With Love and Squalor

I was sending girlchild off to the copy editors in less than two days and had only two pages to go before I could put a bow on it, but I was stumped, immobilized. Which two pages could be so crucial? The dénouement? The grand finale? No: the dedication and acknowledgment pages. Some folks don't include either of these with their novels. Their books, I guess, are solitary beasts, brought into this world alone. But not mine. I owe people. Big time.

I'm a pretty good thanker, I dig gratitude. The list of who to thank via acknowledgments wrote itself: the names of the glorious friends and loved ones who'd let me clock in so infrequently during revision times, the ones who'd never shown weariness of hearing about another round of editing, or that I was going to miss yet another event. I had the who down pat. What boggled my mind was the how.

How to thank someone permanently and in public? How to thank my editor who pretended to never notice my hackles rising in defense of this or that phrase or chapter, who was patient and kind with me for so long that my growling turned to a purr? Or an agent who made me feel brave, even at home, in a new and scary world, who'd become a brother? Or the BFF of 20+ years who had to run on friendship fumes? And the fiancé who'd become an interior designer to the creatively neurotic, hanging each of the 221 pages of the third revision on our bedroom walls at my request? And how to do all of this with humor and sincerity and on the record?

I was stumped. I wandered around my house like Goldilocks, rereading acknowledgments and dedications written by my favorite authors to find a style that fit just right (rereading, because I always read them—they are part of the story for me). I came to understand that like most things in the noveling process, I'd have to find my own way, which I finally did. No good turn is born without a twin, an expression of gratitude for its existence, and the twins arrived when I sat down and began.

The dedication page seemed easier. I'd always known why girlchild exists and for whom—one person. All I needed was the right wording, right? Ha! So much hinges on a to, a for; I went ten rounds with prepositions and was down for the count. My favorite dedications jeered from the bookshelves. Salinger's titular "For Esme, with Love and Squalor," and this dedication that is a masterpiece in four words, almost a novel itself: For Mercedes, of course. I think now that all dedications do what this one does, if not always so gracefully; they speak to a history so rich that with only a few words, we know. Ooooh, we say, especially as writers ourselves, knowing what a book takes from us and so, what it means to give that, to dedicate it, to another, we say: Ooooh, it's like that between them.

Limping and staggering over the finish line, when I sent the final revision off, I mentioned to my editor that I'd added the dedication and acknowledgments. I figured it would be no big deal for her. She's been thanked by better writers and in better ways, but she wrote right back to say that she tore straight to the end of the manuscript to find hers. Like a kid with a Cracker Jack box, she said. I may have nothing else to give her better than that moment—that rush of finding the Secret Decoder ring at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, and the secret messages it reveals, always the same when the fancy wording is stripped, plainly: I see you. Thanks.

How have you handled your dedications and acknowledgments pages? What dreams do you have for those yet to be written? Is there a certain someone your writing breathes for? Do you even read these, like I do, or are you a strictly story-focused reader? Is there a dedication in one of your favorite books that you love? Do you know which author wrote the dedication For Mercedes, of course? There's no prize for knowing the correct answer to this question, but I promise you'll be sincerely acknowledged if you do!

– Tupelo