ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my brilliant agent, Dana Murphy, and my incredible editor, Liz Stein, for making this happen and especially for all your help and support in that final stretch of unexpected difficulties. I’m so grateful to have such a pair of amazing women on my team. My thanks also to everyone at Park Row Books who worked on this for me.

Thanks to my writing group, teachers, and early readers: Madeline Stevens, Karen Havelin, Joe Ponce, Yardenne Greenspan, Emily Barton, Rebecca Godfrey, Heather Aimee O’ Neil, Zachariah Pickard, and especially Lauren Leblanc for all the advice, support and encouragement. I could have never done this without all of you.

Thanks to André Aciman for twenty years of unwarranted faith in me. It’s a debt I may never repay, but I’m working on it.

Thanks to my mom and dad and the circle of friends to whom I owe my education, Jon Newlin, Henri Schindler, Ersy Schwartz.

Thanks to David Brooks for sharing your name and your inspiration with me.

Thanks to my friends, my support: Kris Alexanderson, Alison Fensterstock, Robert Starnes, Janet Peters, Callie Field.

Thank you to Brooke Geahan, a friend, a genius, a force of nature, one of a kind.

A very special thanks to David Shamoon and Ian Davey Volner, as well as old friends and new friends who helped make something magical.

And finally thanks to my husband, Matt, for making me a better person, a better writer, for offering your calm waters up in service to my hurricane, and for tolerating all the nonsense it took to get here.

And to Oliver and Violet, my loves, thank you for sharing your gestation and infancies with this book.