Love and Other Words(84)

Maybe he could.

“Favorite word?” he whispers.

I don’t even hesitate: “You.”

acknowledgments


S

ome of our books have little pieces of our history, some have pieces of people we know, and some have little pieces of us. And then there are books like Love and Other Words that have big pieces of all three.

I (Lauren) was raised in Northern California and spent most of my weekends from age seven onward on the Russian River with my family, in one of three funky little cabins we owned throughout the years. They weren’t fancy, they weren’t fussy – they were small, occasionally damp, shaded by trees, and surrounded by the babbling of the Russian River, or a little creek outside. Much like Duncan did for Macy, my parents got a weekend retreat as a way to get us out of the stress of our lives for a couple days each week, and at a time when buying a modest home in a small town wasn’t prohibitively expensive for a middle-income family.

The area – from Jenner to Guerneville to Healdsburg to Santa Rosa – has been a constant in my life. My sister and I were both married in Healdsburg. My parents spent some of their happiest times together in the Russian River valley. We go there for vacations, reunions, girls trips.

Sometimes I think about my childhood weekends now, and how lucky we were to have a place like that. I think, too, about how it is to be a mother with small children, who – even at seven and eleven – sometimes still seem so plugged into the digital world. I wonder what it will be like for them, and whether it will be hard for me to not give them the same kind of retreat, where they can read for hours in a closet, or make a friend like Elliot, or simply unplug for two solid days.

But mostly I’m sort of devastated, because much of this area has burned in the recent fires in and around Santa Rosa. A house I rented this summer while we were editing this book is now nothing but ash and rubble. But it makes me exponentially more grateful that we wrote this book, that the memories of those areas and spaces are still fresh in Elliot and Macy’s story.

This is our first foray into women’s fiction, and it really was a complete joy to write. We were encouraged by our two most influential book people: our editor, Adam Wilson, and our agent, Holly Root, who waited for the right idea to come along before urging us to try a different voice. Gallery Books / Simon & Schuster is an unbelievably supportive place and we are grateful to everyone there for reading and loving and helping promote this book as much as they have: Carolyn Reidy, who heads up S&S; Jen Bergstrom, who runs Gallery Books; our marketing loves, Liz Psaltis, Diana Velasquez, Abby Zidle, and Mackenzie Hickey. Thank you, Laura Waters, for keeping us all organized, on time, and for giving Adam crap regularly since we’re not around to do it in person. Thank you to the publicity department and particularly Theresa Dooley and our own precious Kristin Dwyer who, most days, feels like the Third Musketeer. We adore the cover, John Vairo and Lisa Litwack. And to the S&S sales team: next time in NYC, your drinks are on us – pinkie promise.

Thank you, Erin Service, for not only reading this over and over, searching for every tiny error, but also – as Lo’s sister – for living so many of those Cabin Moments. Thank you, Marcia and James Billings, for taking us there. We lost one house in a flood and kept the next for over a decade, but every inch of that world will be precious to me forever.

Thank you, Christina, for writing this book with me, for learning and caring about this place as much as I do, for tunneling back in time to figure out who these kids were. We came up with these characters seven years ago, and I’m so glad we found the best place to put them.

We are so lucky that we get to do this and marvel every time that when people ask us what we do in our free time, we get to say, “We think about what we’re going to write next.”