Every other night will have been rehearsal for Friday 18 July—we had to be ready. Everything was pushing us imperceptibly toward this moment—if I hadn’t missed that train, if you hadn’t moved for the job, just imagine.
“I don’t want it to be tomorrow,” you’ll sigh, a single tear escaping as you laugh bitterly at the futility of the sentiment. “I want it to be Friday 18 July forever.”
And when the morning comes, our love like bugs will scatter in the light. We will dress ourselves while facing the wall, we will scramble for our phones, we will be strangers.
And we will realize that Friday 18 July, like every day in history before it, was a moment, a twenty-four-hour trick of the light, a thing that happened once and never again.
And that sad truth will just about swallow us whole.
* * *
Sorry for any inconvinience
Acknowledgments
Before I wrote a book, I always pictured the act of writing a book to be a very solitary pursuit, especially compared to the boisterous world of TV writing, the collaborative art of playwriting, and the high-flying derring-do of skywriting. This may still be true for most books—I’ve only written just the one—but this particular book would not be possible without the helpful participation of many smart and kind people who are not me, and I am very grateful for them.
First of all, I’d like to thank Tim O’Connell and Anna Kaufman at Knopf. I k’not have asked for a better team to cheer me on, bounce ideas across, and gently guide me away from my worst impulses with the occasional well-deployed “Are we sure about this one?”
I’d also like to thank our production editor, Rita Madrigal; copyeditor, Nancy Tan; and proofreaders, Tricia Wygal and Lawrence Krauser. The editing process has been a wonderful journey of discovery about how little I still understand about where hyphens belong. (The general theme of these acknowledgments is: Thank you for helping me look less stupid.)
As of writing this note, it is unclear how much I should thank publicists Nimra Chohan and Madison Brock and marketers Julianne Clancy and Emily Wilkerson because the seeds of their labor have yet to blossom, but if you are reading this book now then they did their job well, and I am thankful to them!
Also, this book is so pretty! I have our jacket designer, Tyler Comrie, and text designer, Cassandra Pappas, to thank for that!
Many people have read these stories over the years and given me their feedback. I’d like to particularly acknowledge Caroline Damon, Dan Moyer, Stephanie Staab, Shary Niv, Jessica Hempstead, Lindsay Meisel, Suzanne Richardson, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Julie Buntin, Lorraine DeGraffenreidt, Octavia Bray, Karen Joseph Adcock, Becky Bob-Waksberg, and Amalia Bob-Waksberg. I’m sure there are many wonderful people I’m forgetting here, as well as many terrible people I am omitting on purpose, so if you don’t see your name here, rest assured you are in one of those two groups.
I’d like to be very Hollywood for a moment and thank my reps, particularly Mollie Glick and Rachel Rusch at CAA and Joel Zadak at Artists First, for helping these stories find a home.
In the spring of 2017, some of these pieces were read out loud at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles. If you’re ever putting together a book of short stories, I highly recommend you put on a show to see what’s working; it’s tremendously helpful. That show was produced by Lorraine DeGraffenreidt, and the stories were read by the very talented Natalie Morales, Baron Vaughn, Will Brill, Emma Galvin, and Kate Berlant. Thank you to everyone who helped me put that show together and everyone who attended it.
I am greatly indebted to some wonderful teachers who encouraged me to write in high school and college, specifically Jim Shelby, Paul Dunlap, Rachel Lurie, Chiori Miyagawa, and Dominic Taylor, among others.
I’d like to thank my family, immediate, extended, and metaphorical, for years of love and support.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife. About half of these stories are from before I met her and half since, and I’m convinced if you lined them all up in the order they were written, you could pinpoint the moment where my heart became whole.
“We Men of Science” originally published in WHAT YOU DO | EAT A PEACH in 2009 and subsequently in Catapult on September 10, 2015. “Missed Connection—m4w” originally published in the Missed Connections section of Craigslist.com on August 6, 2013.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the creator and executive producer of the Netflix series BoJack Horseman. This is his first book.
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Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Page 22