My Thanks

 

My friends Julián Mauricio Gómez Ocampo, Jimmy Luna, Alexander Aponte Moreno, and Alex Pereira played a crucial role with the research for this novel and I owe them the deepest gratitude. My thanks, too, to my agents Tom and Elaine Colchie for their wise advice and their constant encouragement, and for being my friends and family for over forty years; and to Taylor Larsen and Erin Clermont for judicious line-editing of parts of the novel and valuable suggestions.

I began to write Like This Afternoon Forever a few months after the death of my partner and best friend of thirty-three years, the painter Bill Sullivan. For the first two years after his death, most days I struggled mightily to write a single sentence; sometimes it felt like I was scratching out every word on the wall of my study with my fingernails. In that state, I wrote the first half of the novel. Then, in one of those mysterious turns of life, Isaías Fanlo appeared, and it is thanks to his loving support, his close reading of the work, his many important suggestions, and his belief in me, that I could finally complete this book.

And my thanks, also, to Kaylie Jones and Johnny Temple for embracing my novel warmly and giving it a home.