onto something. Your feedback and encouragement meant and still means the world to me.
Cynnie, Stacy, Mary, John, and Karin, you all were among the first to read this and your early feedback, too, gave me both the confidence to move forward and the direction to move in. Thank you for cheering me on and pointing the way.
To the Twitarded blog sisters, Deb, Jen, Stacy, Katherine, Cynnie and everyone else who hung out there and who read my early attempts at writing and kept coming back for more, well, I never would have gotten this book written and published if I didn’t have that kind of support and encouragement early on. Thank you forever for that.
Nina, thank you for jumping in here and doing all the hard work to get the word out. I would truly be lost trying to navigate all of that without you. I can’t thank you enough.
Jeff Zentner! I never would have figured out that I slept on Sharon Van Etten’s floor back in 2001 without you, so we are friends for life now. Thank you so much for all the encouragement and love and support for Loud, and for letting me crash the YA Sweet 16s party as your obnoxious hanger on.
To my parents (all four of them), thank you for always, always encouraging me to do what was in my heart and for believing in me, even when I know it was hard.
Mom, thank you for telling me I could be anything I wanted when I grew up. For telling me I could be a viper pilot or president. And thank you even more for believing it. I promise the next thing I write, you can tell your church friends about (okay not the next thing but maybe the thing after that, we’ll see). And thank you for being excited and proud of me, even though this book isn’t something you can bring to church. (You won’t, right? Right?) Thank you for always being my number one cheerleader, the president of my fan club. For always picking me back up when I feel knocked down. For being Mom. You truly inspire me, every day.
Dad, thank you for the years you let me and Alex rehearse in your shop’s loft after hours, making that horrible racket. For sneaking upstairs to watch us play, even though I know you hated the music and thought we were nuts. Thank you for letting us take the van into New York City to play shows on the Lower East Side when I was 19 and telling me that adventures and dreams were important. Maybe you didn’t always understand mine, but that never seemed to matter. You were always right there to help me go after it in any way you could. I can only hope to do so right by your grandsons.
To my boys, Doot and Bing . . . first of all, put this book down! And don’t look at the laptop when Mom’s writing because there are curse words on it! Thank you both for being the light of my world, the best thing I have ever done and will ever do with my life, and for being cool with wearing mismatched socks, having extra Minecraft time and ordering pizza when Mommy is on a deadline. I cannot wait to see what kinds of stories your own lives inspire and hopefully they are all PG-rated.
To the New Brunswick music scene, a very real and vibrant thing where I spent the majority of my youth: You were the first community where I was accepted and respected for trying to put my original ideas in the world. I have always loved you, but you can’t really appreciate how rare and profound a thing is until you live some years and have the broader perspective of your life to fit it into. We all put so much of our life force into making the music of that scene, but also into being an audience, being there to participate, live and in person, in an experience that is impossible to encapsulate in mere words. You need the sound, and you need to hear it live. And you need us—all of us—to show up and be part of it. Sweaty bodies on a club floor, all feeling it, whoever was on the stage that night almost didn’t matter as long as it was loud and honest. That was the scene, and it was us. And although the club scene may not be what