by E. Lockhart
Some guys from the basketball team jogged by wearing their jerseys.
Two girls with spiraling hair extensions and shining lips shouted when they saw each other.
A group of mousy girls came back from the student center carrying a large bag of french fries. They sat on the lawn to eat them.
Adelaide was glad to be at Alabaster. She would take sculpture and puppetry classes. There, she’d build
shapes that were
not what they seemed to be;
images of boys who were
not who they seemed to be, or who they
used to be;
images of battles that were reunions, and
whales and wool hats and tampons that stood for love. She’d build
spaces that existed only in her imagination,
contradictory rooms and
things she could not express with words,
because they would not cohere into a single, orderly story.
These things would become tangible under her fingers. And in making them, Adelaide would
heal her bleeding wounds and
release her fury; she’d
open her lungs so that she could breathe deeply the wet air of a New England fall, and she’d
open her heart to people (and dogs). She would
love herself, even with her
sadness and her
distractibility, her
defenses and her
failures.
The process of making would
stretch open the universe
until it was
frighteningly and
gloriously
wide with possibility.
Author’s Note
Partial inspiration for Again Again comes from a short story I wrote some years ago called “How I Wrote to Toby,” published in 21 Proms. The characters’ personalities and circumstances are different from what’s in that original story—and that story has no alternate possible worlds in it—but that’s how it went. Constellations by Nick Payne was another source for this novel. It is a wonderful multiverse love story.
Alabaster Preparatory Academy appears (and is interrogated, as promised) in my novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. Luigi’s pizza place can be found in that book as well.
The Factory is based loosely on Mass MOCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams. You can see images of some of the Mass MOCA exhibits mentioned below on the institution’s website.
The art Adelaide sees and does is all invented by me—but with definite debts of inspiration to the following: Half-Truths by Paul Ramírez Jonas, at the New Museum in New York City, 2017; The Flat Side of the Knife by Samara Golden at MoMA PS1, 2014; the book Mark Dion: Contemporary Artist by Mark Dion, Lisa Graziose Currin, Miwon Kwon, and Norman Bryson; Garden of Eden on Wheels, a long-term installation, and pretty much every other exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California; Mary Corse: A Survey in Light at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, 2018; and the Lego art of Nathan Sawaya and Dante Dentoni (among others). Professor Byrd’s print is by Kehinde Wiley. My thoughts on Fool for Love are influenced by Daniel Aukin’s 2015 production at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, with set design by Dane Laffrey.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my editor, Beverly Horowitz, who gently forced me to rethink the novel completely, several times, asking all the right questions in her Beverly way. Thank you to Lauren Myracle, Gayle Forman, Daniel Aukin, and Sarah Mlynowski for reading drafts of the novel and critiquing them, and to Len Jenkin, Libba Bray, and GF for talking through plot points with me. Bob was endlessly supportive. My agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, did all the agenty things but also retained faith in this book when it was really flailing. A number of dear friends whose loved ones have suffered from opioid addictions shared their family stories with me and helped me shape the emotional arcs of the novel.
At Random House, my gratitude to the whole amazing team, including but not limited to Mary McCue, Colleen Fellingham, John Adamo, Dominique Cimina, Kathleen Dunn, Rebecca Gudelis, Christine Labov, Barbara Marcus, and Adrienne Waintraub. Thanks to Jane Harris and Emma Matthewson at HotKey for their early enthusiasm and support.
Thanks to Josh Pugh for supporting the charity Day One, Voices Against Violence. For his contribution to the cause, he got to name a character: Stacey Shurman.
In early 2018, two of my students at Hamline University wrote essays that influenced my thinking on this book. I’m grateful to Miguel Camnitzer, whose research paper challenged the predominance of the monogamy paradigm in recent young adult fiction, and to Jonathan Hillman, whose paper called out the rigid beauty standards to which male characters adhere in many contemporary novels.
Ivy, Daniel, Hazel, Clementine, and Blizzard were the absolute best of the best in any possible universe.
About the Author
E. Lockhart wrote the New York Times bestsellers We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud. Her other books include Fly on the Wall, Dramarama, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and the Ruby Oliver Quartet: The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, The Treasure Map of Boys, and Real Live Boyfriends.
emilylockhart.com
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