My book, Sooner Than Tomorrow — A Mother’s Diary About Mental Illness, Family, and Everyday Life, has been six years in the making. In a few days, it will become available on Amazon. The journey continues.
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
(page 445 in Sooner Than Tomorrow)
First, thank you to my son, Patrick. Thank you for your poetry, your Facebook posts, and your life. You’re the most courageous person I’ve ever known.
Thank you to my daughters, Megan Mace, Marisa Farnsworth, and Kerry Joiner, for reading Sooner Than Tomorrow and giving me permission to put it out there, sharing our family with the world. Your endorsements mean everything to me.
Thank you to everyone I mentioned in the telling of my story. We’re all in this thing we call “life” together.
Thank you to early readers: Ann Hedrick, Pat West Guinn, Kathy Hayes, Mary Lyn Rusmore-Villaume, Rosemary Sarka, and Irene Underwood. You gave me the cojones to believe in myself.
Thank you to the cheerleaders, those of you read my book excerpts week after week at soonerthantomorrow.com and sent me emails, text messages, cards, and letters: Joan Andersen, Tama
Bell, Chris Biswell, Judy Bracken, Madeleine Cunningham, Bev Chinello, Deborah Fabos, Anne Schmidt Francisco, Heidi Franke, Sheila Ganz, Jeanne Gore, Joyce Herrerias, Swannie Hoehn, Rose King, Nancy Krause, Joan Logue, Grace McAndrews, Jan McKim, Mary Murphy, Fran Neves, Liz Noel, Teresa Pasquini, Den Proudly, Karen Riches, Mary Sheldon, Stace Shurson, Sandy Turner, Kimberlee West, Annette Williamson, and to so many more of you who left comments, likes, and loves on Facebook. You kept me going, especially on the days when I thought, what am I doing?
Thank you to Sharon Lefkov, Kerry Joiner, and Michele Joiner for proofing my pages for spellings and typos. Thank you to my little brother, Jim Moon, for bringing my old photos back to life. Acknowledgments also to Sue Clark, my first editor, who read every page out loud with me and assured me, “Yes, this is interesting.” And to the Lincoln Library writer’s class who listened, in the beginning, when Pat was still with us.
Special hugs to Pat’s Facebook friends.
Thank you to Michele DeFilippo and Ronda Rawlins at 1106 Design for your professionalism and guidance.
And finally, thank you to all of you—those I know and don’t know—who are reading Sooner Than Tomorrow. Readers are the whole point of writing. The why in the what if.
—Dede Ranahan
P.S. Love to my heroes—the millions of mothers of the seriously mentally ill who fight for their children every single day.
