Do You Read The Dedications?
What do those words at the beginning of the book tell us?
I haven’t always loved dedications. When I was younger, I never paid them much attention. I will also admit to skipping prefaces and prologues. Ah, the impatience of youth! I guess I just wanted to jump into the story.
At some point that changed. I devour books from cover to cover now. I even read the acknowledgments. Specifically, I read the dedications on purpose, to the point where I’m disappointed when there aren’t any.
I think the best dedication I’ve ever read, or at least read and remembered, is the one in the Little Prince:
“TO LEON WERTH
I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough, then I want to dedicate this book to the child whom this grown-up once was. All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.) So I correct my dedication:
TO LEON WERTH, when he was a little boy.”
The Little Prince may be a book for children, but I have read it more times as a grown-up than I ever did as a kid. This dedication has personality, and like the rest of the book you can take it at face value, or you can accept the invitation to see things a different way.
The dedication to The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is another one to make us think:
“To Lucy Barfield.
My Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result, you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be
your affectionate Godfather, C.S. Lewis”
Completely unrelated to the previous two, but deserving a callout for being a pretty unique dedication, here’s Sloane Crossley’s dedication in “How did you get this number”:
“To my parents. For everything*
*Everything except the two-week period in 1995 directly following the time you went to Ohio for a wedding and I threw a party in the house, which is the most normal thing a teenage American can do, aside from lie about it, which I also did, and Mom eyed me suspiciously for days, morphing into a one-woman Scotland Yard, marching into my bedroom with a fistful of lint from the dryer to demonstrate that I had mysteriously washed all the towels, and then she waited until we were in a nice restaurant to scream, “someone vomited on my couch, I know it!” and Dad took away my automotive privileges straight through college so that I spent the subsequent four years likening you both to Stasi soldiers, confined as I was to a campus-on-the-hill when I could have been learning how to play poker at the casinos down the road and making bad decisions at townie bars. I think we can all agree you overreacted.
For everything except that, I am profoundly grateful. I have only the greatest affection for you now. Also: I vomited on the couch.”
In case you don’t read dedications, I should clarify that these three examples are not the norm.
Most dedications are actually much shorter. Maybe just a name. A mystery: who was this person? Why were they so special?
- For Daniele Ponchiroli — Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller
- For Umma, Ahpa, Myung, and Sang — Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires
- For Blythe… — Dan Brown, Angels & Demons (why the three dots at the end?!)
- For Alberto and Octavio, whom I call by other names. -Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
Some are tiny love poems:
- Once again, to Zelda — Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- For Josh Jones, obviously — Lauren Berry, Living the Dream
- For Maggie, my comet — Amor Towles, Rules of Civility
- For Albio, Alma de Mi Vida (Soul of my life) — André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
- For Marilyn Duckworth and Mih-ho Cha In honor of your friendship, your fierceness, your grace.
- To my mother and the memory of her mother. You asked me once what I would remember. This, and much more. — Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
- For my sister, Lisa, with love and gratitude — Lily King, Writers and Lovers
- Simply and impossibly: for my family — Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
- For Margaret Cordi — my eyes, my years, my beloved friend — Elizabeth Guilbert, City of Girls
And not so tiny love poems:
“To Her
Hand in hand we come
Christopher Robin and I
To lay this book on your lap
Say You’re surprised
Say You like it?
Say it’s just what you wanted?
Because it’s yours-
Because we love you”
A.A. Milne, The Complete Winnie The Pooh
Others are tiny stories:
- To the memory of my mother, who taught me to read, Jacqueline Skyes Gabaldon — Dianne Gabaldon, Outlander
- To the memory of my grandmother, Victoria Parsons Pennoyer, who untaught me everything — Kate Greathead, Laura and Emma
- For Carmen Balcells and Ramón Huidobro, two lions born on the same day and forever alive.- Isabel Allende, Retrato en Sepia
- For Forest, Jade, Haven, and Jerry — and everyone else in the back of the truck. — Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor and Park
- For Joan Ramon Planas, who deserves better — Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
- For my husband, Doug Watkins — in thanks for the Raw Material- Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber
And not so tiny stories:
“No one was better at captivating an audience than Grandpa, when he sat on his favorite bench telling stories, leaning on his walking stick and chewing tobacco.
“But Grandpa…Is that really true?” we grandchildren would ask, wide-eyed.
“Those who only say what is the truth, they’re not worth listening to,” Grandpa replied.
This book is dedicated to him.” — Jonas Jonasson, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
I will admit, this is a very random selection, but it is so on purpose. I hope at least one made you smile.
As I was going through them, I couldn’t help but wonder why I started reading them. What made me stop and stare at the two words, or tiny poems or tiny stories. I think it’s because while the act of writing is solitary, these dedications show we are not alone. It shows the people behind the writer and I kind of love that.
So, do you read the dedications? Do you have any to add to my humble collection? Let me know!
