The Shippers(102)

Acknowledgments


First of all, I need to thank my family—hubby, kids, and mom—for being hilarious and delightful, and talking through structure, and punching up comedy, and reading drafts of this story … but most of all for taking an actual cruise with me for research. I’m not sure it was on anybody’s bucket list to spend Thanksgiving of 2019 chugging around the Gulf of Mexico on an ocean liner, but I begged them all to come with me, and—bless them—they did.

Up to that point, I had not been on a cruise ship since the age of thirteen—a ten-day cruise where I had my first kiss. Or second. Depending on how you define “first kiss.”

A heck of a trip, for sure. And I’ve always wanted to write about it. And now here we are. Though this story bears almost no resemblance to the real trip my family took back then. Other than just the general cruise vibes.

And, yes: I did say 2019. This story was supposed to be the one I wrote during 2020. I had an outline, and I was well on my way to getting started writing … and then 2020 happened. I’m not sure if you remember 2020 at all, but it was not a great time for cruise ships. News story after news story highlighted whole ships felled by infections—from Covid to rotaviruses—culminating in an unforgettable moment in history when a passenger on the unfortunately nicknamed “Poop Cruise” got photographed holding a HELP sign up to his cabin window.

So I called my editor and said, “I think I can’t write this story. Nobody’s ever going to take another cruise.”

She agreed, and so we tabled it.

I wrote The Bodyguard that year, instead.

And I’m so glad I did.

And then I wrote Hello Stranger, and The Rom-Commers, and The Love Haters.

I wasn’t sure if I’d ever come back to this story, honestly. But then one day I went to Atlanta to speak at a library, and I wound up chatting with Bookstagrammer Ashlee Hunter, and I must have posted something about the story at some point, because she said, “When are you going to write your cruise ship book?”

And I was like, “I think maybe the pandemic killed it.”

But she shook her head and said, “Cruise ships are back.”

And that was that.

Before I knew it, this story was taking over my brain. It must’ve been just marinating in there for five-plus years, because when I actually sat down to start writing, I already knew these characters and this setting so well … and the whole story just wrote itself.

It’s the most fun I’ve ever had writing a story.

So thank you, Ashlee!

And thank you to the legendary Judy Blume for being at her store, Books & Books in Key West, on the day our cruise ship docked there—and so graciously visiting with me and giving me a copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

I also need to thank my friends Audrey Fersten, a devoted cruiser, for consulting with me on cruise life, and Cristi Connor for taking me for a ride in her open-top Jeep. Thanks to my real-life friends Tracy Pesikoff and Evelyn Cantorna for letting me borrow their last names. Thanks also to my childhood neighborhood gang of kids in Afton Oaks—who I really did ride bikes and catch tadpoles and peel grapes to make eyeballs with—for providing inspiration for the neighbors in this story. Love you, Hamels, Segers, Tycers, Caughlins, and Tellepsens! I’m so grateful to for our fun childhood on Shetland Lane.

Honestly, everything about writing this story was easy for me … except for one thing: making JoJo a math person.

I’m not a math person. I struggled in math the whole way through school.

I never finished memorizing my multiplication tables. I applied early to Vassar College because there was no math requirement. When I applied to creative writing grad school, I filled in geometric designs on the math portion of the GRE.

But guess who is a math person?

My brilliant, mathy daughter—Anna.

My mom’s a math person, too, actually.

I love math people! And I admire them. I wanted to make JoJo a math person, but I wasn’t sure if I could write a character like her from the inside out, if that makes sense. But then my daughter kindly sat me down and talked to me about math in a way that an English major could understand. And she did such a fantastic job that I got it. I still can’t do it. But she explained what math means to her so poetically that now I can see a version of it in my head that’s almost like an invisible constellation.

Anna’s dear friend John Moon Black, a mathematician, was a great resource to me writing this story—and inspired one of my favorite lines in the book (a thing Cooper says that starts with: “There is no universe…”). I also owe many thanks to Anna’s mathematics professor at Carleton College, Claudio Gómez-Gonzáles, who introduced her to knot theory and inspired her real-life presentation on the mathematical principles of knitting knots (which I fully borrowed for JoJo). I also loved the book The Mathematics of Love by Hannah Fry, and I can heartily recommend these books about math from Anna’s collection: Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations by Stephen Ornes; Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards by Jessica Wynne; and Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book About Math by Alex Berke.

Before I go, let me thank my agent, Helen Breitweiser; my editor, Jen Enderlin; and all the good people at St. Martin’s Press, Macmillan Audio, and Macmillan Speakers Bureau for everything they do year in and year out to help me connect with readers in ways big and small. Huge thanks, too, to Patti Murin for bringing this book (and so many of my others) to life so brilliantly on audio. I’m also massively grateful to the other writers, the booksellers, and the fantastic readers who help spread the word about my books.