The Awkward Art of Book Dedications

Book dedications are strange little things.

They sit right at the front of a novel, usually before anyone has been murdered, betrayed, kidnapped, cursed, seduced by someone entirely unsuitable, or forced to confront a deeply inconvenient family secret.

They are often sweet.

For Mum, who always believed in me.

For my husband, my greatest supporter.

For my children, who gave me a reason to keep going.

Lovely. Heartwarming. Occasionally nauseating.

And then there are the dedications written because, at the time, it seemed like the safest, easiest, or most socially acceptable thing to do. And occasionally you may just feel like you have to. That last one is definitely and Gen X trait.

There may be expectations. There may be complicated emotions. There may be that peculiar relationship dynamic where you find yourself making decisions not because you genuinely want to make them, but because you already know how unpleasant the alternative conversation might be.

So, into the book they go.

Forever.

Which is one of the slightly terrifying things about publishing. You can delete a text message. You can throw away an anniversary card. You can remove someone from your Christmas card list with the efficient brutality of a minor government reshuffle.

But a book dedication?

That thing has an ISBN.

It is out there.

Somewhere, possibly sitting on a stranger's bookshelf between a Colleen Hoover novel and a cookbook they have never opened, is permanent printed evidence that you once thanked someone you would now be considerably less enthusiastic about thanking. I may or may not have done that.

Do I regret it?

Surprisingly, not entirely.

Because writers are scavengers.

We recycle everything.

Awkward conversations, family arguments, embarrassing dates, strange neighbors, terrible bosses and spectacularly unfortunate relationships all disappear into the enormous mental compost heap marked POTENTIAL MATERIAL.

Nothing is wasted.

Pain becomes backstory.

Annoyance becomes dialogue.

And occasionally, someone who made your life exceptionally painful provides excellent inspiration for a villain.

Purely coincidentally, obviously.

Any resemblance to persons living, dead, divorced, blocked on Facebook or quietly avoided in the supermarket is entirely accidental.

Probably.

This is perhaps the greatest revenge available to a writer. Not revenge in the dramatic sense. I am not talking about standing on a cliff in a velvet cape while lightning flashes behind me. Although I am not ruling that out.

I mean the quieter satisfaction of discovering that something unpleasant eventually became useful. A bad experience can become a chapter. A manipulative conversation can become a character trait. A particularly outrageous lie can suddenly make you think, "Actually, that's quite good. I might use that."

There is something wonderfully therapeutic about it. The person who once made you feel small can accidentally help you create something much bigger. And that brings me back to dedications.

We tend to think of them as declarations of love or gratitude, but really, they are tiny historical documents. They capture who we were, whose lies we believed, who mattered to us, or who we thought was supposed to matter to us at the moment that book went to print.

Sometimes relationships change. Sometimes people disappoint us. Sometimes we change enough to look back at our own dedication page and think, "Well. That aged badly."

But perhaps that is fine.

The dedication still tells the truth about that particular moment, even if it is not the truth you would write today. And if the person mentioned in that dedication ever happens to pick up the book and read it again?

I hope they enjoy it.

Truly.

I also hope they make it far enough into the novel to meet the villain.

No particular reason.