So: All I have is art, too, and I wrote Hide as a scream of rage, but I had help.
This book benefited from two soundtracks: Joywave’s album Content while I was letting the ideas simmer for a couple of years, and The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Eye” on repeat while I was writing and needed to tell my brain where to be. Though not music, Maksim Gorky’s “Coney Island” rivals any song for sheer lyricism and also has the only detailed description of the infamous Hell Gate ride that tragically burned down Coney Island’s Dreamland. I was also inspired by the myth of the Minotaur and the ways we keep living the exact same cycles.
There really is an international hide-and-seek competition, the Nascondino World Championship, and it really did take place in an abandoned resort town one year, a fact that lit my brain on fire when I read about it. But it has too many rules and too few monsters, so I made my own.
The editor I most hoped would want to shepherd Hide into the world was Tricia Narwani, and I feel so lucky she felt the same way. I’m immensely grateful to her, Sam Bradbury with Del Rey UK, Alex Larned, Bree Gary, David Stevenson, Michelle Daniel, Angela McNally, Simon Sullivan, Ella Laytham, Pam Alders, Craig Adams, and Del Rey as a whole. As a child obsessed with fantasy, I looked for Del Rey on the spines at the bookstore, and it’s a tremendous honor to join those ranks. Most of my books live in the Penguin Random House now, and it’s a very very very fine house.
My agent, Michelle Wolfson, has seen me through so many stories she never expected when we started working together thirteen years ago, and I’m forever grateful to have her as friend, advocate, and business partner. And not at all sorry I keep writing things she has to read with all the lights on.
Special thanks to my earliest readers for their invaluable encouragement and feedback: JS Kelley, Lindsay Eagar, and Stephanie Perkins. Stephanie and Natalie Whipple provide constant friendship and sounding boards, and I’m glad every day to have them. Thanks as well to Eliza Jane Brazier, for being an example of fearlessly forging ahead in new directions. And Ian Carlos Crawford, someday I’ll put your name in a book and not kill that character. Maybe. Probably not.
My spouse and three children are the foundation of my entire world, and everything I write is possible because my days are filled with love and support. It’s a tremendous honor and constant delight to navigate life alongside you all.
Finally, to everyone who still insists they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps: For fuck’s sake, look up the origin of the saying.