While it might appear that you are holding a book or electronic reading device in your hands, you are actually holding a chunk of a life. Mine. For some inexplicable reason, several years back I felt compelled to take some of the elements that most haunted my childhood and fit them together in a completely fictitious story. The Fort Wayne State School (formerly known as the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth), with the howls of its institutionalized residents audible to those of us living nearby; the tornados that periodically raked the Midwest; the damage wreaked on my mother’s family when her farmer father was turned into a living dead man by encephalitis lethargica, or “sleeping sickness,” in an epidemic that swept the world during the Great Depression; my mother’s mysterious reclusiveness and my own fervent wish that she would be more like Betty Crocker: all these were bits that demanded to be part of a novel. It took four years of leaning on friends, family, and colleagues to put the pieces together and get the completed puzzle into your hands. I feel lucky to be able to thank them now.
From the start, my friend Jan Johnstone was instrumental in helping me to unify the disparate aspects. (She also introduced me to book clubs by starting ours thirty-some years ago, and took me to my first yoga class about ten years back—everyone needs a Jan Johnstone in their life!) When she learned that Betty Crocker was to play a role in my book and that I was traveling to Minneapolis/St. Paul to dig up what I could about America’s Mother, she generously became my guide to the Twin Cities, as well to farming in the Midwest, educating me with a tour of her family farm in Hector, Minnesota. I thank her family in the Gopher State for so generously opening their homes and hearts to me during my visit: Geri and Joel Skogen, Sharon and Dan Marks, Chuck and Judy Gustafson, and Brian and Mary Gustafson, you are dear to me! Thank you, too, to Jan’s childhood friend, DeeAnn Norskog Edlund, for rounding up some Betty Crocker information.
On top of the crucial grounding in Minnesota and farming lore Jan and her family gave me, it was Jan’s sharing of her uncle Wallace F. Gustafson’s memoir that actually organized the book. In it, I learned of the dust storm that terrorized the entire United States east of the Rockies on May 9, 1934. “Uncle Wally” wrote that he had been driving his mother to the Twin Cities on that day and had to pull the car off the road for a long time—the dust completely blinded him. As I read that, a chill went over me. I knew this was the event around which I could center my plot.
Only four years (!) and a lot of help from my friends later, and I had a book. Thank you to Karen Torghele, Ruth Berberich, Jani Taylor, Sue Edmonds, and again, Jan Johnstone, for hearing me out on long walks and over dinners, supporting me and “the Betty book” through thick and thin. Thank you, too, to Colleen Oakley, Stephanie Cowell, Alison Law, Suzanne Van Atten, Susan Rebecca White, Michael Martone, Amy Bonesteel, and Joshilyn Jackson for your writerly pep talks. A huge thank-you goes to dear family friend Mark Meyer for being my guide into the past in Fort Wayne, and to long-term pal and confidante Barb Bedwell McKee for giving me a home away from home and a lifetime of great memories. (Thanks, too, Barb, for reminding me of the sound of those swings.) Thank you as well to Tom Murfield, Randy Harter, Monya Weissert, and Michael Martone, again, in your guidance of things Fort Wayne, and to Neal Butler, owner of Pio Market, for the tour of your grocery store which has remained much like it was when it was a cutting-edge self-serve Piggly Wiggly in the 1930s. Thanks so much, too, to Dan Wire, for the fantastic boat tour of the rivers of Fort Wayne, which are the lifeblood of those of us who grew up near them.
I’d like to thank my dear agent Emma Sweeney and the saintly Margaret Sutherland Brown at ESA for their readings of the book in its many forms and for their patient help in shaping it, as well as for their steadfast championing of my cause. I don’t have enough words to thank my editor Jackie Cantor for giving me permission to write the story I really wanted to write, and then for coaxing the best out of me—I am beyond grateful. I’m indebted, too, to Karen Kosztolnyik, for shepherding the story through its early stages. A special thanks goes out to Michelle Podberezniak, my publicist, for her dauntless efforts. And without the valiant team members at Gallery Books—including Jennifer Bergstrom, Aimee Bell, Lisa Litwack, Jen Long, Abby Zidle, Caroline Pallotta, and Sara Quaranta—you wouldn’t be reading this.
Each of these individuals has blown life into the book you now hold. But The Sisters of Summit Avenue is foremost about families and sisters, both of which I have plenty. Thank you to my sisters, Margaret Edison, Jeanne Wensits, Carolyn Browning, and Arlene Eifrid. You, along with our brothers Howard and David Doughty, have made me who I am and greatly influenced this story. I’m lucky, too, to have three great daughters—Lauren Lynch, Megan Cayes, and Alison Stetler—to shape my thinking and to mother me as much as I mother them. Thank you, girls; thank you, Sean, Michael, and Jamil, my wonderful sons-in-law. Know that you and your children are everything to me. And thank you, Mike, for being the most supportive, wise, and steady husband humanly possible. But at the core of this book are my parents—my gentle dad, whom I worshipped, and my mother, whom I never understood. I’m trying, now, to know you as the girl you once were—Mother, this book is my love letter to you.