Our Missing Hearts (86)

Acknowledgments


No one does anything alone, and I owe more thanks than I can say to the many, many people who have helped along the way.

I’m still not sure what I did to deserve my agent, Julie Barer, but I sure am grateful. My undying gratitude to you, Nicole Cunningham Nolan, and everyone at The Book Group. Full stop.

Thank you, as always, to my editor, Virginia Smith Younce, for your unflappable calm and unerring guidance (and for providing ice cream exactly when I most needed it) and to Caroline Sydney for keeping everything running smoothly. Once again, Juliana Kiyan, Matthew Boyd, Danielle Plafsky, Sarah Hutson, Ann Godoff, Scott Moyers, and the whole team at Penguin Press have shepherded this book into the world with such thoughtfulness and love; I can’t imagine better hands for my work to be in. Jane Cavolina, my copy editor, continues to have the patience of a saint and the eyes of a hawk.

In the UK, huge thanks to Caspian Dennis and Clare Smith for their ongoing championing of my work, as well as to Grace Vincent, Celeste Ward-Best, Hayley Camis, Kimberley Nyamhondera, and everyone at Little, Brown UK; and to Nicole Winstanley and Deborah Sun de la Cruz at Penguin Random House Canada. Thank you to Jenny Meyer and Heidi Gall for helping my books find such good homes abroad, and to all my overseas editors and translators for sharing my words with readers.

Thank you to Ayelet Amittay, Tasneem Husain, Sonya Larson, Anthony Marra, Whitney Scharer, and Anne Stameshkin for your invaluable reads and feedback along the way, and to my writing group, steady guiding lights and unflagging supports. Conversations with Jenn Fang and Dolen Perkins-Valdez shaped my thinking and made this book immeasurably stronger (and Jenn, thank you for Marie’s family tree).

Thank you to Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Marissa Perry Stuparyk, Ariel Djanikian, and Anne Stameshkin (again) for that weekend in the woods, the sofa by the fire, and almost two decades of thoughtful conversation; to Catherine Nichols for making my brain fizzy over ramen lunches and for graciously loaning me the name Bird; and to Jermaine Brown for his advice on the legality of child re-placements and the chilling comment “With a sympathetic judiciary, anything is possible.” Huge thanks to Peter Ho Davies for his wisdom and mentorship, and immense gratitude for sharing that story about his father—I hope this revision of it resonates.

The Guggenheim Foundation provided support for this project and, even more importantly, an early vote of confidence without which I would probably never have attempted this book. The Cambridge Public Library provided me not only writing space but also endless inspiration in its books, patrons, and librarians; thank you for all that you do, and thank you to Kate Flaim for arranging that behind-the-scenes tour that sparked my imagination.

Most importantly, thank you to my family. My mother and my sister continue to indulge me in This Creative Writing Thing, forty-odd years along. It’s not easy to have a writer in the family, so thank you for letting me be one and for sharing your stories with me. I hope I’m making you proud. Thank you to my husband for bringing me lunch when I forget to eat, patiently listening while I ramble about plot points and research, taking on more than your fair share of house and family duties while I write, and having faith in my work even when I’ve misplaced my own. I’m so lucky, and grateful, to be on this journey with you. Finally, thank you to my son: you’re still the best thing I’ve created.





About the Author


Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, will be published in October 2022. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages.