Undone (39 page)

My brother, Ted, a neurosurgeon, answered my many questions about locked-in syndrome (although all departures from fact, for poetic license, are my responsibility alone). I also found helpful the books
Look Up for Yes
by locked-in patient Julia Tavalaro and Jean-Dominque Bauby’s
Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
For legal details, I’m hugely grateful to Susan E. Barnes, whom I happened to find as the first hit on a single, random Google search (“Family Lawyer, Vermont”) and who proved extraordinarily helpful, faxing me, from her office in Stowe, sample paternity claim documents, talking me through the process by which courts vet prospective custodial parents in such cases, and describing to me the role of social workers and psychologists in easing the transfer of a child from one living situation to another—all vital to the workings of my book. (Again, all errors are my own.)

Some timely comments by my editor at the
New Yorker
, Nick Trautwein, some two years into the writing, revived for me a project I had all but abandoned as impossible. When I described to Nick what seemed the insurmountable task of making a good and decent man perform one of the most heinous acts imaginable, he said, “Given that we know she’s not his real daughter, we might just forgive him one slip-up—but no more than that.” (I had been imagining Jasper descending into a hellish period of violation of Chloe lasting weeks or months). Suddenly I was writing again.

My first reader, aside from my wife, was my agent Lisa Bankoff, to whom, for superstitious reasons, I had not even
described the book. I was overjoyed by her enthusiastic reaction (but also properly warned by her proviso that I would have to be as “ready for the hate mail as the honors.”) I extend special thanks to Lisa for having, at the outset, retained as separate the rights for Canada (the country where I was born and still hold citizenship); thus the manuscript found its way to Iris Tupholme, executive publisher and editor-in-chief of HarperCollins Canada. It is to Iris that I owe the un-repayable debt of passing my manuscript to Patrick Crean, who had recently launched his own imprint at the house. There can be few authors in history lucky enough to see an editor so fully and completely understand what one is trying to do. Patrick’s insights for how I might improve the book, from certain strategic cuts to the inclusion of Chloe’s internal thoughts, were beyond invaluable: they resulted in late-stage revisions that, to my mind, made
Undone
a new book altogether, and an immeasurably better one.

Thank you to graphic designer Lisa Bettencourt for her exceptional cover. I also heartily thank managing editor Noelle Zitzer, as well as John Sweet, whose copy edit was impeccable and also saved me from many blunders of chronology.

The wonderful novelist Claudia Casper was an early reader and gave me excellent suggestions for how to improve the book; authors Harlan Coben and Frank Delaney were also early readers and great champions. Likewise, Ron Bernstein, ICM’s man in Los Angeles. Agents Emma Herdman at Curtis Brown UK and Helen Manders at Curtis Brown in Europe were constant supporters and cheerleaders. My friend, author Joe Hooper, gave the book a careful read, and I benefited greatly from his typically cogent and subtle insights.

Thank you to my wife, Donna, who regularly warned me of the landmines such a story strewed before the feet of an unwary (male) writer; and our son, Johnny, who along with his parents lived with the writing of this book longer than any of us thought we would have to (I said it would take a year; it took four).

Finally, I’d like to make special acknowledgment of my late mother, Carol, an avid reader (and, in her seventies, a published author). It was from my sense of the pleasure and solace she took from the written word that I myself wanted to try my hand at writing. Before embarking on
Undone
, I was sufficiently nervous about the challenges of its subject matter (the invidious nature of desire) that I spelled out the plot to her, over Skype, and felt relieved when she pooh-poohed my trepidation over reception of the novel’s faux-incest theme. “All subjects are fair game in literature,” she reminded me. I returned to the task with fresh courage, and was happy when she, then in the final stages of ALS, read the finished manuscript and gave it her blessing. Always bearing in mind my agent’s warning about the inevitable angry mail, I hope most other readers will be as indulgent.

Toronto native
JOHN COLAPINTO
(who started his career at the former
Saturday Night
magazine) is an award-winning journalist, an author and a staff writer at
The New Yorker,
where he has written about subjects as diverse as medicinal leeches, Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer, fashion designers Karl Lagerfeld and Rick Owens, and Paul McCartney. Prior to
The New Yorker,
John Colapinto wrote for
Vanity Fair, New York
magazine and
The New York Times Magazine,
and he was a contributing editor at
Rolling Stone.
He has also published a non-fiction book,
As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl,
which was a
New York Times
bestseller; as well as the novel
About the Author,
a tale of literary envy and theft, which was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

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“In his arresting novel
Undone
, John Colapinto fearlessly explores the troubled terrain that lies between desire and cruelty, fidelity and temptation, and crime and punishment. Equal parts mystery, social satire and philosophical rumination,
Undone asks
, ‘What drives a good man to act badly?’ ”

—RACHEL GIESE, journalist and author

“Vivacious is an adjective often reserved for women, but
Undone
is that unusual hybrid—a vivaciously male novel. With his new novel, Colapinto targets the bloodless male literary characters of the early 21st century as his story profanely embodies the great roles—orphans, protectors, invalids, lechers, predators—and tosses literary themes in the air like so many spinning crystals. Colapinto, who is astutely brilliant at animating people on the pages of
The New Yorker
, refracts modern morality—hubris, loss, good, evil, lust, revenge— to give us a spicy tale full of verve, vim and villainy.” —CLAUDIA CASPER, author of
The Reconstruction
and
The Continuation of Love by Other Means

“John Colapinto has written a wicked and sharp-edged novel that cuts deep into both contemporary media culture and the uncontrollable embarrassment that is male sexual desire.”

—RUSSELL SMITH, author of
Girl Crazy

“This book should be labelled with a Must-Be-Read-in-One-Sitting sticker. I could not put the damn thing down. Though it takes its best cues from the traditional mystery novel, it is also a satire shot through with unexpected, touching sincerity. The characters are daft, sweet, disgusting, outrageous, heartrendingly admirable, annoying—and oddly true. I read the story thinking, ‘This could
never
happen!’ knowing full well that, in the morally conservative, sexual crime–obsessed America of today, it actually
could
happen. Reading, I repeatedly asked myself, ‘Who is this man so undone? What
would
we do to save him? Could we?’ ”

—KAREN CONNELLY, author of
The Lizard Cage
and
Burmese Lessons

Cover image: Emily Graham / Millennium Images

Cover design: Lisa Bettencourt

Undone

Copyright © 2015 by John Colapinto.

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EPUB Edition March 2015 ISBN 9781443434706

Published by Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

FIRST EDITION

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