To Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Studios of Key West, and Spiro Arts for the time and support.
I’ve worked on this book in a number of different places—North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, Utah, Virginia, Illinois, New York City, Boston, Key West—and each landscape made its mark. I’m especially grateful to Key West for the ghosts and the stories.
In the early stages, I consulted Killer Germs by Barry E. Zimmerman and David J. Zimmerman and Flu by Gina Kolata, later turning to sources that shined a light on our current American dystopia—especially Andrea Elliott’s “Invisible Child” series for The New York Times and Matt Taibbi’s “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch from America’s Most Desperate Town” for Rolling Stone.
To Mike Y., for letting me crib from his Twitter feed.
To the Writers’ Room of Boston, for the space and the view.
To Courtney and her excellent apartment, where this book was finished.
To the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the extraordinary show of faith.
To Don, Jess, Robin, Tarfia, Karen, Lauren, Ted, Shannon, Porochista, and Jane for the company on the path, which would have been so much darker without you.
To my early readers, Josh, Matt, and James, for helping me find my way through the woods.
To Mike S., Nina, and Meghan for the support and guidance when it was urgently needed.
To Elliott, for writing alongside me.
To Sarah Scire. To Sean McDonald. To Nayon Cho and Abby Kagan. To Delia Casa and Nina Frieman. To everyone else at FSG who helped this book come into being. Thank you.
To Emily Bell, for keeping the path alight with her fierce vision and impeccable editorial eye. For her trust and her friendship. I owe you the world.
To Katherine Fausset, for the exceptional privilege of being able to call you my agent and my friend. You are simply the best. Thank you as well to Stuart Waterman and everyone else at Curtis Brown.
To my family, for believing.
To my grandmother, whom I miss.
To Paul, for everything, always.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was named a Best Book of 2013 by NPR and The Boston Globe. Find Me is her first novel. She lives in the Boston area. Or sign up for email updates here.