Obstetrix(51)

I was extremely fortunate in having an actual gynecologist agree to read the whole manuscript. Noe Woods, thank you SO MUCH for your comments, which were extremely helpful. Any remaining mistakes are mine alone and were probably added to the manuscript after she saw it.

Thanks to my agent, Danielle Bukowski, for claiming me as a client when my previous agent departed (friends, I am on my sixth agent. It is normal for authors to have more than one agent over the course of their career but I am an outlier. There, that’s the gossip I promised earlier) and for treating my work as worth the effort. Many thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Mal Frazier for their work on this book; to Patrick, for sitting me down in Glasgow and asking me to send him my next book; and finally, to Lydy Nickerson for reading Patrick and Teresa one of my short stories while on a road trip.

I have been a member of the Wyrdsmiths writers’ group since 1997, and my friends and colleagues in the group remain indispensable to me as a writer and also, you know, because they’re awesome and they’re all friends I lean on for all sorts of reasons: Eleanor Arnason, Adam Stemple, Theo Lorenz, Kelly Barnhill, and Lyda Morehouse. Lyda is the friend who took over submitting my stories for me during the lowest point in my writing career and is also my best friend. Thank you, all of you.

My husband, Ed Burke, has always supported and believed in me. Ed, you’re awesome and I love you. Thank you for everything.

And finally, my father, Bert Kritzer, to whom this book is dedicated. Liz’s father, Sam, is not based on mine—my dad was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, to note one major difference. But Sam Gwinn got my dad’s generosity, his problem-solving ability, and his fondness for long phone calls. (He also got my mother’s anti-nostalgia for ice-cold outhouse seats.) Like Liz, I was deeply fortunate in my parents. Dad, thank you for your decades of support and encouragement. I love you.