The Drowning Girl

Author’s Note

Never has a novel come easily to me, but never before has one come with such profound difficulty as did The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. I was sitting in the South Kingston Public Library (Peace Dale, RI) on August 8, 2009, reading a book on the Black Dahlia murder, when the germ of the story first began to take shape in my mind. Over the subsequent twenty-seven months (to paraphrase Kelly Link’s marvelous observation), it shifted its shape many times. And it was not until the last day of October 2010, after numerous false starts and plotlines devised, then cast aside, that I found my way into the book. In the end, it was as simple as allowing Imp to speak in her own voice.

There are a great number of sources of inspiration I feel I should acknowledge—because this is what we do, writers and madwomen, take apart things and then put them back together again in other ways. Some of these inspirations are quoted or alluded to in the text; others are only echoed, implied, or paid homage. They include (but are not limited to) Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871); the works of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen; Radiohead’s “There there (The Boney King of Nowhere)” (from Hail to the Thief, 2003); Anne Sexton’s “With Mercy for the Greedy” (from All My Pretty Ones, 1962); Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (from New Hampshire, 1923); Poe’s album Haunted (2000); Elia Kazan and William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), and, by extension, William Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807); David Tibet and Current 93’s Black Ships Ate the Sky (2006); a number of paintings—William Bradford’s Arctic Sunset (1874), Winslow Homer’s On a Lee Shore (1900), Martin Johnson Heade’s Brazilian Forest (1864) and Salt Marshes of Newburyport, Massachusetts (1875–1878), all from the collections of the Rhode Island School of Design; Dante Alighieri’s la Divina Commedia (1308–1321); Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979); Kelly Link’s “Pretty Monsters” (2008); Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (from Plans, 2006); the music of R.E.M., especially “Find the River” (1992, which would have been quoted, herein, if lawyers didn’t suck); Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (from New Poems, 1867); Charles Wesley’s “Idumea” (1793); Seichoˉ Matsumoto’s Kuroi Jukai (1960); Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851); Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice,” (1978); Charles Fort’s Lo! (1931); Henry Francis Cary’s translation of Dante’s la Divina Commedia (1805–1814); and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Doomed City (The City in the Sea)” (1831, 1845). Also, various works by Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. As for the works and lives, the arts and letters, of Phillip George Saltonstall and Albert Perrault, those are entirely my own invention, with the help of Michael Zulli and Sonya Taaffe.

To a degree, the overall structure of the narrative was suggested by the late Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 (Symfonia pies´ni z˙ałosnych, 1976), as conducted by David Zinman. Too, the influence of Neil Jordan and Danielle Dax, via The Company of Wolves (1984), should be fairly obvious, though I somehow was unaware of it until I’d finished the book. And the same can be said for another very obvious inspiration, Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” (1970, as reinterpreted by This Mortal Coil and Elizabeth Fraser on It’ll End in Tears, [1984]).

I have many people to thank (names will be repeated), because without them, this novel genuinely would never have been written. First and foremost, Sonya Taaffe (above and beyond; and for granting me permission to use her “The Magdalene of Gévaudan”) and Geoffrey H. Goodwin, who sat up with me on several occasions, long past midnight and almost until dawn, discussing where Imp’s story might and might not be. I owe an especially great debt to a number of writers who, during a late-night, dawn-thirty impromptu “workshop” at ReaderCon 21, urged me on and provided many ideas that would become crucial to the shifting shape of the novel: Michael Cisco, Greer Gilman, Gemma Files, Erik Amundsen, and, again, Geoffrey H. Goodwin and Sonya Taaffe. My thanks to Peter Straub, for his brilliance and support, and to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz (Writers House), and editor, Anne Sowards, for their patience as I missed deadline after deadline, and still asked for more time. To Michele Alpern, who has restored my faith in copy editors. To my mother, Susan Ramey Cleveland, to Jeff VanderMeer, and everyone who loved The Red Tree. My thanks to Hilary Cerullo, MD, who calmed my mind so I could finally write again, and to Kristin Hersh—the Rat Girl—for showing me it was okay to write like I think. My gratitude to the staff of the Providence Athenaeum, the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, S. T. Joshi, Andrew Fuller, Andrew Migliore and the organizers of the 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Portland, OR), and to everyone in Boston, New York City, and Providence who has offered support, but are too numerous to name. Also, thanks to Elizabeth Bear, Holly Black, Dan Chaon, Brian Evanson, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Kathe Koja, Bradford Morrow, Benjamin Percy, Peter Straub, Cathrynne M. Valente, and Jeff VanderMeer, who all read the book while it was still only a manuscript, and to Jacob Garbe and Casondra Brewster for words in perfect order, and to Melissa Bowman for a perfect analogy. And to Radiohead and Philip Ridley for letting me quote their songs. To Vince Locke for the illustrations that appear in this edition of the novel. My gratitude to Kyle Cassidy, for his vision, and to everyone else who helped us turn the book into photos and a Lilliputian film (Brian, Sarah, Dani, and Nicola). Again, all my love to Michael Zulli, who became my Saltonstall, and brought the man and his paintings into this world, with a sprig of nightshade and black serpentine. But, above all, thanks to my partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, for putting up with my shit, and reading these words back to me again, and again, and again.

We’re doing the impossible, and this makes us mighty.