CITY_OF_GIRLS_by_Elizabeth_Gilbert

Andrew Gustafson opened up the wonders of the Brooklyn Navy Yard for me. Bernard Whalen, Ricky Conte, and Joe and Lucy De Carlo helped me to understand the life of a Brooklyn patrolman. The regulars at D’Amico Coffee in Carroll Gardens took me on the most colorful trip through time you could ever imagine. So thank you to Joanie D’Amico, Rose Cusumano, Danny Calcaterra, and Paul and Nancy Gentile for sharing your stories. You guys really made me wish I had grown up in South Brooklyn back in the day.

Thank you to my father, John Gilbert (LTJG, ret., USS Johnston), for helping me to get the Navy details right. I am grateful to my mother, Carole Gilbert, for teaching me how to work my ass off and how to be resilient in the face of life’s difficulties. (I never needed it more than this year, Mom.) I am grateful to Catherine and James Murdock for their keen copyediting skills. Because of you this book has five thousand fewer commas than it needed.

Without the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library, I would not have been able to read the papers of Katharine Cornell, and without Katharine Cornell, there would be no Edna Parker Watson.

I am grateful to my great-aunt Lolly, for giving me those old Alexander Woollcott books, which set me down the path of this story. But most of all, Lolly, thank you for modeling the extraordinary optimism, cheer, and strength that make me want to be a better and braver woman.

I am grateful to my extraordinary team at Riverhead—Geoff Kloske, Sarah McGrath, Jynne Martin, Helen Yentus, Kate Stark, Lydia Hirt, Shailyn Tavella, Alison Fairbrother, and the late and beloved Liz Hohenadel—for publishing my books so brilliantly and boldly. Thank you to Markus Dohle and Madeline McIntosh for investing in me and believing in me. Thank you, also, to my friends and colleagues at Bloomsbury—Alexandra Pringle, Tram-Anh Doan, Kathleen Farrar, and Ros Ellis—for keeping things so bright and cool on the other side of the Atlantic.

Dave Cahill and Anthony Kwasi Adjei: I cannot run my world without you. I hope I never have to!

Thank you to Martha Beck, Karen Gerdes, and Rowan Mangan, for reading thousands of pages of my writing over the past few years, and

for wrapping me up in the great big wingspan of your collective love. Thank you to Glennon Doyle, for sitting by my door all those nights. I needed it, and I am grateful.

Thank you to my sister-wives, Gigi Madl and Stacey Weinberg, for their love and sacrifice during such a hard season of pain and loss. I could not have survived 2017 without you.

Thank you to Sheryl Moller, Jennie Willink, Jonny Miles, and Anita Schwartz, for being enthusiastic early readers of these pages. Thank you to Billy Buell, for lending me the use of his fabulous name.

Sarah Chalfant: As ever, you are the wind beneath my wings.

Miriam Feuerle: As ever, I love rolling with you.

Lastly, a message to Rayya Elias: I know how badly you wanted to be here at my side while I wrote this novel. All I can tell you, baby, is that you were. You are never not at my side. You are my heart. I will always love you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love, as well as several other internationally bestselling books. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, The Signature of All Things, was named a best book of 2013 by The New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine,The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and The New Yorker.

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