The Newlyweds (50 page)

I wouldn’t have written this book if not for an extraordinary person I met six years ago on an airplane. Farah Deeba Munni opened her life to me, sharing her two homes, her sense of humor, and her memories, while giving me the freedom to make something entirely different from them. A writer couldn’t ask for a more valuable gift, and I’m deeply grateful for her trust and her friendship.

The hospitality of Farah’s parents, her grandmother, and her extended family, both in Dhaka and in Haibatpur, exceeded even extremely high Bangladeshi standards. Farah’s husband, David Butler, was an invaluable resource for all things Rochesterian, and I’m grateful to him for his patience with this project. I owe thanks also to Omar Shareef and Shahriar Kabir and their families for welcoming me into their homes in Dhaka, and to Betsy Hartmann for discussing her experiences in Bangladesh.

At a time of sparse funding for the arts, I’m indebted to the Guggenheim Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, which provided financial help as well as a genuine community of writers, a rare thing. I’m also thankful to Deborah Treisman at
The New Yorker
, and to David Bezmozgis, Emma Freudenberger, and Fatema Ahmed for their thoughts and suggestions about early drafts of the manuscript.

Robin Desser is the kind of editor who isn’t supposed to exist anymore, both sympathetic and exacting, and this book is much better for her hand in it. I always feel lucky to have Binky Urban for an agent—this time in particular for convincing me to keep going when I thought I was really stuck. And this book is dedicated to Paul, who supports me in ways I couldn’t have imagined when we were only newly wed.

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novel
The Dissident
and the short-story collection
Lucky Girls
, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; both books were
New York Times Book Review
Notables. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of
Granta
’s Best Young American Novelists and one of
The New Yorker
’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family.