who will message me about it. Relatedly, thanks to Corinne Mucha for the design advice, Peter Sagal for introducing me to Lisa Rosowsky, and Lisa Rosowsky for generously sharing your time and expertise on type design.
Craig McClain for taking me to the deep sea and letting me be an unofficial amateur marine biologist, for double-checking my science, and for answering all my creepy questions about human falls.
Cameron McClure for being an incredible agent and for once describing my genre/me as “uncategorizable weirdo,” the HIGHEST compliment.
My brilliant editor, Christa Désir, and the hardworking, thoughtful, and supportive team at Sourcebooks—Letty Mundt, Erin Fitzsimmons, Jessica Thelander, Laura Boren, Liv Turner, Anna Venckus, Diane Dannenfeldt, and Tessera Editorial—who enthusiastically embraced my weird book and made it better than I could have ever imagined.
For all the many challenges of this project, it was a delight to explore all the different possibilities of lineage. This book’s influences, inspirations, and family tree are massive and branchy, and to list them all would take up another book’s worth of pages. So instead, a few highlights: The Passion of Joan of Arc and its mysterious star Renée Falconetti; the documentary Obit; the Center for Hellenic Studies’s YouTube channel with its captivating readings of Greek plays over Zoom; the epitaphs in The Greek Anthology, Book VII; the Overlooked series of obits in the New York Times; The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson; Life on the Death Beat by Alana Baranick, Jim Sheeler, and Stephen Miller; “Can Greek Tragedy Get Us Through the Pandemic?” by Elif Batuman in The New Yorker; “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” by David Graeber in The Baffler; “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.” in the San Francisco Chronicle; “Decomposing Bodies in the 1720s Gave Birth to the First Vampire Panic” in Smithsonian Magazine; Bo Burnham: Inside; Cézanne: A Life by Alex Danchev; Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill; Art Is Everything by Yxta Maya Murray; Search History by Eugene Lim; the Zappa documentary; Lynda Barry; Laurie Anderson; Anne Frank of course; Itamar Ben-Avi; the saga of 14 Maiden Lane in Manhattan; Ana Mendieta; Sarah Lucas; The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben; Etymonline (best app for word nerds); Race after Technology by Ruha Benjamin; and hundreds and hundreds of newspaper obituaries, the unofficial archive of humanity.
With apologies to the CIA if you’ve been tracking my online search history—now you know why I looked especially deranged between 2021 and 2023.
And a second note to Kyle Thiessen, who doesn’t think he did much, but that’s a load of horse crap.