Acknowledgments
This weird little book had many midwives, too many to be acknowledged here. But I will give explicit and impossible-to-overstate thanks to Maggie Lehrman, my editor and friend, who gave me superb and superbly modulated guidance from conception to completion, and without whom this book quite literally would not exist. I thank Matt Hudson, my erstwhile agent and also friend, who was somehow able to interest numerous important people in a very profane manuscript about boys who make homages to Werner Herzog and a girl who has cancer. I want to thank my parents, sisters, and grandma in advance for the times they will have to answer the question, “So, is that your family?” (No, it is not.) Finally, I am thankful for Tamara, who loves this book, and whom I love.