Thank You, Moon

“In Feb­ru­ary 2020, Knopf edi­tor Kather­ine Har­ri­son tagged me on Twit­ter, alert­ing me to a con­ver­sa­tion about how ani­mals respond to the Moon’s cycle, and asked “Is this some­thing you’d poten­tial­ly be inter­est­ed in writ­ing? I just can’t get enough of the moon these days, and I feel like you could bring some­thing spe­cial to it.” She also includ­ed a beau­ti­ful, eerie, mys­te­ri­ous image of the Moon par­tial­ly obscured by clouds. It was an irre­sistible invitation.

“A few days lat­er, I began doing some basic research to see how much infor­ma­tion I could find. After a cou­ple of weeks of dig­ging, I was con­fi­dent that there were enough sol­id exam­ples to fill a book. Now I need­ed a strong hook—a unique lens that sparks the reader’s curios­i­ty and encour­ages them to think about a famil­iar top­ic in a new way.

“Often, a book’s hook is obvi­ous from the title. Exam­ples include:

• Feath­ers: Not Just for Flying
• An Egg Is Quiet
• If Sharks Disappeared
• Pink Is for Blobfish
• Weeds Find a Way

So on Sat­ur­day, I told my hus­band we were going to brain­storm titles while we cleaned the house. The ideas could be good or bad, sil­ly or seri­ous, any­thing at all. Any unique way of think­ing about “our clos­est com­pan­ion in space.” I liked the sound of that phrase, so I wrote it down to get us started.

“Three hours lat­er, the dust bun­nies were gone, the bath­room sparkled, and we had a list of about twen­ty phras­es. The next day, I typed them all into a com­put­er file along with all the adjec­tives I could think of to describe the Moon image Kather­ine had sent me. My goal was to cre­ate a man­u­script that evoked that image.

“It didn’t take long for the title Thank You, Moon and the feel­ing of grat­i­tude to rise to the top. After all, life on Earth—including us—couldn’t exist with­out the Moon to reg­u­late Earth’s seasons.

“Con­fi­dent that I’d come up with just the right angle for approach­ing the book, I dug into the research and began think­ing about the struc­ture. I decid­ed to arrange exam­ples in pairs, focus­ing on what ani­mals need to do to survive—find food, avoid preda­tors, and raise a fam­i­ly. Once I had that plan in place, I began to write.”