Gabrielle and Jenna are cousins who live apart, their parents obviously connected, and in my mind Jenna probably consulted Gabrielle about her conception problems. In fact, there are other stories: Ginny as a twenty-year-old shop clerk having an affair with her older, non-Jewish, married boss; Jenna meeting her husband Jay’s parents in New Jersey while a strange news story unfolds in the background; Lucy reconnecting with James from camp years later, in London. Some of these stories were written, others sketched out, a couple not on the page at all, just fragmented in my head.
The map is endless—how we connect to people and spread, vinelike, and overlap—and yet for this book, I had to tame the growth in order to focus on the heart of this novel, Lucy and Jenna finding each other through the sprawl of adolescence, travel, love, work, loss, family, flings, and time; Kyla’s personal evolution from a not very nice friend to someone whole and fully realized; and Gabrielle’s quiet peace with her father and new mothering role.
If I were to draw a real-life picture of my vines, there would be just as many arrows and lines leading from one friend to the next, back to one boyfriend and on to the seventh-grade friend who later roomed with my husband at college and through whose twin I wound up meeting my spouse. There would be my husband’s cousin who is married to a guy whose sister is married to a man whose sister-in-law is now one of my best friends, even though that’s not how I met her (this union was performed by my first editor). Friendships, relationships, familial and otherwise, seep, the edges and overlaps spreading, and it’s only when I pick through the brush of it all that I realize how tenuous some of the important connections are—what if I’d had a different editor or hadn’t been friends with the twins in seventh grade. But I did—and so here am I, and in the same light, here are these girls, these women, who are tangled and untangled, their stories mapped out.
Emily Franklin
Acknowledgments
So many thanks are due to: Faye Bender, who loved The Girls’ Almanac right away; Jennifer Pooley, for her brilliant editing and belief in this book; Grandma Bev and Papa, who read so many of these stories before I completed them and whose constant love and support of me and my writing is a huge part of my life; to Jack Harris for physics and math assistance; to Kristin Pape, who wrote the poem upon which “Residency” is based; Heather Swain for support, humor, and encouragement; my mom; my children; my brothers; Kathy for her early reads; Heather Woodcock for careful notes in those first drafts; the Strauss Family; the writers who gave their support with blurbs; and my own group of early girls. And of course, always, Adam.
About the Author
EMILY FRANKLIN is the author of the novel Liner Notes and a fiction series, The Principles of Love. She is co-editor and contributor to a two-part fiction anthology: Before: Short Stories About Pregnancy from Our Top Writers and After: Short Stories About Parenting from Our Top Writers and editor of It’s a Wonderful Lie: 26 Truths About Life in Your Twenties. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including the Mississippi Review and Boston Globe. She lives outside of Boston with her husband and their three children.
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BY EMILY FRANKLIN
The Girls’ Almanac
Liner Notes
The Principles of Love Series
Before: Short Stories About Pregnancy
from Our Top Writers
After: Short Stories About Parenting
from Our Top Writers
(Coeditor and Contributor)
It’s a Wonderful Lie: 26 Truths About Life
in Your Twenties
(Editor)
Copyright
Some of these stories appeared in the following journals and anthologies:
“Come to Iceland,” Mississippi Review
“Early Girls,” Small Spiral Notebook
“A Map of the Area,” Carve Magazine
“In the Herd of the Elephants,” Literary Mama and
Before: Short Stories About Pregnancy from Our Top Writers
“43 Lake View Ave.,” Pindeldyboz
“Defining Moments in the Life of My Father,” Heat City Review
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE GIRLS’ ALMANAC. Copyright © 2006 by Emily Franklin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-198523-2
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