Big Summer(110)

Thanks to James Iacobelli and Olga Grlic, who are responsible for Big Summer’s stunning, summery cover, and to Andrea Cipriani Mecchi for making my author photo shoots a party instead of an ordeal. In the audio department, I am grateful to Chris Lynch, Sarah Lieberman, and Elisa Shokoff. In the production department, thanks to Katie Rizzo, Dana Sloan, Vanessa Silverio, Paige Lytle, Jessie McNiel, and Iris Chen.

Dhonielle Clayton and Preeti Chhibber were smart, discerning readers who pushed me to write a world inhabited by fully realized characters of all races and ethnicities. My thanks to both of them.

Thanks to Michelle Weiner (no relation—at least, none that we’ve discovered!) and to my brothers, Jake and Joe Weiner, who help me out in Hollywood.

For details about life online or in New York City, I am grateful to Amber McCulloch and Katie Murray. Any mistakes are my own.

Thanks to my friends of the writing and nonwriting variety. My husband, Bill Syken, is an insightful editor in addition to being the most dangerous player in the game. Adam Bonin continues to be kind and supportive and the best co-parent I could wish for.

Thanks to my daughters, Lucy and Phoebe, and my small dog, Moochie, who patiently and graciously (for the most part) share me with invented people while I’m living in a made-up world. Thanks to my sister, Molly Weiner, and to my mother, Frances Frumin Weiner, who took me to Cape Cod when I was a little girl and taught me to love the ocean.

My deepest gratitude to all of my readers, who come to my events, follow and interact with me on social media, and “like” my selfies, my tweets, my New York Times op-eds, my pictures of my dog, and my occasionally upside-down videos. Whether this is the first of my books you’ve read, or you’ve been a reader since Good in Bed and have grown up alongside me, I’m very happy that you’re here.

This book is dedicated to my fabulous, supportive, funny, and endlessly cheerful assistant, Meghan Burnett. “Assistant” doesn’t begin to cover what Meghan has been to me in the fifteen years we’ve worked together: she is a friend, an advocate, a keen and observant reader, kind enough not to laugh at me when I tell her, for example, that we need to order eight hundred boxes of Girl Scout cookies and patient enough to do it. She is also the person who everyone in my life, including my mother, prefers to deal with instead of me (“Is Meghan there? Put Meghan on the phone!”). Thanks, Meghan, for everything.