In Memory of Central Park was begun by my deceased husband, Aron Spilken, PhD, in the late 1980s. He created a vision of New York City extremely similar to the one presented here. The main characters, the Liberty Party, the Patriots, and a band of revolutionaries with many similarities to the group presented in the current version were included in his original manuscript.

Though terrorism had not yet emerged, and almost no one except Senator Al Gore considered global warming a legitimate issue, by the time my husband began working on this book, many people were concerned about overpopulation, the environment, and the loss of civil liberties. The novel was born, after all, during the Reagan years, a time not dissimilar to the current reign of darkness under George W. Bush.

My husband died suddenly and unexpectedly in November of 2003. About six months later I decided that I would like to revise and complete this book.

From the very start, I loved this novel. Although it was not ready for publication, I liked it more than any of the other fine things my husband wrote. I found the writing exquisite, the characters exceptionally vivid, and the political satire wickedly satisfying. I felt I understood the soul of the book. And when I realized, in addition, that recent history had rendered my husband’s vision of New York City more relevant today than it was when he originally created it, I was truly excited.

New York City as portrayed in In Memory of Central Park is a perfect symbol of the isolationism to which the current Bush has condemned our country. On almost every important issue, including climate change, the war in Iraq, and stem cell research, George W. has chosen to go it alone. And now that we have terrorism to worry about, now that the population of the planet has continued to grow exponentially, now that the rising waters created by global warming—barring some truly miraculous intervention—will surely flood the island of Manhattan, now that the world’s water and air and food are even more polluted and our civil liberties are in yet greater jeopardy than ever before, this fanciful image of New York City in the mid-twenty-first century is an amazingly apt metaphor for our current reality.

In addition to the above literary and political motivations, I had personal ones as well. The loss of my husband was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, bar none. It was quite frankly difficult to survive. I needed a purpose for my life, and completing this book provided that. Furthermore, my husband and I had always worked together on projects. I was his editor, carefully reading over his writing, making comments, discussing ideas, crossing out extraneous words, and rewriting sentences. We worked together, as well, on projects for the theatre, projects for the ranch where we lived, the design for a house we were building in Mexico. As a couple, we were constantly involved with one creative project or another. Picking up where he left off with In Memory of Central Park allowed me to continue collaborating with him despite his death. It provided a kind of contact I could not have had in any other way.

I also felt a need to express and honor the beauty of the relationship I’d had with my husband. I did this by developing and expanding the relationship between the two main characters, Noah and Margaret, which, though in part pure fiction, does mirror in important ways the relationship I had with my husband, both from his point of view and from mine.

While I have edited, cut, added to, and rearranged what my husband wrote, at least half of the words in this novel were taken directly from his manuscript. There are entire chapters that are pretty much the way he wrote them. Other chapters are jointly written; yet others contain my writing alone. Does this not make my husband a coauthor of this book? Certainly it does.

Nonetheless, this book isn’t the result of two people negotiating how it should be written or dividing it up between them in some arbitrary way. I inherited a manuscript, some of which I kept, some of which I threw out, all of which I edited, rearranged, and updated. Ultimately, I crafted the novel according to my personal vision of what it should be. I could never have guessed what Aron would have done had he chosen to complete the manuscript, nor did I try. This, of course, required that I write convincingly in the novel’s original voice, which, for reasons I can’t explain, I felt sure I could do. Since completing the book, I have asked numerous readers to guess which parts were written by Aron and which parts were written by me. Since no one yet has been able to identify who wrote what with any consistency, I assume I succeeded in this important task.

For a variety of complex reasons, my publisher and I decided not to list two authors on the front cover. However, I wish to acknowledge clearly and unequivocally that my deceased husband Aron Spilken and I are coauthors of this novel.