The Story of a Marriage — Acknowledgements
Much gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts for their support, and the retreats where this novel was written—begun at Santa Maddalena, rewritten at MacDowell and Centre d’Art i Natura, finished at Yaddo—as well as to Lynn Nesbit, Cullen Stanley, Jonathan Galassi, Beatrice Rezzori Monti, Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, Daniel Handler, and best thanks of all to my editor, Frances Coady, who saw this book through everything.
I am grateful to Jane Hudson at the Sunset Library, and the San Francisco History Center for their information on neighborhoods, including photographs and historical clippings, many of which appear in the novel, warped by its funhouse mirrors–the soldier’s dollar does indeed exist in a cellophane envelope, signed by soldiers. Background painting was aided by personal accounts, including those by Gordon Zahn and Adrian Wilson on the CO experience, Josette Wingo and Joyce Maupin on life for women in the war, Erwin Kell on gay life in the bay area in the fifties, and many contributors to the Western Neighborhoods Project. Douglas Henry Daniels’ Pioneer Urbanites was a crucial insight into the singular African-American experience in San Francisco. Costumes came from picking through the 1948 San Francisco Chronicle for Pearlie’s old coats, hats and gloves, and reading most of 1952 and 1953 to find the rest, including the little lipstick mirror she is given for her birthday, reflecting the world around her. The same newspaper provided air raids, anxiety, Pearlie’s clippings, and Ethel Rosenberg’s half-tone face.
Everything else is invention.
