Bright Young Women(121)

To the whole team at Marysue Rucci Books: Jessica Preeg, Richard Rhorer, Andy Jiaming Tang—thank you for the friendship and the support. Elizabeth Breeden, thank you for being you. I would follow you into a fire.

Bruna Papandrea, Erik Feig, Jeanne Snow, Casey Haver, Julia Hammer, Samie Kim Falvey—thank you for getting the band back together on this one. Let’s make something great.

Big thanks to Alice Gammill, my Pamela Schumacher-esque assistant, who dots every i and crosses every t, loves on my big fat bulldog like a second mother, and who procured hundreds of pages of transcripts and case files from the Florida Archives at the height of the pandemic—a painstaking and nearly impossible task that you never gave up on. I could not have told this story without you.

Michelle Weiner, Joe Mann, Cait Hoyt, and Olivia Blaustein, thank you for the wise advice, the nimble negotiating, and for continuing to make all my Hollywood dreams come true.

Christine Cuddy, you make sure all our bases are covered always. With you I have the security to be creative—thank you.

The team at Sunshine Sachs: Kimberly Christman, Keleigh Thomas Morgan, and Hannah Edelman. You three are worth every penny. Grateful for what you see in me.

Briana Dunning is the most talented hair stylist in Los Angeles and I have to thank her not only for a killer cut but for all her native Floridian wisdom. She is the one who taught me the saying that in Florida, the further north you go, the more southern it gets, which helped orient my understanding of the Panhandle. And to my Seattle shepherd, Bethany Heitman, thank you for dispelling me of the notion that Seattle is the rainiest city in the country just before the pages went to press.

Thank you to Tori Telfer, whose powerful 2019 profile of Kathy Kleiner in Rolling Stone got some of the wheels turning in my head, and who didn’t hesitate to share resources when I cold-emailed her. You remind me of how lucky I am to be a part of this writing community.

On the subject of luck, I have a bit of it thanks to you, the reader. Thank you for preordering, purchasing, reserving at your local library, and for your messages and Instagram tags. Without you, there is no this. I hope number three was worth the wait.