Thanks are due to my wonderful agent, Samantha Haywood, for her forthright critiques and warmhearted support of this difficult book.
So Much Love would be an extremely different and poorer book without the deft and untiring editing of Anita Chong, who shouldered the burden along with me for more than two years. Working with her was a relief, a joy, and an education.
I am indescribably lucky in my family, and wish to thank Barbara, Gerald, and Ben Rosenblum for their support of this book, during all the fits and starts and failures and successes.
I owe so much to my husband, Mark Sampson, for his love, his insightful reading (and rereading) of my drafts, his own inspiring work ethic, and his incredible patience with this protracted effort.
And finally, though this book and all its characters are a work of fiction not based on any real persons or events, of course I read a great deal by and about victims of various forms of violence, in particular kidnapping victims like Catherine. Though much of the media coverage of that type of crime is sensational and disturbing, the actual voices, when I could find them, were incredibly, shockingly quiet, still, and true. Their words stay with me, and I am thankful for them.
The lines from Hamlet that Donny recites on this page are from Act 3, Scene 2, lines 334 to 338, from page 1716 of The Norton Shakespeare (W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).
The text on Archie’s tag described on this page is from the poem “The Largest Life” by Archibald Lampman, which can be found in The Poems of Archibald Lampman (ed. Duncan Campbell Scott). (General Books, 2009)
The translation of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych that Kyla refers to in “Youth Must Have Its Day” is an amalgam of those by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage Books, 2012) and by Louise and Aylmer Maude.
So Much Love Page 27