Some further debts: The violinist Kathleen Thomson kindly read both “The Worst You Ever Feel” and “Cross” for musical accuracy; remaining mistakes are mine. A childhood friend, Elizabeth Pulbratek Randisi, went and grew up into an estate planning lawyer and gamely helped me figure out the inheritance details in “The Museum of the Dearly Departed.” Any lingering plausibility issues are no reflection of her excellent legal skill. Alex Ross’s 2009 New Yorker article “The Music Mountain” launched my obsession with the Marlboro Music School and Festival, and allowed me to imagine the place that would hover in the background of “Cross.” At a dinner one night, Brian Bouldrey told me a story about the composer István Márta; I went back to my hotel room and wrote “The Singing Women.”
This book would not exist yet if it weren’t for the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ragdale Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
I was blessed to be born into a strange and artistic family, one that I’m still struggling, in many ways, to understand. But I was handed more stories than I could ever decipher or use, and — more important — I was instilled from the beginning with the understanding that the arts were, while perhaps not the best way to make a living, the best way to make a life.
Jon Freeman is now married to a busy writer but used to be married to someone with delusions of being a writer. I’m not sure whether my neuroses were greater now or then, but he’s put up with all of them and edited the hell out of every story here. This book is for him.