We Run the Tides(64)

“This way,” I say, leading us in the opposite direction of the bright blue sea, but the ringing only grows louder.





Acknowledgments


What would I do without my family? Thank you to my parents, Paul and Inger, and to my sister, Vanessa, for so much, for everything, for a lifetime of kindness. Thank you to Dave for endless encouragement and countless reads, and to our kids, for constant inspiration and for this book’s title.

Enormous thanks to my incomparable agent, Nicole Aragi, and to Edwidge Danticat for introducing us. Thank you to everyone at Aragi Inc.and to Brooke Ehrlich at Anonymous Content. I’m indebted to my longtime editor, Daniel Halpern, and to Gabriella Doob for all her work on behalf of this novel. Thank you also to Helen Atsma, Sonya Cheuse, Elizabeth Yaffe, Michelle Crowe, Lydia Weaver, Leda Scheintaub, and everyone at Ecco. Thank you also to my foreign advocates and publishers: Felicity Rubinstein at Lutyens & Rubinstein, Karen Duffy and everyone at Atlantic, and Lina Muzur at Hanser.

I’m so grateful to my fellow McSweeney’s board members, especially those whose support during the writing of this book nurtured me in innumerable ways: to Gina Pell for many conversations about literature in general and this novel in particular, to both Isabel Duffy and Caterina Fake for literally giving me the keys to quiet spaces in which to work when I was nearing the finish line, and to Natasha Boas for her advice about covers. Enormous thanks as well to Amanda Uhle, Hilary Kivitz, and Brian Dice, and to Bibiana Liete for help with my Portuguese translation questions.

I’m also grateful to Jennifer Bunshoft and Nínive Calegari for answering my questions, and to Eve Weinsheimer for her great eye, and to Em-J Staples for her close read. Charlotte Trounce: thank you for the stunning cover art.

And thank you to my writer friends, those indulgers and truthsayers, who read so many drafts of this book: Ann Packer, Rafael Yglesias, Sarah Stone, Ron Nyren, Lisa Michaels, Angela Pneuman, Ann Cummins, Steven Willis, Cornelia Nixon, Tiffany Shlain, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, and Amanda Eyre Ward. My deepest thanks to Heidi Julavits for her wise edits and decades of friendship.





About the Author


VENDELA VIDA is the award-winning author of six books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, and co-editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. She was a founding board member of 826 Valencia, the San Francisco writing center for youth, and lives in the Bay Area with her family.

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