Role Models
Page 25
The Family by Ed Sanders. E. P. Dutton & Co., 1971.
Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell. University of Chicago Press, 1965.
America’s Most Hated Woman by Ann Rowe Seaman. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005.
My Life Without God by William J. Murray. Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1982.
Daddy Grace by Marie W. Dallam. New York University Press, 2007.
Jean Rhys by Carole Angier. André Deutsch, 1990.
Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion by Larry E. Arnold. M. Evans, 1995.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Big thanks to my assistants Susan Allenback and Trish Schweers for their patience, endless research, and help in editing the manuscript of Role Models before I turned it in to the publisher. Trish can actually read my handwriting and decipher the rhythm of my alternative morality, while Susan can zero in on an unclear phrase like a seasoned vice cop busting a streetwise hooker.
I also had great literary detectives working for me: Jim Hollenbaugh, Mathew Bainbridge, Scott Huffines, Kristin Miller, Pat Moran, and Jim West, who tracked down sources and missing persons in my quest for the details of subversive lives. The Maryland State Library Resource Center of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was also invaluable in helping me find obscure information concerning local lunatic history in my hometown, Baltimore. Joan Miller at the Wesleyan Cinema Archives is quite adept at locating obscure news articles I’ve clipped and shipped off to my collection there, and I thank her for being so organized and diligent in her search for the exact right one, which I sometimes only dimly remembered.
Thomas Keith, an editor at New Directions, accidentally gave me the idea for the book by asking me to write the introduction to the reprint of Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs. Bill Clegg, my literary agent, knew immediately where to go with Role Models and set up this book with the publisher I wanted the most in a quick, painless way. Jonathan Galassi, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, understands my humor and edited the memoirs with a dignified, kind, decisive respect for filth, brevity, and the twisted logic that healthy, happily damaged readers might understand.
Most important, I thank the role models themselves and their friends and families for letting me poke around in their lives as I tried to understand how they survived with such grace and honor.
OCTOBER 19, 2009