Hello Beautiful

Alice turned her face upward, as if to study the night sky, as if she required a different vantage point to sort through what was inside her. William had written a series of questions in the footnotes of his manuscript, a long time ago. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Who am I? He could sense those questions deep inside his daughter now. She was not broken, like he had been. Julia had seen to that. But Alice was taking tentative steps onto a new terrain, wondering if the ice could bear her weight.

“I know you can do this on your own,” he said. “But, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to help.”

Acknowledgments

Helen Ellis, Hannah Tinti, and I happened to sit next to each other in Dani Shapiro’s New York University workshop in 1995. Despite our striking differences, we recognized something in one another, and when the class ended, Helen suggested we continue to meet. These two women are still my first readers, and I hear their voices in my head when I write. I am the writer I am, and this book is the book it is, because of them.

I am both proud and delighted to be represented by Julie Barer and The Book Group and to be published by Whitney Frick and The Dial Press. Susan Kamil was in the room for Dear Edward, and I feel like she remains in the room with us now. Many thanks to Rose Fox, Clio Seraphim, and Nicole Cunningham for reading early drafts of this novel and offering insightful notes. Loren Noveck and Kathy Lord were incisive, thoughtful copy editors, and they have my gratitude. Thank you to the team at The Dial Press / Random House, especially Andy Ward, Avideh Bashirrad, Maria Braeckel, Carrie Neill, Debbie Aroff, Madison Dettlinger, and Donna Cheng. I’m very fortunate to have Caspian Dennis, Jenny Meyer, and Michelle Weiner as advocates for my work, and I’m grateful to be published in the UK by Isabel Wall and Viking Penguin.

Growing up, I slept at my friend Leah’s house as often as I slept at my own, and her parents, Louis and Cecilia, were like second parents to me. There were many reasons I loved being there, but one of them was the constant parade of Ceil’s many sisters (Toni, Celeste, Rosemary, Caroline, and Christine), who walked in and out of the house as if it were their own. The sisters were all short, most of them had curly hair, and their faces resembled one another’s to the extent that they looked like different versions of a whole. They inspired my Padavano sisters, and I thank them for always being nice to the shy girl who was usually by Leah’s side.

My uncle Ed mailed postcards to me from his home in Chicago when I was a kid, and the greeting was always the same: “Hello Beautiful.” I knew that my uncle didn’t really know what I looked like — I saw him very rarely — but that’s why I loved the greeting. It felt like he believed I was beautiful on the inside, and since (as an introverted, bookish child) my insides were the most significant part of me, I appreciated this. The title of this novel, and the fact that it’s set in the neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago, are because of my uncle. In childhood, magical lands rise up inside us, and my uncle’s mural-covered neighborhood was one of mine.

Librarians and booksellers are the best people. The librarians Kolter Campbell and Catie Huggins at the McCormick Special Collections and Archives at the Northwestern University Library answered several of my questions about classes and programs at Northwestern University in the 1980s, and I am grateful for their assistance. Katharine Solheim from Pilsen Community Books helped me determine which street the Padavano family might have lived on, and her expertise on Pilsen was invaluable. The wonderful Lozano Library sits in the middle of Pilsen, as it does in my novel. The actual library opened its doors in 1989; I have taken fictional liberties, and my version exists a few years before that date. I hope, in any case, that I have honored the library, and the profound importance of all public libraries to our society.

I’m grateful to my friend JJ Lonsinger Rutherford for answering questions about what it’s like to grow up as a very tall girl. JJ is fierce and funny and a great advertisement for growing as tall as you possibly can. I also want to thank Dominic Vendell for generously answering my logistical questions about how one earns a PhD in history. Kevin Konty told me, years ago, that his mother had fostered newborns while he was a teenager, and that was so interesting to me that I’m amazed the idea didn’t show up in one of my novels until now.