Thanks to Pam Holland for photos of New York trains and subways so I could get my imagery right after I misplaced my own. Raymond Teichman, Supervisory Archivist at The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum helped by digging up the full context of Eleanor Roosevelt’s short quotation in the epigraph. Her article, “Women in Politics,” ran over three issues of Good Housekeeping in 1940: Volume 110: January: pp.18-19, 150; March: pp.45, 68; April: pp.45, 201-203. The relevant part is:
This country is no matriarchy, nor are we in any danger of being governed by women. I repeat here what I have so often said in answer to the question: ‘Can a woman be President of the United States?’ At present the answer is emphatically ‘No.’ It will be a long time before a woman will have any chance of nomination or election. As things stand today, even if an emotional wave swept a woman into this office, her election would be valueless, as she could never hold her following long enough to put over her program. It is hard enough for a man to do that, with all the traditional schooling men have had; for a woman, it would be impossible because of the age-old prejudice. In government, in business, and in the professions there may be a day when women will be looked upon as persons. We are, however, far from that day as yet.
With the right woman, such as an Isabel Diaz, I hope that this day is now not far at all.
For other help with Born to Run, thanks to: Bill Thompson, my editor in New York. Authors Stephen King and John Grisham said good things about him for a reason. Luke Causby for the jacket and internal book design. Graeme Jones for typesetting, Karen Young for production. Publicist, Trudy Johnston. The book’s distributor in Australia and NZ, Simon & Schuster, especially Lou Johnson and Ed Petrie and their fabulous team and reps. And the bookseller who sold this book to you, or your friend who gave it to you.
I also shine a torch on Pantera Press. With our focus on discovering and nurturing previously unpublished writing talent, Pantera Press hopes to be “a great new home for Australia’s next generation of best-loved authors.” In its second year, it is already delivering on that dream, with a small but growing stable of authors, books with rave reviews and happy readers, including a best-seller, several books now in reprint, new editions, and one short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
Lastly, my family. My role-model wife, not least for the light bulb she flicked on for me when she tossed in her own business career to become a full-time professional sculptor. Visit her website: www.jennygreen.net
And our extraordinary two kids who have lived with this book and far, far more.
If you enjoyed Born to Run, here is a taste of John M. Green’s first novel...
NOWHERE MAN
It’s available from all good booksellers…
1
THIS CITY DOESN’T grow on you, it grows in you. It snatches your breath. It scratches its scarlet nails down your back so you squirm for more. Sydney is heaven without dying. But in eight minutes, for Sonya, it would become hell.
The bush track clung alongside the foreshore, a seductive stretch of dirt and rocks and water views. Professor Sonya Wheen pounded it daily so, even without checking her watch, she knew she’d been running fifty minutes. But after last night, who cared about time?
Dribbles of sweat kept filling her smile lines. It had been their first sex in three weeks, true, but what did she expect after nine, no, ten years. As Sonya was convincing herself once again that Michael wasn’t a lousy lover, the lace frond of a fern camouflaged a sandstone outcrop and she almost tripped. Regathering her balance and her pace, she reminded herself that in the long spaces between the sex Michael was still, well, a gentleman; most at ease sniffing a vintage red or cradling a tumbler of good scotch—no ice, no water—and drawing back on one of his antique smoking pipes. And considerate. The word “companion” didn’t endear itself to her, so she pushed it away.
She leapt, almost flew, over a tree root that caught her eye just in time but her shoulder swiped against a split branch of a eucalypt.
To her, Michael was a Mr Cool in a gallant, nineteenth-century kind of way, yet “cold fish” was the epithet more often whispered round their circle of friends; these days more a semi-circle, and mostly hers. To them, Michael soaked himself in solitude. “Reserve” was a word conceived for him, or so a friend had said once in Sonya’s earshot. It was true he rarely sought friendships and when on odd occasions they were offered, he seldom accepted them.