Authors: Marisa Silver

Mary Coin (24 page)

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the continued support and encouragement of David Rosenthal, and to the precise intelligence and refined touch of Sarah Hochman. I am lucky to have had my dear friend and agent, Henry Dunow, by my side all these years as a most trusted and thoughtful early reader. Kimberly Burns is a true believer, and I am grateful for her inventive work and her boundless optimism. Rachel Kushner has taken this journey with me, challenging me time and again with her complex and nimble mind. And Ken Kwapis never fails to help me discover what it is I’m really after.

Two of the characters in this novel are inspired by Florence Owens Thompson and Dorothea Lange, the subject and photographer involved in the making of the great photograph
Migrant Mother
. I am grateful for their lives and legacies. The letter Mary Coin writes to
Look
magazine is adapted from a letter Thompson submitted to
U.S. Camera
. Vera Dare’s field notes are drawn from those Lange made while working, and from the individual and general captions she appended to her photographs.

The excellent books
Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
, by Linda Gordon, and
Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life
, by Milton Meltzer, provided me with a wealth of information that was useful in constructing the life of Vera Dare.

Often, I know why I am drawn to a particular idea at the outset. But sometimes, it is only through the process of making the work that I discover what has compelled me toward a set of preoccupations. I have come to understand that it was my long-ago collaboration with the late filmmaker Richard Leacock that lies at the heart of this novel. Ricky always knew where to point the camera.

About the Author

Marisa Silver is the author of the novels
The God of War
(a
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize finalist) and
No Direction Home
, and two story collections,
Alone With You
and
Babe in Paradise
(a
New York Times
Notable Book and
Los Angeles Times
Best Book of the Year). Her first short story appeared in
The New
Yorker,
when she was featured in the magazine’s first “Debut Fiction” issue. Silver’s fiction has been included in
The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories,
and other anthologies. Winner of the O. Henry Prize, she lives in Los Angeles.