Kissing in America (27 page)
Read Kissing in America Online
Authors: Margo Rabb
My deepest thanks to my extraordinary editor, Alexandra Cooper, and my wonderful agent, Emily van Beek. I'm grateful to the incredible team at Harper: Megan Barlog, Rosemary Brosnan, Renée Cafiero, Kate Engbring, Barbara Fitzsimmons, Erin Fitzsimmons, Megan Gendell, Victor Hendrickson, Kate Morgan Jackson, Susan Katz, Nellie Kurtzman, Jenna Lisanti, Alyssa Miele, Diane Naughton, Andrea Pappenheimer, Sandee Roston, Patty Rosati and the entire School and Library Marketing team, Olivia Russo, and Booki Vivat.
Thank you to the readers of various drafts of this novel for their wisdom and advice: Allison Amend, Dalia Azim, Judy Blundell, Shana Burg, Becky Hagenston, Jodi Keller, Dika Lam, April Lurie, Anna Sabat, Mary Helen Specht, Cecilia Ward, and Lara Wilson.
Thank you to Brian Anderson, Bob Ayres, Pinckney Benedict, Sam Bond, Patti Calkosz, Doug Dorst, Benjamin Dreyer, Valerie Greenhill, Bethany Hegedus, Shelby Hogan, Robin Lauzon, Kirk Lynn, Justin St. Germain, Stacey Swann, Nina Brown Theis, Marsha and Rich Wagner-McCoy, and Bobson Wong for the fact-checking help.
I'm grateful for the support and encouragement of Lynne
Barrett, Michelle Beebower, Sarah Bird, Edward Carey, Nichole Chagnon, Elizabeth Everett, Carrie Fountain, Deborah Heiligman, Devon Holmes, Marthe Jocelyn, Varian Johnson, Sheri Joseph, Ana Knezevic, Iva Knezevic, Mila Knezevic, Elizabeth McCracken, Linda Sue Park, Jackie Rabb, Helen Reid, Karleigh Ross, Sharmila Rudrappa, Andrea Silber, Laura Silber, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Rebecca Stead, Michael Taeckens, Hannah Tinti, Julien Yoo, and Jennifer Ziegler.
Thank you to Adrienne Brodeur at
Zoetrope: All Story
for publishing the short story that inspired this novel. I'm also grateful to the following sources of information: the documentary film
My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports
;
Too Young to Remember
by Julie Heifetz; and the reporting by the
New York Times
on the crash of Air France 447 and the recovery of its wreckage.
Thank you to SCBWI for the Work-in-Progress grant that helped support the writing of this book, and to Cecilia Ward for providing a place for me to write the first draft while I had a young baby at home. Thank you to the MacDowell Colony, the Writers' League of Texas, and to Meghan Dietsche Goel, Mandy Brooks, and all of the staff at BookPeople in Austin.
Enormous thanks to Lara Wilson for the long talks about motherhood, writing, and grief, and to Dika Lam for the daily laughs (including the manroot jokes), and for keeping me going every day.
Thank you especially to Marshall, Delphine, and Leo, with all of my love.
As I wrote this book, I started each day by reading a poem. Many of the selections below are from my favorite poems, which continually inspire me; these poems take loss and grief and turn them into something beautiful. As a reader and a writer, poetry is my first love; it captures, in the words of Dylan Thomas, how “your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.” And in the words of Rita Dove, “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” In Audre Lorde's words, which I believe can be applied to fiction as well, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” I'm enormously grateful for the work of all the authors included here, and I hope that readers will love their books as much as I have.
Excerpt from “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” by W. H. Auden,
here
,
here
.
Excerpt from “If Men Could Menstruate” by Gloria Steinem,
here
.
Excerpts from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas,
here
,
here
,
here
.
“Funny grief” from “Vilify” by Sherman Alexie,
here
.
“I dwell in possibility” from “I Dwell in Possibility” by Emily Dickinson,
here
.
Excerpt from “March” by Mary Oliver,
here
,
here
,
here
.
Excerpts from “I measure every Grief I meet” by Emily Dickinson,
here
,
here
,
here
.
“At his touch, the scabs would fall away” from “AdolescenceâIII” by Rita Dove,
here
.
Excerpts from “Wild Nights!” by Emily Dickinson,
here
,
here
.
Excerpt from “kidnap poem” by Nikki Giovanni,
here
.
Excerpt from
Women and Economics
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
here
.
“You can't keep weaving all day and undoing it all through the night” from “An Ancient Gesture” by Edna St. Vincent Millay,
here
.
“There is no music like this without real grief” from “Orfeo” by Louise Glück,
here
.
Excerpt from “i like my body” by e. e. cummings,
here
.
“Those who are dead are never gone” from “Sighs” by Birago Diop,
here
.
“O Love, O fire!” from “Fatima” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
here
.
“Time does not bring relief” by Edna St. Vincent Millay,
here
.
“To touch him again in this life” from “The Race” by Sharon Olds,
here
.
“Help me to shatter this darkness” from “As I Grew Older,” by Langston Hughes,
here
.
Excerpts from “Twenty-One Love Poems” by Adrienne Rich,
here
,
here
.
Excerpts from “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
.
“Feast on your life” from “Love after Love” by Derek Walcott,
here
.
Excerpt from “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke,
here
.
“Worn down love” from “The North Ship XXV” by Philip Larkin,
here
.
“Light, love, life all tumbled”: from “Coda” by Marilyn Hacker,
here
.
Excerpts from “A Letter” by Yehuda Amichai,
here
,
here
,
here
.
Excerpt from “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe,
here
.
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Photo by Jackie Rabb
MARGO RABB
is an acclaimed novelist whose debut,
Cures for Heartbreak
, was hailed by critics and young readers alike. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the
New York Times
, the
Atlantic
, the
Rumpus, Zoetrope: All-Story, Seventeen, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South
, and
One Story
, and have been broadcast on NPR. She received the grand prize in the
Zoetrope
short story contest, first prize in the
Atlantic
fiction contest, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award. Margo grew up in Queens, New York, and has lived in Texas, Arizona, and the Midwest; she now lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two children. You can visit her online at
www.margorabb.com
.
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.