The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

picked up my plate and my mug, and I carried them along the path with me as we made our way back to the house, the old woman and I.
    “The moon does shine as bright as day,” I said. “Like in the song.”
    “It’s good to have a full moon,” she agreed.
    I said, “It’s funny. For a moment, I thought there were two of you. Isn’t that odd?”
    “It’s just me,” said the old woman. “It’s only ever just me.”
    “I know,” I said. “Of course it is.”
    I was going to take the plate and mug into the kitchen and put them in the sink, but she stopped me at the farmhouse door. “You ought to get back to your family now,” she said. “They’ll be sending out a search party.”
    “They’ll forgive me,” I said. I hoped that they would. My sister would be concerned, and there would be people I barely knew disappointed not to have told me how very, very sorry they were for my loss. “You’ve been so kind. Letting me sit and think, here. By the pond. I’m very grateful.”
    “Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “Nothing kind about it.”
    “Next time Lettie writes from Australia,” I said, “please tell her I said hello.”
    “I will,” she said. “She’ll be glad you thought of her.”
    I got into the car and started the engine. The old woman stood in the doorway, watching me, politely, until I had turned the car around and was on my way back up the lane.
    I looked back at the farmhouse in my rearview mirror, and a trick of the light made it seem as if two moons hung in the sky above it, like a pair of eyes watching me from above: one moon perfectly full and round, the other, its twin on the other side of the sky, a half-moon.
    Curiously I turned in my seat and looked back: a single half-moon hung over the farmhouse, peaceful and pale and perfect.
    I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.

Acknowledgments
    This book is the book you have just read. It’s done. Now we’re in the acknowledgments. This is not really part of the book. You do not have to read it. It’s mostly just names.
    I owe thanks to so many people, the ones who were there in my life when I needed them, the ones who brought me tea, the ones who wrote the books that brought me up. To single any of them out is foolish, but here I go…
    When I finished this book, I sent it to many of my friends to read, and they read it with wise eyes and they told me what worked for them and what needed work. I’m grateful to all of them, but particular thanks must go to Maria Dahvana Headley, Olga Nunes, Alina Simone (queen of titles), Gary K. Wolfe, Kat Howard, Kelly McCullough, Eric Sussman, Hayley Campbell, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Melissa Marr, Elyse Marshall, Anthony Martignetti, Peter Straub, Kat Dennings, Gene Wolfe, Gwenda Bond, Anne Bobby, Lee “Budgie” Barnett, Morris Shamah, Farah Mendelsohn, Henry Selick, Clare Coney, Grace Monk, and Cornelia Funke.
    This novel began, although I did not know it was going to be a novel at the time, when Jonathan Strahan asked me to write him a short story. I started to tell the story of the opal miner and the Hempstock family (who have lived in the farm in my head for such a long time), and Jonathan was forgiving and kind when I finally admitted to myself and to him that this wasn’t a short story, and I let it become a novel instead.
    The family in this book is not my own family, who have been gracious in letting me plunder the landscape of my own childhood and watched as I liberally reshaped those places into a story. I’m grateful to them all, especially to my youngest sister, Lizzy, who encouraged me and sent me long-forgotten memory-jogging photographs. (I wish I’d remembered the old greenhouse in time to put it into the book.)
    In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day. Words save our lives, sometimes.
    Tori gave me a safe house to write it in, and I cannot thank her enough.
    Art Spiegelman gave me his kind permission to use a word balloon from his collaborative conversation with Maurice Sendak in The New Yorker as the opening epigraph.
    As this book entered its second draft, as I was typing out my