Thank you:
Nicole Aragi, best imaginable agent, for your patience, encouragement, and brilliant editing.
To the folks at HarperCollins, especially Gail Winston, for your excellent sensibility as editor, and your contagious enthusiasm. Maya Ziv, for your grace and generosity as you worked on so many details. And Shelly Perron, phenomenal copy editor.
Thanks to those writers who helped me as I worked: Don Challenger, whose own writing and great humor inspired me to begin; Jane Bernstein, for ongoing support and perceptive comments on the first draft; Lawrence Wray, for reading the first draft and steering me past my blind spots, and for buying an Evvie coat; and Charlotte Daniels, for reading early on, in the middle, and then again at the end, and for giving me the gift of a week in her perfect cabin where I finished the manuscript.
Thanks also to Patrick and Patricia Tierney, who listened to the first pages of this aloud and told me to keep going, and to Cynthia Taibbi, who read the finished manuscript.
Thanks to my family and all my friends, far and near, for your invaluable support and presence in my life.
And to those who lived with me as I wrote: Patrick, for sustaining love, faith, and friendship; and Rosey and Anna, for outlandish comedy and kindness.
Finally, a heartfelt thank-
you to Drue Heinz, whose generosity and support of fiction made possible the career of so many writers, including mine.
J
ANE
M
C
C
AFFERTY
is
author of the novel
One Heart
and two collections of
stories,
Thank You for the Music
and
Director of the World and Other Stories
, which won the
Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
She is the recipient of an NEA award, t
he Great
Lakes New Writers Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Pittsburgh, where
she teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.
Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive
information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor
This book is a work of fiction. References to
real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended
only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other
characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's
imagination and are not to be construed as real.
FIRST YOU TRY
EVERYTHING
. Copyright © 2012 by Jane McCafferty. All rights reserved
under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the
required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to
access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be
reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored
in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form
or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter
invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
McCafferty, Jane.
First you try everything : a novel /
by Jane McCafferty.â1st ed.
p. cm.
EPub Edition © January 2012 ISBN:
9780062188199
ISBN 978-0-06-621062-9 (hardback)
1. Middle-aged womenâFiction. 2.
Married peopleâFiction. 3. Identity (Philosophical concept)âFiction. 4.
Pittsburgh (Pa.)âFiction. I. Title.
PS3563.C33377F57 2012
813'.54âdc22
2011028528
12 13 14 15 16
OV
/
RRD
10 9 8 7 6
5 4 3 2 1
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