Look at me: (52 page)
Authors: Jennifer Egan
Tags: #Plastic & Cosmetic, #Psychological fiction, #Teenage girls, #Medical, #New York (N.Y.), #Models (Persons), #General, #Psychological, #Religion, #Islam, #Traffic accident victims, #Surgery, #Fiction, #Identity (Psychology)
Acknowledgments
During the years I spent writing
Look at Me
, certain individuals and institutions provided me with a tincture containing one or more of the following essentials: editorial assistance verging on collaboration; encouragement when I lacked confidence to proceed; time and space in which to work; career advice; funds; some fleck of inspiration; access to a crucial area of knowledge or expertise. I am hugely indebted to all of them.
David Herskovits, Kay Kimpton, Professor Barbara Mundy, Nan Talese, Amanda Urban, Lisa Fugard, David Rosenstock, Elizabeth Tippens, Ruth Danon, Monica Adler, Don Lee, Tom Jenks, Deirdre Fishel, Peter Mezan, Elisabeth Robinson, the Corporation of Yaddo, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Dr. Sarah E. Friebert, Dr. Jack Owsley, Dr. Bryant Toth, private detectives Jonathan Soroko and Lawrence Frost, attorneys Alexander Busansky and Christina Egan, the Frary family, two former FBI agents specializing in counterterrorism who shall remain nameless, Jon Lundin’s
Rockford: An Illustrated History
, and William Cronon’s
Nature’s Metropolis
.
Afterword
I wrote
Look at Me
over the course of six years. In that time the novel went through countless revisions, the last of which I completed in January 2001, when America, and certainly New York, were in some sense different places than they are today.
In that final revision—a light one, since the book was scheduled for publication in September—I spent several days working on the character of Z. My editor felt that his humanity didn’t come through quite as strongly in the section describing his perambulations in New York City as it does later, after he has transformed into Michael West. I welcomed the chance to take another pass at him; of the many characters in
Look at Me
, Z had always worried me the most. I was afraid no one would find him credible.
I’ve written elsewhere about the preoccupations that led me to develop such a character, and the research I did. My purpose here is to remind readers that, while it may be nearly impossible to read about Z outside the context of September 11th, 2001, I concocted his history and his actions at a time when the events of that day were still unthinkable. Had
Look at Me
been a work-in-progress last fall, I would have had to reconceive the novel in light of what happened. Instead, it remains an imaginative artifact of a more innocent time.
Jennifer Egan
April 4, 2002, New York
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2002
Copyright
©
2001 by Jennifer Egan
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:
Egan, Jennifer.
Look at me : a novel / Jennifer Egan.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-4000-3327-0
1. Traffic accident victims—Fiction. 2. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Models (Persons)—Fiction.
4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Teenage girls—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.G292 L66 2001
813′.54—dc21
2001027152
CIP
v3.0