So Much for That (54 page)

Oh, the three of them were a “family” only loosely speaking, since Carol and Shep kept chastely to separate bedrooms. Or they did until Carol came out with an astonishing question while lingering after dinner, when Heather was off taking a moonlight swim.

“Do you by any chance have a really, really big dick?”

By morning, after a tearful confidence that he wished she’d got off her lovely chest a long time ago, he would understand the context. At the time he simply laughed and said that there was only one way for her to find out.

Of course, from the very start of this “escape fantasy,” Shep had been mindful of its pitfalls. For years people had warned him that there was no escape. Any island “paradise” was bound to disappoint. He would get bored. He would get lonely. He would crave the company of his own kind. He would discover that he was an American through and through, who could never assimilate with natives who believed in voodoo. He would miss movies and fine restaurants and cable television. According to Beryl, he would scurry shamefacedly back to Westchester in no time. Because all along he’d been trying to shed the very rough beast bound to slouch after him wherever he fled: himself.

They were all full of shit. It was great.

I
’d like to thank David Brenner, executive director of the Dysautonomia Foundation, for being so astonishingly generous with his time and so informative about his work and his own demanding home life. Likewise, thanks to Faye Ginsburg, her husband, Fred Myers, and their charming daughter Samantha, as well as to Laurie Goldberger and her impressive daughter Perry (who gave me courage to make Flicka smart as a whip), all of whom were graciously forthcoming about the many challenges of managing one of the most bizarre diseases I’ve ever heard of. I’m grateful to the owners of Fundu Lagoon on Pemba Island, especially Ellis Flyte, and to the resort’s gracious General Manager Matt Semark for enabling me to be obscenely pampered with sundowners, coconut curries, and lemongrass oil massages all under the hilariously respectable guise of doing “research.”

Novelists thanking spouses for their amazing patience during the agony of artistic creation gets pretty tired. Besides, I don’t consider writing an agony, and my husband Jeff is not remotely patient. Yet he did furnish me one gift for which any author’s gratitude is bottomless: a good title.

I’d also like to thank my good friends Deb Thomson and Fiammetta
Rocco for sharing the intimate and often painful details of their treatments for life-threatening illness. Would that I could also thank Terri Gelenian-Wood for similar confidences, but Terri’s expertise regarded an illness that proved not merely life-threatening but deadly. Now that it’s too late for gratitude, I can only lodge on the record that I miss her grievously, and that I’m relieved to have dedicated an earlier novel to such a lifelong close friend while I still had the chance. Terri, my life is smaller without you.

Because out of sheer laziness I have not customarily included acknowledgments in my books, I’ve yet to formally thank my editor Gail Winston, on whose solid common sense I heavily rely and whose enthusiasm for this and previous novels means so much to me. In kind, I can finally thank my agent, Kim Witherspoon, whose efficient, intelligent conduct of her job makes it so much easier for me to do mine. I hesitate to let the secret out lest she be inundated with writers desperate for better representation, but I am blessed with one of the only literary agents in New York City who is not a nut.

Yet…

LIONEL SHRIVER
’s novels include the
New York Times
bestseller
The Post-Birthday World
and the international bestseller
We Need to Talk About Kevin,
which won the 2005 Orange Prize and has now sold over a million copies worldwide. Earlier books include
Double Fault, A Perfectly Good Family,
and
Checker and the Derailleurs.
Her novels have been translated into twenty-five languages. Her journalism has appeared in the
Guardian,
the
New York Times,
the
Wall Street Journal,
and many other publications. She lives in London.

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