Perhaps my greatest stroke of luck in the book-publishing process was meeting Victoria Skurnick, of the Levine-Greenberg-Rostan Literary Agency. She is a force of nature, and my advice to anyone who ever crosses paths with her is to shut up and do exactly what she says. Trust me: it saves a lot of time. Karen Kosztolnyik is the kind of editor that writers dream of. She managed both to love this book from the get-go, and to make it a million times better. My thanks to Karen, as well as to Louise Burke, Jen Bergstrom, Jean Anne Rose, and the entire team at Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.
I share my protagonist’s weakness for the Euro look. Happily, my Euro husband favors Italian suits and Scotch over skinny jeans and cigarettes. Nick drove carpool and did grocery runs and learned to cook a formidable chicken curry, to give me time to write. He listened to me ramble about possible plot twists and then came up with some of the best plot twists himself. Peach, I could not do this, or anything else that I do, without you by my side.
Our son James spent much of last winter plopped beside me, penning his own first novel. He already possesses, at the age of ten, both a way with words and an appreciation for the challenges that fiction writers face. (“Mom,” he sighed one night, “it’s a ton of work when you have to make up all the characters and all the action and the ending and everything, isn’t it?”) Our younger son, Alexander, endured months of suspiciously early bedtimes, so that I could sneak away and continue writing into the night. In the morning he would cock one sleepy eye, wrap warm arms around my neck, and whisper, “Did you finish the chapter?” Yes, lovely boy, I finally did.