One of the things nobody tells you when you write a book is how to do a dedication. Like the title and the acknowledgements, the dedication is primarily a challenge faced by authors who have already secured both a publishing deal and a plausible ending.
A dedication is meant to be a permanent memorial, even when the bulk of the print run ends up being pulped. It is something you are supposed to craft with care. That said, a dedication can be as short as two words, or even one, and no one is going to pay too much attention to it. Generally, when analysing a book’s dedication, the discerning reader concerns himself with just two questions: Is the book dedicated to me? Is it dedicated to anyone I could plausibly claim to know?
In his book Invisible Forms, Kevin Jackson argues that many of the bits of books we tend to disregard — epigraphs, acknowledgements, indexes, bibliographies — are actually ‘paratextual”, in other words, worthy of analysis in their own right. But this argument works better for prefaces and glossaries than for dedications.
A dedication remains, however, the first thing the reader sees after the title. As an author, one wants it to be reflective of the contents, or at least reassuring and inviting. The perfect dedication would also be immediately moving, or funny, or both; timely but also timeless.
My own quest for such a dedication for my first novel was doubly hamstrung: I couldn’t think of anything amusing or apt, and I could not choose the subject. My wife had already insisted that I dedicate it to her. I would have done so anyway, but she clearly feared that I might never write another book, and that this would be her only chance.
I began to think about typing ‘To S” and leaving it at that. Then it came to me. My dedication would read, ‘For Sophie, for all time”, and underneath, in square brackets, would be the words, ‘Dedication applies to hardback only”. It could be construed as a timely literary in-joke, harking back to the scandal over Peter Carey’s alleged attempt to have all the dedications to his ex-wife expunged from future editions of his novels, but it was self-contained enough to make sense if you found the book a decade hence.
Having secured my wife’s permission to be light-heartedly unkind, I slipped the dedication into the page proofs and sent it off. In the intervening weeks I imagined the copy editor chortling at its wickedness, its aptness and its originality. When the first box of books finally arrived, I turned to the page after the title page. It said:
For Sophie, for all time
And that’s all it said. Evidently the copy editor had taken the bit in brackets not as a joke, but as an instruction.
When my wife opened the book she laughed harder than I have seen her laugh in a long time. ‘It’s funny,” she said, ‘because it sounds like you mean it.” She seemed particularly pleased that I had been wrong-footed into a heartfelt display of sincerity as the result of a doomed attempt to be amusing. Life is rarely so satisfactory.
I didn’t say anything to the publishers, but when a few weeks later I got an email from them asking, in all seriousness, what sort of dedication I had in mind for the paperback, I felt obliged to explain. Then, after some thought, I asked them to restore the bit in brackets. Why not have it both ways? —