My editor, Kathryn Belden, who helped me tease out a version of the story I hadn’t imagined possible before she got her hands on it.
The tireless teams at Scribner, CAA, and DeFiore and Company, including: Michelle Weiner, Colin Farstad, Jacey Mitziga, Ashley Gilliam, Nan Graham, Sally Howe, Jaya Miceli, Abigail Novak, and Kathleen Rizzo.
Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Brendan Duffy, Kelly Link, Lydia Peelle, Anica Rissi, Lynn Strong, and Lynn Weingarten, who read versions of the book, helped me navigate plot labyrinths, and offered the kind of friendship and occasional sanity checks no writer can do without.
Leslie Jamison and Adam Wilson, who read multiple drafts, talked me through several revisions—not to mention off several ledges—and have been more generous with their time and advice than seems possible. They never stopped pushing me to make this book better, and it’s largely because of them that I found the confidence to try.
* * *
In an effort to make both the history and science in this book as accurate as possible, I devoured more books and journal articles than I can list here, but my understanding of fugue states and hysteria were especially shaped by Ian Hacking’s Mad Travelers, Elaine Showalter’s Hystories, and Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses. The latter is a beautiful and unsettling biography of Charcot’s three most famous subjects: Blanche, Geneviève, and, of course, Augustine. It was Douwe Draaisma, in Forgetting: Myths, Perils, Compensations, who introduced me to the idea of studying memory by studying forgetting—and who noted that the English language lacks a noun for the thing forgotten. William Everdell, in The First Moderns, originated the theory that modernity is fracture.
I’m very grateful to the historian Anne Harrington for her course on “Madness and Medicine,” which I took twenty years ago and haven’t stopped thinking about since. The spark for this book was lit in that lecture hall. I’m grateful also to Emily Goldman, who talked me through the mechanics and philosophy of musical fugues; to my graduate school adviser, M. Norton Wise, whose “hinge of temporality” theory I borrowed for my fictional historian of science—and finally, to Natalie Roher, for the rats.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© NINA SUBIN
Robin Wasserman is the author of Girls on Fire, an NPR and BuzzFeed best book of the year. She is a graduate of Harvard College with a master’s in the history of science from UCLA. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches on the faculty of the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program.
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Girls on Fire
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Robin Wasserman
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First Scribner hardcover edition July 2020
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ISBN 978-1-9821-3949-0
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