Нил Гейман: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “Nothing kind about it.”

“Next time Lettie writes from Australia,” I said, “please tell her I said hello.”

“I will,” she said. “She’ll be glad you thought of her.”

I got into the car and started the engine. The old woman stood in the doorway, watching me, politely, until I had turned the car around and was on my way back up the lane.

I looked back at the farmhouse in my rearview mirror, and a trick of the light made it seem as if two moons hung in the sky above it, like a pair of eyes watching me from above: one moon perfectly full and round, the other, its twin on the other side of the sky, a half-moon.

Curiously I turned in my seat and looked back: a single half-moon hung over the farmhouse, peaceful and pale and perfect.

I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an aferimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.

This book is the book you have just read. It’s done. Now we’re in the acknowledgments. This is not really part of the book. You do not have to read it. It’s mostly just names.

I owe thanks to so many people, the ones who were there in my life when I needed them, the ones who brought me tea, the ones who wrote the books that brought me up. To single any of them out is foolish, but here I go . . .

When I finished this book, I sent it to many of my friends to read, and they read it with wise eyes and they told me what worked for them and what needed work. I’m grateful to all of them, but particular thanks must go to Maria Dahvana Headley, Olga Nunes, Alina Simone (queen oftitles), Gary K. Wolfe, Kat Howard, Kelly McCullough, Eric Sussman, Hayley Campbell, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Melissa Marr, Elyse Marshall, Anthony Martignetti, Peter Straub, Kat Dennings, Gene Wolfe, Gwenda Bond, Anne Bobby, Lee “Budgie” Barnett, Morris Shamah, Farah Mendelsohn Henry Selick, Clare Coney, Grace Monk, and Cornelia Funke.

This novel began, although I did not know it was going to be a novel at the time, when Jonathan Strahan asked me to write him a short story. I started to tell the story of the opal miner and the Hempstock family (who have lived in the farm in my head for such a long time), and Jonathan was forgiving and kind when I finally admitted to myself and to him that this wasn’t a short story, and I let it become a novel instead.

The family in this book is not my own family, who have been gracious in letting me plunder the landscape of my own childhood and watched as I liberally reshaped those places into a story. I’m grateful to them all, especially to my youngest sister, Lizzy, who encouraged me and sent me long- forgotten memory-jogging photographs. (I wish I’d remembered the old greenhouse in time to put it into the book.)

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day. Words save our lives, sometimes.

Tori gave me a safe house to write it in, and I cannot thank her enough.

Art Spiegelman gave me his kind permission to use a word balloon from his collaborative conversation with Maurice Sendak in The New Yorker as the opening epigraph.

As this book entered its second draft, as I was typing out my handwritten first draft, I would read the day’s work to my wife, Amanda, at night in bed, and I learned more about the words I’d written when reading them aloud to her than I ever have learned about anything I’ve done. She was the book’s first reader, and her puzzlement and occasional frustration, her questions and her delight were my guides through subsequent drafts. I wrote this book for Amanda, when she was far away and I missed her very much. My life would be grayer and duller without her.

My daughters, Holly and Maddy, and my son, Michael, were my wisest and gentlest critics of all.

I have wonderful editors on both sides of the Atlantic: Jennifer Brehl and Jane Morpeth, and Rosemary Brosnan, who all read the book in first draft and all suggested different things I needed to change and fix and rebuild. Jane and Jennifer have also both coped extremely well with the arrival of a book that none of us was expecting, not even me.

I would very much like to thank the committee for the Zena Sutherland Lectures, held at the Chicago Public Library: the Zena Sutherland Lecture I delivered in 2012 was, in retrospect, mostly a conversation with myself about this book while I was writing it, to try and understand what I was writing and who it was for.

Merrilee Heifetz has been my literary agent for twenty-five years now. Her support on this book, as with everything over the last quarter of a century, was invaluable. Jon Levin, my agent for films and such, is a fine reader and does a mean Ringo Starr impression.

The good folk of Twitter were extremely helpful when I needed to double-check how much blackjacks and fruit salad sweets cost in the 1960s. Without them I might have written my book twice as fast.

And lastly, my thanks to the Hempstock family, who, in one form or another, have always been there when I needed them.

Neil Gaiman, Isle of Skye, July 2012