Recently, ten years after I first wondered about the man from Council Bluffs, I reached out to chat with Janet Fitch herself. As Fitch describes, the dedication page itself can almost work as a clue in another way—this one not about the work on the shelf, but instead about the life it had before publication. The dedication page invites you to join a tiny benediction, asking you to remember that the book you are about to receive was once merely a twinkle in the eye of its writer, a twinkle that required hard work and long hours and much time and support from some special people; perhaps even the person or persons to whom an entire first page is dedicated.
My favorites are the cryptic dedications, the ones that hint at some mysterious origin story connecting the book to its maker. Ludolph sees the dedication functioning almost as a two-way mirror. The reader can only perceive a certain amount of the true story. Author Danielle Lazarin dedicated Back Talk , her debut collection of short stories published last year, to her parents.
For her, she said the decision was simple—her parents were the ones who had supported her growth as a writer from the very beginning, and it only made sense. Fitch agrees that acknowledgements occupy an entirely separate space of thank-yous.
Take a book like Lolita. To whom could you possibly dedicate Lolita? And yes, of course—I asked Fitch about the man from Council Bluffs, the first rose she ever laid.
If he disappeared for a period of time, his mother knew she could call the Council Bluffs Free Library, a little Carnegie library where her son would spend hours reading in the stacks. He read the dedication and immediately recognized himself, she says.
