My indefatigable and quite glamorous agent, Wendy Sherman, who plucked this manuscript from the slush pile and worked with me tirelessly as it morphed into the book you’re holding in your hands. Wendy, I love you more than pie.
Joel Ross, who read every word of this book a thousand times and made me get up and run when I was sure I couldn’t. For giving me a place to stay when I was in a face-plant after setting my first book aside and for buying me the world’s best breakfast sandwiches while I cried and made lists of alternate careers that included sign twirler and world’s oldest waitress.
My writer tribe, the people I’ve sidled up to in all those places I mentioned (and others) and begged/wheedled/forced to be my friends, whom I’ve stayed in touch with across miles and years and who have read endless drafts of all my work before this book and then this book, plus a bunch of scrawled illustrations on cocktail napkins about what our writer commune will look like someday. These people talk me down from the rafters when I’m ready to throw it in and gossip madly with me when schadenfreude seems like the only reason I have to go on: Jennifer Pashley, Eileen Cook, The Hydra (Teri Carter, Suzy Vitello, Averil Dean, Amy Gesenheus), Allison Burnett, Polly Dugan, Libby Flores, Betsy Lerner, Jim Ruland, Haven Kimmel, and some other very important people I’m blanking on right now, which means you’ll probably be getting flowers or chocolates or something from me in the near future.
Scott Hoffman, for believing in me when I was just a baby writer with thirty pages ripped from my journal. Your years of encouragement and cocktails and dinners were invaluable. Plus you can sing the hell out of “Black Dog” at karaoke, and who doesn’t need that person in their corner?
Denise Roy, my brilliant editor at Dutton, who loved my book so much she made me cry the first time she talked to me about it and then cry even harder when she acquired it.
Rachelle Mandik, for copyediting all my bad habits and tics into oblivion.
Plus a cadre of people at Dutton I haven’t met yet because these things happen with such a long lead. But I love you anyway, you beautiful book people.
And, finally, and most important, my husband, Chris, who didn’t even blink when I came home in 2006 and said I was finally ready to try. “Fly, little chicken,” he said.
And I did.
Shanna Mahin is a high school dropout who rallied late despite her ninth-grade English teacher’s prediction of a lifetime of wasted potential. Her writing fellowships include the MacDowell Colony, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices, among others that she will tell you all about over a glass of wine. Just like her character, Shanna is third-generation Hollywood, but any other similarities are strongly renounced, at least until the statute of limitations expires.
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