The baby is fine and strong and healthy, and I’m practically glowing with life. I know you laugh at me, but that’s how I feel. Like the sun herself. Joseph wants us to be careful about telling the world until we have a more “certain outcome” （his words）。 And I’m trying to be good, Trish. But the secret is bursting out of me every day. If I could stand up and shout it from the rooftops, this is what I’d say: that in April of 1971, my child will be born, and I already know two things. I knew them the first time I felt the baby kick.
One: she will be a girl. Two: she will change the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, thank you to my agent, Alice Whitwham, for always taking my wild ideas so seriously and for helping guide me from the wobbly beginnings to a clear and steady draft. And my gratitude goes to the whole team at Elyse Cheney Literary Associates. Endless and massive thanks to Daphne Durham for instantly seeing the best version of this novel and giving the most incisive （and fun!） feedback to help the story arrive there. It’s been magical to see Josie and friends develop with your guidance. Thank you so much to Lydia Zoells for sharp and amazing feedback, and to the entire wonderful team at MCD for giving this book such a welcoming home.
This idea was originally sparked by a book called Making Sex, by Thomas Laqueur, and I owe a lot to Laqueur’s work for making me think about the history of reproduction and the ways women’s bodies have been treated as afterthoughts in that whole process. I also found incredible insights through Aarathi Prasad’s Like a Virgin. The historical accounts of searches for a child born of virgin birth inspired some of the tests in Girl One, including the skin graft operation. I learned a lot from reading The Genius Factory, by David Plotz, which is about the emergence of sperm banks and the resulting “fatherless” children, and My Life as the World’s First Test-Tube Baby, by Louise Brown. Utopian Motherhood, by Robert T. Francoeur, gave me insight into the views of the changing reproductive landscape in the early 1970s.
I have to thank Franklin Sayre and Janelle Barr Bassett for being patient friends and early readers as I agonized over parthenogenesis for … years! Thanks to Franklin for answering some of my med school–related questions （any mistakes are very much my own）。
Much love to my parents. Dad, unlike my protagonist, I’m lucky to have a good father who’s always encouraged my love of reading. Mom, I could never have written a book about mother-daughter relationships without our wonderfully complex and supportive relationship. Thanks to all my siblings-in-law and siblings. To my mother-in-law, Karen, thank you in particular for helping with childcare so that I was able to write!
Huge thanks to everyone who’s taken my writing seriously over the years, including one of my most enduring mentors, Kathryn Davis, whose belief in me as a writer has carried me so far. Thank you, thank you, to everyone who supported my debut. You have my eternal gratitude, and I’m so honored to have such generous readers.
To Miles and August: you’ve never made my writing process easier, but you make life infinitely weirder and sweeter. And finally, my everlasting thanks to Ryan, for being a tireless source of support and insight, for reading endless drafts, and for always being just as curious about the world inside my brain as I am. Having a partner who loves reading, writing, and plotting is a gift I won’t take for granted.