Growing Girls (30 page)
Authors: Jeanne Marie Laskas
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Humor, #Parenting, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Exactly. (And thank God someone around this joint understands me.) Get that dog a puppy A kitten, a baby hamster, a little lizard that needs love, anything.
I can’t, I suppose, help but see the world this way. Something magnificent happens in your life, and pretty soon you think it is the answer to every aching heart. You start seeing it here and there, repeating itself, you see it in the news stories you read and in the vacant eyes of some old chicken walking by. It becomes a song you’ll never get out of your head so you might as well sing it.
Motherhood was my rescue. Motherhood.
I wish to thank Alex and Anna and Sasha, my beloved little family, for providing me with more material than any author could ever hope for.
As always I am grateful to my agent, Andrew Blauner, for his tireless friendship and support, and to Kate Miciak, my editor at Bantam, for her patience, enthusiasm, and the trust with which she gives me such glorious room to roam. My thanks to the people of the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, for the formative and essential part they’ve played all these years.
I wish to thank my sisters, Kristin, Claire, and Eileen, for all the lessons on how to be a mom. Finally, and once again, I thank my mother, whose example finds its way onto each page I write.
JEANNE MARIE LASKAS is a columnist for the
Washington Post Magazine
, where her “Significant Others” essays appear weekly. A
GQ
correspondent, she writes for numerous national magazines. She is the author of
The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know; We Remember; Fifty Acres and a Poodle;
and the award-winning
The Exact Same Moon
. A professor in the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, she also writes the “My Life as a Mom” column for
Ladies’ Home Journal
. She lives with her husband and two daughters at Sweetwater Farm in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania.
GROWING GIRLS
A Bantam Book
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Jeanne Marie Laskas
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006041701
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-42069-5
v3.0
