“I’d like to thank…..”

Acknowledgments

Dedications are short and sweet. Acknowledgments are long and fulsome, even tedious, but I always read them. Acknowledgments offer a glimpse into the writer’s process. Who offered advice and direction? Who granted them time or money? Who ferreted about in dusty archives? Who are their illustrious writer friends, and who are the nearly anonymous amigos who dispensed cups of tea or shots of alcohol? The long suffering spouse always gets the last buttery acknowledgment—unless of course, the writing broke up the marriage.

Novels didn’t used to have acknowledgments. People think a novel must spring full blown on the half shell from the writer’s mind. Though one author does the hard work of writing and assembling the novel—the proverbial blood sweat and tears—many people contribute.

The first book of mine to have Acknowledgments was Graced Land which we will soon release as an ebook. My e-book editor, Andrea Gabriel  asked if I wanted to use the same Acknowledgment page from the book.

Originally I had used only the first names of people who had offered up various sorts of help. Appallingly, I have no recollection of two of them. Who was Mary? Who was Vickie? What did they contribute, and how could I have forgotten? Two other names, friendships that had once been so sustaining and important they merited a printed salute, have ended. One with a bang. One with a whimper. Both losses remain for me indelibly tinged with sadness.

But an e-book is a new incarnation. A fresh medium for the message. The past never stays the same. This time I intend to use full names, specific info.

Thank you, Paola Rizzoli!  Paola  had invited me to visit her in Italy in 1977. In mid-August when Elvis died she and I were seeking out Paola’s ancestors, comically trooping through obscure Umbrian villages with names like Fratta Todino. We were getting rides when no bus or train service went there, getting leered at, followed, hooted at by local ill-bred men. We were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. You need not doubt who was the knight on a quest and who was the lumbering Sancho. I wore four inch platform sandals and hauled around a heavy suitcase.

Thank you, Frank!  Frank Johnson, my father’s younger brother, was a man of great charm, a born raconteur who was mostly full of bullshit. However, Frank’s stories were very useful to a novelist, and I used them in several books. For Graced Land, Frank was my source on the Studebaker Starlight Coupe. Frank Johnson was one of those men (and they are mostly men) who divide up the eras in their lives by what car they drove at the time. Frank’s cars were more important, more memorable than his women.

Thank you, Meredith!  Meredith Cary, my longtime friend and early reader, read the first, raw hundred pages of Graced Land and offered restructuring advice which I followed. She never did like Elvis, though she liked the novel.

Thank you, Connie!  Connie Eggers and I went to the same high school in a town rather like St. Elmo. Connie kept her yearbooks. I threw mine away in 1979. The era was different, but the place was the same. Her yearbook pictures were essential for my reconstruction of St. Elmo High School.

Thank you, Paul!  Paul Klein was my sons’ music teacher, a respected local musician, and a font of background info on early rock. He even made me tapes of seminal recordings.

When my then-agent Charlotte Sheedy told me that two houses were bidding on Graced Land, Grove and a mega-house, I went with Grove on instinct. A good instinct. My publishing experience there, though many years ago, was the best ever. My longtime friend and agent in London, Juliet Burton, found a congenial home and editor for Graced Land and other books with Constable. (Now defunct.)

Graced Land is dedicated to my mother, Peggy Kalpakian Johnson. It’s not the only nod to her. Late in the novel Emily and Howard Hansen stand in front of an elevator one night at the County hospital listening to a typewriter clack at the end of the hall. The woman who was typing comes out and joins them. She smiles. That was my mother who typed all my scripts for years in the hours after she had worked a full day as secretary to an orthopedic surgeon. (With the advance from Graced Land we bought our first computer.)

And Vickie? Now I remember! My character Emily Shaw is a Tri Delt, but I had absolutely no notion what a posh sorority house was like. One autumn afternoon Vickie and I crashed the Tri Delt house at USC. We collected info I, alas,  never used in the book, but our venture certainly was fun; the girls were too well bred to throw us out. However, all these years later Vickie is too dignified to want to be reminded of that romp.

And Mary? If you’re out there, Mary, and remember your contribution to Graced Land, please do let me know and accept my sincere apologies for forgetting. We will add you to the e-thanks.