Dear SheWriters,

I must admit that some of the writers I thank below are friends. Whether your favorite authors are the sort you meet regularly for lunch or the sort who manage to lift your spirits by their written words alone, they are true friends.

Michelle Maisto: Michelle’s gorgeous memoir of food and love, The Gastronomy of Marriage, was the first original project I bought at Random House. Her prose is unerringly graceful and her recipes for broccoli rabe and orecchiette, cream puffs, and pasta e fagioli have become new favorites in my repertoire. Our author-editor relationship morphed quickly into a friendship for which I will always be grateful.

Amity Gaige: Her novel, The Folded World, is a beautiful study of what happens to a relationship when the world intrudes, and Amity herself is as incandescent as her writing.

Hilma Wolitzer: I had the pleasure of working with Hilma during the publication of her books The Doctor’s Daughter, the coming-of-age story of a 51-year-old editor, and Summer Reading, a novel about a women’s book club in the Hamptons. Hilma, too, is a true friend, and one of my favorite memories of my six years in Manhattan is sitting with Hilma and her husband, Morty, in their apartment, listening to big band music and paging through the books in their unparalleled library.

Lastly, I want to thank Meg Wolitzer, Hilma’s daughter and author of The Wife, one of my very favorite books, which addresses men and women in literature in a fascinating and controversial way.

Thankfully yours,
Lea Beresford
The Girl with the Red Pencil

PS – Not long ago, I wrote that my favorite book is almost always the one I’m currently reading. Right now it is Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1984.