Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

Thirteen years ago, I sat with my dear friend Kristen in her mom’s living room in Ohio. On the floor, my one-year-old son played with her one-year-old daughter. As we watched them, we talked jokingly about how great it would be if they got married, how we would love to be grandparents together, and how many potential problems would be averted if they had cool, evolved in-laws like us. “They’d be perfect for each other!” we joked. “We could make them be!” Obviously the idea never left me, so I thank Kristen for the inspiration and for letting me name my strange, repressed heroine after her beautiful, exuberant child.

Second novels are difficult. Without the encouragement and ass-kicking of my friends, this novel would not have been written. Joshilyn Jackson, this is your book. Thank you for loving it when I couldn’t, for sticking up for the characters, and for staking out that ending. Susannah Breslin, thank you for your relentless drive. When I whined about revisions, you said, “If one of your kids had pooped all over the floor, would you stand there complaining about it? No, you would roll up your sleeves and clean it up. So clean it up.” One would think that comparing a novel to a diaper leak would be paralytically insulting, but instead I think I should do this quote in cross-stitch.

To my brilliant agent, Caryn Karmatz Rudy: You are every author’s dream. Thank you for working so hard and so long on this book. To my brilliant editor, Hilary Teeman Rubin: I am so grateful to have you in my corner. Your insights and ideas were invaluable in creating this novel. Loving thanks to my wise and helpful publicist at St. Martin’s, Dori Weintraub.

Thank you to my writing group: Veronica Porterfield, Antonia Giordano, and Layla Denny, and to my early readers: Sherene Silverberg, Kristen DeHaan, and especially Andrea Kinnear, who told me I could write about a brain tumor. A particularly urgent thanks to Christian Kiefer for wading into an early draft and saying the true, hard things. Thank you to my friends online, especially my friends at Book Pregnant, and to my friends out in the real world: You bought my book, you invited me to your book clubs, you linked, you tweeted, you shared. You are incredible.

The booksellers I have met in the last two years are some of the most marvelous, intelligent, driven, and charming people I’ve met in my life. I’m so thankful for the work you all are doing to connect books and readers!

My wonderful children, Benny and Sadie, are a cheerful, needed balance to the darkness in my brain—more than a distraction from the work, they are my salvation from the work. My husband, Dan, is an endless source of happiness for me, as well as a good listener with a deft hand at untangling plot problems. I am grateful for my family above everything else.