The Chicken Sisters(112)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS





I’m not going to lie, I thought about not having any acknowledgments. The risk, no, the probability that I will leave someone out is overwhelming. How can you thank everyone who makes it possible to do work you love? Start with the carpool and go from there, I guess.

Thank you to everyone who drove any member of my family anywhere ever, especially during NaNoWriMo 2017, when I first drafted this book, or over the next year and a half, when I was madly revising it. And thanks to those who helped mightily in that revision process, in particular my agent, Caryn Karmatz Rudy, and Jennie Nash and the Author Accelerator team. Down the road, thank you to beta readers Sarina Bowen, Lisa Belkin, and Wendi Aarons.

Thank you to Margo Lipschultz, who is proof positive that editing is alive and well and who made this whole story—as well as writing it—much more fun, and to her entire team at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, whose enthusiasm for “the chicken book” brought me much joy. You’re just the right number of cooks in this kitchen.

Into the writing of any book some rain must fall, and in the summer of 2019 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There is nothing about that sentence that is not a cliché, but none of it felt like a cliché at the time. Thank you to the doctors, nurses, and radiation therapists at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock for being relentlessly and rightly optimistic, even when it must have been obvious that I was not entirely receptive to your good cheer, and for, we all hope, so thoroughly removing all traces of cancer that I will never again fall into your clutches. Thank you to Dwight Sperry and Kimberley Moran for providing unexpected support when I answered the question “How are you?” too honestly; to Mimi and Jason Lichtenstein (and Trevor) for striking just the right balance between understanding and distraction; to Kendall Hoyt for many much-needed walks, and to Sheryl Stotland, Nancy Davis Kho, Mary Laura Philpott, and Liz McGuire for being Team KJ in the form of cards and gifts and snark. That’s my love language, crew.

Thank you, too, to our Spanish family, Eva, Miguel, Ici, and Paula, for becoming such a joyful part of our life during that strange season; to Holly and to Judi, Nick, Natalie, Kira, and Tia for putting family and friends above everything else; and to Kristyn, Greg, Lyn, and Brittney for doing a whole lot of farmwork so that I wouldn’t have to.

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for never, ever not encouraging me in following this inexplicable career path, for supporting me at every turn and reading every word, although when it comes to that terrible novel draft from 2011, I really wish you wouldn’t. And thank you, Mom, for resisting the urge to tell me the real story behind Chicken Annie’s and Chicken Mary’s. I guess it’s okay now.

Thank you to Jess and Sarah. I probably could do it without you two, but I wouldn’t really want to.

And thank you to the best possible husband and partner for me, Rob. I’m still sorry about your baseball glove. Finally, thank you to Sam, Lily, Rory, and Wyatt for apparently just accepting that some days, the people in my laptop would be as real to me as the ones outside it. I hope you all know there is no one more real, or more important, than you.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR


KJ Dell'Antonia is the former editor of Motherlode and current contributor to The New York Times, as well as the author of How to Be a Happier Parent. She lives with her family on a small farm in Lyme, New Hampshire, but retains an abiding love for her childhood in Texas and Kansas.