The politics of book acknowledgments

Should you thank your ex?

As I wrote in my own acknowledgements for my essay collection, I am obsessed with acknowledgements pages. To quote (oh no) myself:

“This page comes in as many flavours as there are stories. The ten-page monologue that earnestly thanks specific Spotify playlists, particular condiments and the precise contortion of the author’s cat on a late Saturday in June when the light hits it just so. The woo-woo one liner: I thank the universe for giving birth to me. The bellicose rant: This is a fuck you to everyone who said I couldn’t write this. And the artfully pompous: I doff my cap to Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and Henry Kissinger for their support. All are delicious to me.”

And so when one of my favourite journalists, Amelia Tait, who has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, The New Statesman and The New Yorker on a compellingly diverse roster of topics including procrastination, eavesdropping, ASMR child stars, bath toys and crisps (and whose MG novel, Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveller, is out in May) told me she wanted to write about the politics of book acknowledgments - who you thank and who you don’t - I couldn’t say yes quick enough. So here she is. Enjoy!

---

Recently, my editor emailed me about the acknowledgements in my debut book. “One small question,” she wrote, “Is Tom your only brother?”. A lack of commas had caused the confusion – it looked like I’d picked a favourite brother to thank and ignored the rest. I do only have one brother, but I loved the idea of having seven and showing gratitude to just one, like a biblical patriarch giving his best son a fancy coat.

It got me thinking about the politics of acknowledgements, which can run from a single paragraph to pages upon pages, with some authors thanking their Year Seven English teachers and others simply nodding to themselves. (The playwright John Marston was an early pioneer, touchingly dedicating one 1598 work, “To his most esteemed and best-beloved Self.”) The more I thought about it, the more tricky the social dynamics of it all seemed. Should you thank your ex-husband? Can you acknowledge three of a five-person friendship group and leave out the other two?

It’s difficult to trace when dedications like Marston’s evolved into full-blown, back-of-the-book acknowledgements, but like all things emotional, it seems the 20^th century is to blame. While plenty of classics end when they end, today acknowledgements are expected, which can be difficult for debuts who have to walk the line between self-importance and gratitude. Writing on academic acknowledgements in 2006, the linguistics researcher Davide Simone Giannoni noted that they “sell the book” by publicising the author’s “human values”, such as “family ties, loyalty to friends, social commitments and morality.” Or to put it another way: you don’t want to look friendless, but nor do you want to look like a total beg.

There are so many potential pitfalls. There’s the issue of name-dropping – or worse, accidentally dropping a name. There’s debating the order to list people in, like a tween rearranging her Myspace Top 8. Family members have to be considered, however inconsiderate – to say nothing of the problem with estranged relatives or your ex. I won’t tell you how I navigated this minefield, because I’m a coward. But seven authors agreed to share their thoughts with me. They range from celebrated award-winners to total newcomers – some are novelists, others write non-fiction. Most wanted to be anonymous, others were happy to be named, which we should all acknowledge was pretty brave. They told me about ex-fiancés, friendship fallouts, distant parents and rogue proofreaders. And they told me some nice stuff, too.

“I started writing acknowledgements as soon as I got the book deal,” says debut author Alessandra Ranelli, whose spicy mystery Murder at the Hotel Orient comes out in April. “I already had a long list of people to thank”. Yet despite the care and attention to detail in Ranelli’s acknowledgements – she shouts out her therapist and even MA 48, the waste management department of the city of Vienna – she still had to email her editor abruptly in February to get something changed. Ranelli had called off her engagement with her partner of four years, and – after much deliberation – decided to remove his acknowledgement from her book.

“I was very torn about actually keeping it or removing it, because I try not to harbour animosity towards people,” Ranelli says. She had thanked her then-partner in the last few lines of her acknowledgements, valuing him because he “always believed I would be a famous author one day”. But even this wording was careful – Ranelli says that her former fiancé was not actually particularly helpful or encouraging: “He believed I would be an author, which is not the same as being supportive of that.”

Still, Ranelli did consider keeping the acknowledgement. She says her family has always been comfortable with life’s grey areas – she has written in the past about showing up for her ex-husband post-separation, and he is featured in her acknowledgements, “so it seemed weird to have one ex in there and then perhaps cut the other one.” But in the end – after soliciting opinions on social media – Ranelli decided to remove her former fiancé. She did it because she imagined herself flicking through her debut in a few years’ time. “I didn’t want to look back at an acknowledgement section that is so full of joy and then finish it on this reminder of a very painful thing that happened right before the best thing in my life,” she says.

book proofs come sans acknowledgements, which looks chic and bitchy

Ranelli’s former partner knows about being cut – she says he “shrugged” and “didn’t seem to care too much.” But being left out of acknowledgements can often be wounding at worst and baffling at best. One author, who I’ll call Tess, tells me about a time she helped another (vocally lefty) author with some research – not only was Tess not paid, but when she later picked up the book in a shop, she saw she hadn’t even been thanked. “To be honest, I laughed,” she recalls. Tess wasn’t angry or upset by the omission, but notes: “It’s such a classic male feminist thing to do.” She believes the author didn’t deliberately miss her out, but her work simply didn’t figure in his mind. Yet while she has no lasting ill-will, she notes: “I did not buy the book!”

At least Tess can guess at what happened. I hear from another author that they know someone who was edited out of their friend’s acknowledgements between the hardback and paperback release. It was never brought up by either party and the reason why remains a mystery. The author Ann Patchett partly dislikes acknowledgements for this reason; noting that she doesn’t want them to be a reminder of friendships that have faded away.

Another anonymous author – I’ll call him Jack – tells me that this basically happened to him. Jack included the name of one of his oldest friends in his acknowledgements because she was very supportive of his book, which is about the LGBTQ+ community. Later, however, Jack and his friend fell out because of the latter’s anti-trans beliefs, and they now haven’t spoken in years. “It makes me feel uncomfortable that the name of someone who is transphobic is in the book, even if it is just her first name and written at the end in very small writing,” Jack says. Equally, Jack appreciates that his acknowledgements were a snapshot of a moment in time: “You can’t discount the entire friendship and the significance of it just because of where things ended, right?”

Friends are one thing, family is… another. An author I’ll call Ella tells me she doesn’t have a great relationship with her family, and so left them out of her acknowledgements entirely. She wasn’t conflicted about it, but she was paranoid that readers would judge her. “I just didn’t want people to think I was a loser, which is tough because I kind of felt like a loser for not having my family to thank in the first place,” she says. Ultimately, Ella felt it would’ve been more dishonest to include her relatives than omit them. And even though she has a slightly more cordial relationship with her parents now, a year after publishing, she doesn’t regret her decision. It hasn’t caused any problems, because they still haven’t read her book.

The authors who talk to me about omitting people from their acknowledgements say they weren’t making pointed or petty decisions – they clarify it was about making their thanks as genuine as possible. After all, one insincere acknowledgement can undermine the rest. This was the logic of another author who had to specifically request that a proofreader was left out of their acknowledgements. The proofreader made alterations to the manuscript which changes altered the meaning of the text, and the writer only spotted these changes by chance. The author didn’t want the person to be fired, but, completely understandably, they couldn’t bring themselves to thank them.

Even without drama like this, writing acknowledgements can be fraught. Matt Blake, author of the haunted-house divorce memoir Hearth of Darkness, says he spent “plenty of time” worrying about his acknowledgements – debating whether to make them short and classy like old-school writers or write them in the “garrulous, effusive modern way.” In the end, he chose the latter.

“I wasn’t sure at first which I should do because I think both ways say something about you as a writer,” Blake says. Though he knows some might consider long acknowledgements indulgent, he took a day to write his, which he wanted to make interesting for the reader. But though he didn’t fear verbosity, Blake equally didn’t want to turn the whole thing into a Facebook friends’ list – so he made sure to only name people who’d directly helped with the book (reading chapters or offering advice). Many of the authors I speak to say they also made this distinction – but one says she regrets getting carried away and thanking too many pals.

“In hindsight I was slightly too sincere,” she says, noting that her acknowledgements became like a wedding guest list. She felt she had to include some friends because she’d included others, and it felt unfair to leave them out even though they hadn’t actually helped with the book. “It was a bit of people-pleasing, probably, and a fear of not being comprehensive,” she says. But although she looks back and cringes at her “slightly grandiose” tone, she notes that it’s “sort of helpful to have all your friends written in a list in one place.”

I am grateful to the authors who shared their acknowledgements stories with me, but no one admitted to things that – in my most cynical moments – I believe are true. Of course, we’ve all raised an eyebrow when a blurb on the front of a book (“outstanding!” “unprecedented!”) turns out to be written by a close personal friend that the author thanks in the acknowledgements, but I feel even subtler dynamics are at play. Isn’t so-and-so trying to show she’s sooo popular by listing 50 friends? Isn’t Lucy angry that she included Tim in her acknowledgements, but Tim didn’t include Lucy in his? And – let’s be honest – didn’t that less-famous-guy include the name of that more-famous-gal so it would basically seem like she endorsed his book?

For that last one, I find some evidence… from 1773. It was then that Oliver Goldsmith published his play She Stoops to Conquer, which he dedicated to the super-famous dictionary botherer Samuel Johnson. “Dear Sir, By inscribing this slight performance to you, I do not mean so much to compliment you as myself,” Goldsmith wrote. “It may do me some honour to inform the public, that I have lived many years in intimacy with you.”

The big business of books has seemingly always corrupted the emotional side of things. In his 1887 book, The Dedication of Books to Patron and Friend, Henry B. Wheatley argued “few desires can be more natural than that of an author to link the name of a friend or patron with the work of his own mind” – but he went on to pooh-pooh the exchange of cash for credit. Wheatley lamented that tasteful and “feeling” dedications had over the years evolved into pandering to patrons, which could turn a book into “a mere vehicle for the fulsome praise of some worthless being.” And he wasn’t even talking about his ex.

Though her ex-fiancé ultimately didn’t make the cut, Ranelli stresses the importance of acknowledgements. “You never publish a book alone, even if you’re a self-published author,” she says, adding that even if you design your own cover and market the book yourself, you still have readers to thank. “You’re never alone,” she says, “otherwise it would just be a diary entry.”

I tend to agree – it was only when writing my own acknowledgements that I realised how much work goes into one book, and how many people I needed and wanted to thank. (My husband typed up notes from history books! My friends answered WhatsApps when I wanted a word for “that feeling when you’re hungry and also jealous?”). Equally, there was something about writing acknowledgements that felt strangely non-consensual: what if I included someone’s name and they thought my book sucked? What if they would rather not be associated with it, and cringed with horror when they saw they were included, and wondered how they would ever recover their reputation after such a besmirching slight?

Only time will tell, I guess, but until then: I would like to thank everyone who spoke to me for this piece. Thank you most of all to my mum, and special thanks to one of my seven brothers. Thank you, reader or hopefully readers, for reaching the end. Ultimately, though, there’s only one person who really made this piece possible, and that’s obvious: my most esteemed and best-beloved Self.