Really Good, Actually(92)
I wiped my nose and did a bit more humming. A warm breeze moved through the trees above me, dislodging a fat chestnut that clattered to the ground near my feet. I looked up at the empty church, then past it at the moon, full and gorgeous and absurd. I clicked the side of my phone and the message disappeared. Then I got up from the ground, still laughing, and went home.
An Epilogue
The papers arrived on a Tuesday, bundled with a magazine, a hydro bill, and a postcard from one of Amy’s friends (“Dallas ain’t the same without you, slut!”). I opened the envelope carefully, leaving the dense stack on the counter while I made coffee and toasted an English muffin.
The places I needed to sign were tabbed. I considered reading the entire thing over, but Lori had walked me through it already: satisfactory division of assets, refusal of further financial liability, mutual desire to dissolve the marriage . . . I got the gist.
It crossed my mind that it might be best not to get a buttery fingerprint on important legal documents. I put down the muffin.
Flipping to the first of the tabbed pages, I noticed Jon’s signature was different. It seemed larger, loopier, the Ps in his last name more ostentatiously P-like. Possibly he had jazzed it up for the occasion, or maybe I had misremembered or forgotten it. It looked like the handwriting of a stranger.
I wrote my name under his and finished the muffin. Later that day I would do something else.
Acknowledgments
The acknowledgements for my essay collection rambled on for three pages, so I am going to try to keep things concise here, but I am very grateful to a lot of people so we may end up with a ramble no matter what we do. Thank you for your patience (we’ve begun).
Enormous thanks to my wonderful agents, Marya Spence and Claire Conrad, as well as their assistants at Janklow & Nesbit. Their support during every stage of this process has made impossible things possible; I would never have found Merris without Marya. It is also through my agents that I ended up with the dream team of Kishani Widyaratna and Jessica Williams, who guided the book to its final form with such wisdom and humor. I’m very grateful to them, their assistants, and the publicity and marketing teams of 4th Estate and William Morrow, as well as to the many, many people involved in printing, distributing, and selling this novel. Thank you in particular to Sari Shryack, Mumtaz Mustafa, and Jo Thomson for designing the book’s beautiful covers. Thank you to Louise Glück for use of her gorgeous poem in the epigraph.
Many people provided early feedback that made this book better than I could have managed on my own. Thanks to Katie Baker, Emma Herdman, Nathan Foad, Adam Howard, Marisa Meltzer, Liz Watson, Amy Reed, Catherine Liao, Helen Gould, Neha Patel, Emily Whalen, Hali Hamilton, Emily Stubbings, Celeste Yim, DJ Mausner, Sarah Hagi, Mark Lund, Rose Johnson, Caroline O’Donoghue, Dolly Alderton, Adam Burton, and Josie Long, for conversations, emails, and advice that changed the book’s shape. In particular, Tess Degenstein, Kathryn Borel, Laura Dawe, Lauren Oyler, and Joel Golby fielded a LOT of texts about the book and still read it, in full, in some cases several times over. Thank you so, so much.
Thank you to Paul Bogaards for his support and advice throughout the unfamiliar process of putting something like this out into the world. Thanks to Abby Singer and Rob Kraitt of Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, Cara Masline and Katie Newman at 3Arts, and their assistants for their continued support.
I am most grateful to my close friends and family for their support during crises fictional and real. Special shout out to the original Five Poots group chat; my almost comically supportive parents, Peter and Janice; my kind and funny sisters, Alice and Melissa; and Stephen Carlick, who hears every idea and joke the first (and fortieth) time, and whose calm care has been one of the great surprises of my life.
About the Author
MONICA HEISEY is a writer and comedian from Toronto. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue (UK), Elle, the Guardian (UK), Glamour, New York magazine, and VICE, among others. She has written for television shows like Schitt’s Creek, Workin’ Moms, Baroness von Sketch Show, and more. She lives in London. This is her first novel.
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