Dr. Frank's What's-it

I Would Like to Thank Myself and God

Cranky tips on how not to do acknowledgments, with instructive examples from Chuck Klosterman and Steve Almond.

There is not one piece of the book publishing process that is not a potential well-spring of embarrassment. As with anything that is done chiefly for effect, there are a lot ways to go with acknowledgments, and all of them are wrong. Even keeping it simple, as the author of the piece recommends, can seem pretentious in its own way, like you're bashing people over the head with your relentless good taste and elegance. But you can't just skip them, as I imagine many authors might prefer, so you do what you got to do. If that involves writing cloying prose poems in honor of your publicist, or thanking God or your cat, so what? You've got to put something in there.

That said, though, this excerpt from Almond's acknowledgments (I assume it's from his latest, The Evil B. B. Chow) is really quite something:

...anyone -- I mean anyone -- who takes up the holy office of making sentences, songs, paintings, those artifacts which serve as testament to our otherwise unarticulated fears and wishes, and last but not least Abraham Lincoln, a man of astonishing eloquence and moral courage, who died, many years ago, for the sins of this country. Let us, in this age of unremitting grievance, choose as he did: to love, to sacrifice, to forgive...