My deepest gratitude goes to Aimee Bender, who read this novel with such generosity and insight in its earliest of drafts. I am very grateful to Elisabeth Schmitz for championing this book and guiding it toward publication. Many people at Grove Atlantic have gone above and beyond with their time and care: thank you Julia Berner-Tobin, Paula Cooper Hughes, Kirsten Giebutowski, Judy Hottensen, Gretchen Mergenthaler, Katie Raissian, Deb Seager, Chin-Yee Lai, and everyone else who helped this book find its way into the world. My profound thanks to my agent Nicole Aragi, who responded to this novel with more enthusiasm than I could have hoped for, and also to Duvall Osteen for keeping things organized behind the scenes. Thank you, too, to Southwest Review for publishing the first chapter in 2013 and honoring it with the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction. A special thanks to the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for recognizing the value of supporting feminist projects. I also thank T. C. Boyle and the students in his workshop at the University of Southern California, who were the first readers of what became the opening chapter of this novel. Let me extend my heartfelt appreciation to all the teachers over the years who have provided me with such superb models of thinking and writing, especially Bill Handley and Natania Meeker at the University of Southern California and Marshall Klimasewiski and Kellie Wells at Washington University in St. Louis. My sincere thanks to both of these institutions for financial support and for offering wonderful communities in which to grow as a writer. I will always be immensely indebted to the colleagues and friends in these writing communities who provoked such influential conversations about books. On a more practical level, thank you to Janalynn Bliss at USC for printing off chapters of this novel when I was no longer on campus. More recently, I owe Cornell University my thanks for providing a teaching home as I revised History of Wolves.
I want to acknowledge, too, some of the books that inspired the writing of this one. In chapter 1, Linda quotes in her presentation from Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men. The full passage reads: “But the term alpha—evolved to describe captive animals—is still misleading. Alpha animals do not always lead the hunt, break trail in snow, or eat before the others do. An alpha animal may be alpha only at certain times for a specific reason, and, it should be noted, is alpha at the deference of the other wolves in the pack.” In chapter 8 there is a reference to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I am indebted to many sources for information about flora, fauna, and life in northern Minnesota, but two stand out: Sigurd Olson’s The Singing Wilderness and Helen Hoover’s The Years of the Forest. I was grateful to have Caroline Fraser’s excellent and harrowing book God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by my side, along with Barbara Wilson’s Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood and Lucia Greenhouse’s fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science. It should be said that Paul’s case is a fictionalized composite of many around the country, and it reflects neither a specific child nor the particulars of any one court case in any actual place or time. Caroline Fraser’s book offers an especially powerful nonfictional record of children and their families in Christian Science—including detailed religious, legal, and social histories—for those interested. I am grateful to Sharon Ostfeld-Johns for offering medical advice on the manuscript and pointing me to UpToDate, a physicianauthored online resource, where I learned about some of the symptoms of diabetic ketoacidosis and cerebral edema.
This novel owes a great deal to all the time I’ve spent wandering around in the woods: thank you to my parents for this legacy of woods-haunting (to modify a phrase from Virginia Woolf), and thank you, particularly, to the establishments that fed me and put me up when I was traveling in the summer of 2012 in northern Minnesota. In addition, and though my vein of gratitude runs more obliquely than I can easily express, let me acknowledge here those who were kind to me when I was very young at Principia College.
Finally, I am grateful to my family for being there through the years, for their patience and openheartedness at every odd turn in my own story. And my most humble thanks go to Nick Admussen, who believed in the value of this project from the beginning and kept my head above water all along the way. This novel is dedicated to him.