by Clare Beams
Friends old and new, thank you for your support and listening and encouragement. Our Boston crew, I continue to miss you desperately. And I feel so lucky to have found a group of friends in Pittsburgh that has helped me weather this writing-books-while-parenting-small-children season: Elizabeth and Rob Felter, Michelle Gil-Montero and Roman Antopolsky, Meg Goehrig and Bryan Brown, Sara and Dan Lindey, Megan and Alex Poplawsky, Lauren Shapiro and Kevin González, Anjali Sachdeva, Becky Tuch, I am grateful for all of you. Then the far-flung but dear: Lydia Nycz, Amy Wu Silverman, Anna Mirabile, and Kate Schlesinger, what a joy to watch you shape your lives, and how lucky I feel to have you in my corner as I shape mine.
I have wanted to be a writer almost as long as I can remember, and my family has helped me in uncountable ways with the pursuit of this particular dream (and, really, all dreams). Thank you a million times over to my mom and dad, Ann and Mark Beams, for their endless belief and their endless love—and to my mom for being, always, my first reader. My thanks and love to my brother, Owen Beams; my sister-in-law, Eden Beams; and my nieces, the wonderful Madelyn and Cadence. And thank you to my incredible in-laws, who have often stepped in to help make things work on the home front.
Thank you to my husband, Finnegan Calabro, for building with me this life, for living it with me, for filling it with more joy and love than I think I would have believed possible.
And to my miraculous daughters, Tess and Joanna. This book is for you, because you have changed everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches creative writing, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
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