A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius/Mistakes We Knew We Were Making [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION For all the author's bluster elsewhere, this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes. Dialogue: This has of course been almost entirely reconstructed. The dialogue, though all essentially true—except that which is obviously not true, as when people break out of their narrative time-space continuum to cloyingly talk about the book itself—has been written from memory, and reflects both the author's memory's limitations and his imagination's nudgings. All the individual words and sentences have been run through a conveyor, manufactured like so: 1) they are remembered; 2) they are written; 3) they are rewritten, to sound more accurate; 4) they are edited to fit within the narrative (though keeping with their essential truth); 5) they are rewritten again, to spare the author and the other characters the shame of sounding as inarticulate as they invariably do, or would, if their sentences, almost invariably begun with the word "Dude"—as in, for example, "Dude, she died"— were merely transcribed. It should be noted, however, that what's remarkable is that the book's most surreal dialogue, like that with the Latino teenagers and that with the beleaguered Jenna, is that which is most true to life. Characters, and Their Characteristics: The author, though he was loath to do it, had to change a few names, and further disguise these name-changed characters. The primary example is the charac- OKAY NOW. This edition of A.H.W.O.S.G. contains countless changes, sentence by sentence, many additions to the body of the text, and it also contains this, an appendix, featuring corrections, notations, updates, tangential remarks and clarifications. This appendix, you might be interested to know, was supposed to, and almost did, accompany the original hardcover edition of the book. A version of it was nearly complete, when its author made the mistake of telling a writer friend about it, with, let's admit, a certain smugness. I was, I figured, the first to think of adding a corrective appendix to a nonfiction work, one meant to illuminate the many factual and temporal fudgings necessary to keep this, or really any, work of nonfiction, from dragging around in arcana and endless explanations of who was exactly where, and when, etc. So: the corrective appendix was being prepared, and was to follow the original text, a few pages after the final "finally." But upon telling this writer-friend about the idea, she said, while looking much too ravishing over an open candle and with wet hair, "Oh, right, like Mary McCarthy." There was, in the distance, the sound of thunder, and of lightning striking, presumably, a kitten. "Um, what do you mean, pray tell, Just like Mary McCarthy?" I thought, while, fear-stricken, managing only "Huh?" She noted that McCarthy had done almost the same thing in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, a book about which I was of course unware, because I am a moron. She explained that after each chapter