Legend of a Suicide

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

JOHN L’HEUREUX HELPED me most in shaping these stories, and also in shaping my life. Michelle Carter helped enormously, also. The truth is, I received more generous help from great writers than any young writer could hope for. Grace Paley and Adrienne Rich sponsored me for an early writing grant (run by Laura Selznick) when I was an undergrad at Stanford. In grad school at Cornell, Stephanie Vaughn and Robert Morgan tried to help me see how the stories might become a book. Mike Curtis at The Atlantic published my first story, “Ichthyology,” and Kim Witherspoon gave me early encouragement. When I returned to Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, Toby Wolff, who had long been my favorite writer, encouraged me also.

I’ve been lucky, in other words. I’m grateful to Gail Winston and many others at HarperCollins, grateful also to the folks at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and at UMass Press, for first putting this book into print. It’s especially nice that it’s a prize in Grace Paley’s name, since she was such a great teacher and inspiration. I still think of all she taught us, including that “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

I owe a debt, also, to a lot of writers I don’t know whose works inspired these stories. Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth Bishop, most of all, but also Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy and others.

I want to thank David Forrer for his tireless work and constant good humor, Stewart O’Nan, Robert Olen Butler, and Noy Holland for their generous endorsements, and also thank the National Endowment for the Arts for a Creative Writing Fellowship in 2008. University of San Francisco, where I currently teach, has also been tremendously supportive.

Finally, I need to thank my family, because it was an uncomfortable topic I was writing about — my father’s suicide — and there’s exposure in these stories. They’re fictional, but based on a lot that’s true. My stepmother, Nettie Rose, was especially generous in helping me talk through everything for several years. She had faced a lot of other deaths in her life and seemed fearless to me then.