by Lyndsay Faye
Of Benjamin’s, Horatio is taking only a few keepsakes. The pocket square from his tuxedo, that night. His favorite New World’s Stage coffee mug. And the black leather cuff.
Brow furrowed, Horatio continues packing.
Of course he will keep this, too. He loved Lia.
He will keep it when he returns to London and finally to work. When his first biography is published, it will be tucked in a teak box with Benjamin’s things. It won’t have moved when he publishes his twelfth. All the objects will be safe in their dark home when Horatio wins the Costa Book Award, the Specsavers National Book Award, and finally the Pulitzer. He will keep it when he moves to the Sussex Downs at age seventy with his Staffordshire bull terrier, keep it close along with his memories of a philosopher who loved the stars.
Horatio will keep the strawberry scarf for the rest of his life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There were aspects of this book for which I needed to do no research whatsoever, neuroatypical brains and addiction struggles in particular. But I’ve always been riveted by the mysteries of the cosmos—quantum mechanics, paradoxes, cosmology, and the like—and for that, I had the best of assistance. My deepest gratitude to Charles Seife (Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Idea), Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music), Simon Singh (Fermat’s Last Theorem), John Gribbin (In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat), and Brian Greene (everything the chappie’s ever written, but in particular The Fabric of the Cosmos). It’s likewise with humble gratitude that I thank Columbia University for allowing me to audit some of the classes Benjamin would have been taking for his very real master’s program. I might not have understood half of it, but it deeply enriched my experience of the program, familiarity with the intersection between physics and philosophy, and the actual halls Ben and Horatio would have haunted as grad students.
The culture of New Orleans is one of the richest in a rich nation, and I’m delighted to say I’ve been there multiple times, as I’m not comfortable landing readers in geographies I know nothing about—even if the book physically takes place in New York. However, when writing the Weird Sisters, I relied heavily on a single text: Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book by Luisah Teish, which is a fascinating combination of autobiography, history, feminism, self-help, and spell work. As for the language of flowers employed by Lia and the sisters, that was my own amalgamation of Teish’s recipes, Victorian lore, and herbal cures borrowed from other cultures. Hey, just because the sisters are from the American South doesn’t mean they can’t dabble in the wisdom of Chinese apothecaries. It made sense not to bind them to a single way of manipulating flora, and my research for that spanned many a tome and encyclopedia.
As ever, I can’t sufficiently express my gratitude to my agent, Erin Malone, foreign rights agent Tracy Fisher, and all the other heroes of William Morris Endeavor. Erin, you’ve been a champion for the entire time I was writing this—don’t think I haven’t noticed. I have. Boundless thanks to my editor, Sara Minnich, who took a manuscript that occasionally went off the rails (all of mine do, let’s be real here) and applied a fine-toothed comb to it during 2020, The Year During Which We Largely Abandoned Combs and Just Said Screw It No One Cares About My Hair. Sara, this is a vastly better book because you’ve been such a dedicated, intelligent, caring, and thoughtful part of it. The entire team I work with at Putnam is very dear to me (I’m looking at you, Katie McKee and Alexis Welby), and in short, I couldn’t have a better support system if I magicked one up myself.
My dedication at the front of this novel is to the Groundlings. During Shakespeare’s time, groundlings were the riffraff who couldn’t afford seats in the mezzanines and were instead packed shoulder to shoulder standing in the yard below the stage for the price of a penny. It was actually in Hamlet that Shakespeare invented the slang—he quite liked inventing slang—during the speech when Hamlet is begging the Players to speak the speech trippingly and not chew the wallpaper. “O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings,” he laments. (I adore Hamlet, but he is one meticulous little snot.) Previously, groundling had meant a wide-mouthed fish, so it was a clear dig at the impoverished denizens of the theater’s pit staring up at the stage, who were notorious for creative misbehavior like chucking un-fresh fruit during the duller stretches.
My own Groundlings, however, are very real and alive today. There are about a dozen of us, give or take, and every year without fail, we get up before sunrise to wait in line for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater. We snooze in sleeping bags, order breakfast from Andy’s Deli (they deliver to the line—one indicates “by the water fountain,” “near the big rock,” “close to the Pinetum”), talk, laugh, collect tickets, and then reconvene for a picnic at Turtle Pond before the show. You aren’t allowed glass in the Delacorte; but you are allowed box wine, or on one memorable occasion Ziplock bags of premade margaritas, and we howl with laughter at all the jokes and are very much the groundlings minus the fruit. They’re some of the dearest memories of my life. I’ve seen Ann Hathaway in Twelfth Night, John Lithgow in King Lear, Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice. And I’ve loved Shakespeare with all my heart since I was a little girl, when my parents took me every summer to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But it was my Groundlings who made those dozens of shows so precious to me. This book is for each and every one of them.
Finally, as always, it’s for my readers. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, readers. Shakespeare and I have one thing in common: we are (or were) commercial authors, people who live and breathe and buy groceries by sharing stories. I wouldn’t exist without you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lyndsay Faye is the author of six critically acclaimed books: Jane Steele, which was nominated for an Edgar for Best Novel; Dust and Shadow; The Gods of Gotham, also Edgar-nominated; Seven for a Secret; The Fatal Flame; and The Paragon Hotel. Faye, a true New Yorker in the sense she was born elsewhere, lives in New York City.
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