I owe a great deal to my brilliant editor, Jennifer Smith. She read an early draft of this novel and told me I had taken a wrong turn. I muttered many curse words under my breath while agreeing to try a new direction. And then, when I finally figured it out a few months later, I wrote her an email saying:
Damn you. You’re right
. Thank you, Jen, for your keen vision—you could see the proper shape of my novel well before I could. And thank you for your gentle, lovely way of guiding me. I’m so glad you never heard all those bad words.
I try to attend a writers’ residency every year—they feed my soul and offer me a remarkable chance to write without distraction. Brush Creek Arts in Wyoming deserves a lot of the credit for this novel. I wrote the first hundred pages in a two-week frenzy of creative energy while living there in my beautiful cabin. Then I returned almost a year later to rewrite the novel. Thank you to the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts.
The folks at Ballantine and Random House make me very happy. I so appreciate the work of Libby McGuire, Kim Hovey, Jennifer Hershey, Hannah Elnan, Cindy Murray, Susan Corcoran, Maggie Oberrender, Janet Wygal, Dana Blanchette, and so many others who truly love to bring books into the world. Thanks for taking me in and treating me so well.
Many thanks to the Goddess of Web Design, Ilsa Brink.
Neal Rothman, thank you for all that you do for me, for us.
BY ELLEN SUSSMAN
A Wedding in Provence
The Paradise Guest House
French Lessons
On a Night Like This
Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave
Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex
E
LLEN
S
USSMAN
is the nationally bestselling author of the novels
On a Night Like This, French Lessons, The Paradise Guest House
, and
A Wedding in Provence
. She is the editor of two anthologies,
Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave
, a
New York Times
Editors’ Choice and a
San Francisco Chronicle
bestseller, and
Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex
. She has published numerous essays and short stories. Ellen teaches creative writing both in private classes and through Stanford Continuing Studies. She has two daughters and lives with her husband in Northern California.