I expected the verbal equivalent of a shaken fist or else a playful nose-thumbing at his readers: “To the memory of Attila the Hun, who taught me everything I know,” or “To Susie, the girl next door — thanks for pretending not to see me spying on you all those nights.” When I checked, the truth was much tamer: the famously iconoclastic J.D. Salinger had dedicated “The Catcher in the Rye” to his mother. I wondered what she thought of the novel, if she had recommended it to her friends, and if they, too, had been proud of the young author by association — or else had kicked Salinger’s mother out of their progressive dinner circle.
Book dedications, for many authors, are the whipped cream on the cocoa, more sugar for the already sweet occasion of a book’s acquisition and publication. Like Salinger’s, dedications might be dutiful, if not also heartfelt offerings to supportive family members. Other dedications are impulsive romantic gestures, as in the case of a young female poet a friend told me about a couple of years ago. In the hothouse days of a new relationship, she dedicated her forthcoming collection to a man she’d been seeing for three weeks. The book endured; the love affair did not. My advice would have been to save him for the acknowledgments page!
Acknowledgments are in general more expansive and inclusive than dedications. They usually appear in the final pages of a book, and it is here that authors demarcate the complex emotional and intellectual territory they traversed while writing and researching their books. Acknowledgments might include the names of experts who provided technical details about a scholarly or scientific topic, mentors and writing group members, former classmates, siblings, editors, agents, colleagues, first, second and third readers — there is room, in most books, to thank everyone the author would like to thank in the acknowledgments page. But, well, should they use all that room?
Peter Orner, whose most recent book is “Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge” (dedication: “For my mother, Rhoda Kaplan Pierce, and Pat Strachan”), shared a few of his thoughts: “I’m always of the school, the less the better. … These long acknowledgment pages that you see sometimes — and I’ve been guilty of a little of this myself — (seem) sometimes (to be) more about the thanker than those being thanked.”
Despite how brief or bloated an acknowledgments page might be (and like Orner, I’ll admit that I’ve probably been guilty of overstuffing my own “acks” pages), the coveted real estate remains at the front of the book. One of my favorite dedications is Salman Rushdie’s in his übernovel “Midnight’s Children”: “For Zafar Rushdie, who, contrary to all expectations, was born in the afternoon.” Here Rushdie makes a clever joke that also serves as a good introduction to the book’s lightly comic tone.
Two-time National Book Award nominee Rachel Kushner included an equally memorable, albeit very different, dedication in her second novel, “The Flamethrowers”: “This book is for Cynthia Mitchell. And for Anna, wherever she is (and probably isn’t).” Of course I wondered immediately who this Anna is, and if she was the basis for Kushner’s romantic heroine. The author and her editor must have known that this cryptic dedication alone would likely seduce a few casual bookstore browsers into buying the novel.
Speaking of another Anna, likewise a romantic figure but a more well-known one, I checked “Anna Karenina” for a dedication page, but didn’t find one. Instead, there was an ominous epigram on the title page: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.” Instead of thanking his wife or any of their many children, Tolstoy enacted a kind of spooky authorial ventriloquism that leads us directly into the novel.
I searched a number of other classics for dedications and didn’t find them in my scruffy paperback editions of “Madame Bovary,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Crime and Punishment,” “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” “Wuthering Heights” or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Maybe dedications were recent additions to a book’s front matter? It didn’t seem likely, however, and a moment later, I spotted one in “The Innocents Abroad,” Twain’s jesting voice as distinct here as on any other page he ever signed his name to: “To my most patient reader and most charitable critic, My Aged Mother, this volume is affectionately inscribed.”
With a little research, I learned that, in fact, book dedications date back a number of centuries and were sometimes used by an author or a publisher to thank a patron, and in some cases, to try to flatter the patron into offering a donation for the book’s printing costs (or seed money to put toward the creation of the author’s next volume.) Well, who ever said that a compliment costs nothing?
Michael Lewis, author most recently of “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt” and numerous other best-selling works of nonfiction, uses his dedications for a less pragmatic purpose: “I’ve never used them to thank someone who helped with the book, but always to give a shout-out to someone I care about.”
Stuart Dybek, whose newest story collections, “Ecstatic Cahoots” and “Paper Lantern,” were both published in June, shared this about his own dedications: “I wish I had a mysterious one, something along the lines of Jimmy Durante the Schnoz, who would sign off every show with ‘And good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.’ (It) would get you making up stories about who she was. I’m afraid my own dedications are neither amusing nor mysterious. Family members mostly, by way of thanks, making an acknowledgments page unnecessary.”
Dybek also said, “(I)f one considers the book beginning with its title, then why not make the dedication ‘Fiction,’ too? Which I guess is a kind of metafiction move, or maybe more akin to continuing a painting past its frame, on the wall where it hangs. I actually did consider that idea for the book of love stories, ‘Paper Lantern’ … but finally that was just too cheesy.”
As for Orner, “I prefer (dedications) to be short and to the point. I don’t like a crowd here … yet, to contradict myself, my favorite is this very familiar dedication: ‘If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.'”
That’s from J.D. Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Amateur readers?” Orner added. “Has this plea ever been more timely? And I like that word: ‘untellable.'”
Bonnie Jo Campbell also shared some thoughts about her own book dedications: In her first book, the story collection “Women and Other Animals,” she “forgot all about the dedication, and so it doesn’t have one. Now I’m hitting myself on the forehead … because it’s such a beautiful way to honor a person, and I missed the opportunity. If I’d been thinking, I would have dedicated it to my mom. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to dedicate a book to my mom, but the others didn’t seem right. I (dedicated) my first novel to my brothers and sisters, ‘fellow wild children of Michigan.’ ‘American Salvage’ I dedicated to my husband. ‘Once Upon a River’ was dedicated to ‘All the Children Raised by Wolves,’ and I still don’t yet understand why that felt right, but it still does. I guess I want to devote the book to the girls and boys who must survive more than their share of troubles. I hope it speaks to them.”
Jami Attenberg, whose fifth book, “Saint Mazie,” will be published in June, dedicated her first book, “Instant Love,” to her friends; her fourth novel, the best-selling “The Middlesteins,” was dedicated to her family. The two in between, “The Kept Man” and “The Melting Season,” don’t have dedications. “I am way more interested in the acknowledgments than the dedications, which always seem so brief,” she explained. “One note from one person to another, and it’s not addressed to me — you know? But the acknowledgments seem like they’re for the whole world.”
I dedicated my first book to my parents and to a boyfriend I’d been with for several years, but between the galleys and the final printing, we broke up. Fortunately, I had time to change the dedication: My oldest friend Melanie replaced the ex-boyfriend; my parents stayed put. My second book is dedicated to my partner of the past four-and-a-half years. I’m trying to decide if he’ll also be the dedicatee of my forthcoming novel; he’s certainly had to put up with a lot while I’ve been writing and revising it. Yet, if I decide not to dedicate it to him, there’s always the acknowledgments page. Would he see this the same way? Um, probably not.
Christine Sneed is the author of the novel “Little Known Facts” and the story collection “Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry.”
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Dedications of note
“For Grace Darling Griffin; And for my grandfather, Samuel Mirsky”
— Erica Jong in “Fear of Flying”
“For Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío”
— Gabriel García Márquez in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”
“For Quintana”
— Joan Didion in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”
“To the memory of my mother, Jeanette S.M. Jones”
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— Edward P. Jones in “Lost in the City”
“For Scott. What now, f**ker?”
— Allie Brosh in “Hyperbole and a Half”
“To Véra”
— Vladimir Nabokov in “Lolita”
“For Mata Hari”
— Kurt Vonnegut in “Mother Night”
“For — but not about — Ragdale and Yaddo, with boundless gratitude”
— Rebecca Makkai in “The Hundred-Year House”
“For Elizabeth and David”
— Sylvia Plath in “The Bell Jar”
“To my mother, who, when I was a child at her knee, taught me to revere the fanciful and the imaginative”
— Richard Wright in “Native Son”
“For Coco Dupuy”
— Scott Spencer in “Endless Love”
“For Mr. Lee and Alice, in consideration of Love & Affection”
— Harper Lee in “To Kill a Mockingbird”
“For my mother and father”
— Roxane Gay in “Ayiti”
“To my grandmothers, Jessie Goddard Leslie and Lillie Stagner Marmon, and to my sons, Robert William Chapman and Cazimir Silko”
— Leslie Marmon Silko in “Ceremony”
“For Dianne”
— Ernest J. Gaines in “A Lesson Before Dying”
“To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, in whose beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that endures”
— Willa Cather in “O Pioneers!”
“To Pat Covici, a great editor, and, better yet, a generous friend, this book is affectionately dedicated.”
— Saul Bellow in “Herzog”
“For my brothers, Dave and Tom”
— Stuart Dybek in “The Coast of Chicago”