I made the earliest sketches of The Rabbit Hutch in Prospect Park, and my love for that public sanctuary clearly informed Blandine’s devotion to the Valley; I am indebted to the Prospect Park Alliance for their stewardship.
I am indescribably grateful to my parents and brothers, who have nurtured my love of reading and writing since I was a child. My mother, the greatest art teacher on earth, taught us that creativity requires mess, mistakes, and love. My father read to us every night and patiently transcribed my stories before I knew how to spell. Both my parents spent incalculable hours with us at the public library. They encouraged my earliest fiction, continuing to do so as I made the statistically ill-advised choice to pursue writing as a career. Ben provided brilliant feedback on my drafts, instructive reading recommendations, luminous literary analysis, and even a Rabbit Hutch playlist. I am thankful to Joshua for his poetry, music, and for modeling a life lived on one’s own terms. I thank Nick for his music, visual art, and for being my first friend in this world. Nick elevated Todd’s illustrations far beyond my original vision—I cannot imagine a more harmonious collaboration.
My infinite gratitude to Andrew Krizman. It took five challenging years to write this novel; Andrew’s transformative respect for and belief in my work was my primary sustenance throughout. He maintained his faith in me even when I lost faith in myself.
Finally, I thank each reader, for finishing what I began.
Notes
The first epigraph is lifted from Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me.
The second epigraph is taken from Selected Writings: Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Mark Atherton (London: Penguin, 2001). The majority of the Hildegard quotes reproduced throughout The Rabbit Hutch are from this volume.
In “Afterlife,” Blandine quotes from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge Classics, 2002).
In “The Expanding Circle,” Moses references the moral philosopher Peter Singer’s 1997 thought experiment, “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.” (I do not share Moses’s venomous reaction to this paper and its author.)
“Variables” repurposes practice-test questions from collegeboard.org. It also briefly quotes from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. A version of “Variables” appeared in the 150th issue of The Iowa Review.
“Pearl” references a fictional woman who is inspired by the real-life Rose Marie Bentley (1918–2017). Like Pearl, Bentley also owned a pet store and died of natural causes at the age of ninety-nine, never receiving a diagnosis of situs inversus with levocardia while she was alive. Bentley donated her body to a research university, where anatomy students discovered her condition.
Al Quig’s photographs of our hometown, South Bend, inspired many of the images described in “Pearl.”
“Altogether Now” quotes from chapter 29 of The Book of Her Life by Teresa of Avila. The version transcribed in this novel is from The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, vol. 1 (Washing-ton, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2001).
“Viral” quotes YouTube’s content policies.
My brother Nicholas Gunty, a musician and visual artist, made the illustrations featured in this novel.
Tess Gunty was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Iowa Review, Freeman’s and other publications, and she lives in Los Angeles. The Rabbit Hutch is her debut novel.