My aim with this book was to depict mental illness in a historical context, and acknowledge that conditions like anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, and so many more are not inventions of the twenty-first century, but rather have always been part of the human experience.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental illness or suicidal thoughts, you are not alone. There is help, and there is always, always hope.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:
1-800-273-8255
Chat online at www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
Crisis Text Line:
Text HOME to 741741 (24/7)
A Note on Locations
The Republic of Salé was a real pirate city on the opposite side of the river from Rabat, Morocco. Though the official republic only lasted from 1624 to 1688, pirate activity continued, and it was a haven for corsairs for several centuries. Ten percent of what the pirates looted was paid to the sultan. Though only briefly mentioned in this book, one of the main sources of income for these pirates was the slave trade. Enslavement of captured sailors from all countries was common. Piracy—it wasn’t pretty!
Contrary to what I thought before starting the research for this book, Iceland is not a discovery of twenty-first-century tourism! Like many other islands in the North Atlantic, Iceland was a dependency of Denmark–Norway in the eighteenth century, when it had a population of just over fifty thousand people. That number fluctuated over the century due to an influx of European sailors, explorers, fishers, and traders, as well as the disease they brought with them, and a volcanic eruption and the famine that followed it.
Magic has always been a very real and present part of Icelandic culture, and still is today. Much like Europe and America, Iceland had its own period of witch burning, in which almost two hundred people were charged with practicing sorcery and twenty were put to death. The galdrastafirs, or staves, in this book, are all real. Staves are used for a variety of purposes, from protection to preventing fox bite to navigation to keeping your sheep docile. They first appeared in the late Middle Ages, but the most well-known date from the eighteenth century, when they were recorded in magical textbooks called grimoires.
I learned about staves while visiting Iceland several years before The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue was released. I was months from seeing a therapist for the first time and being given a diagnosis and medication to help treat my own mental illness. At the time, all I knew was that I had spent months in an unending cloud of sadness and worry that had left me feeling like barely a person. I struggled to write. I struggled to look people in the eyes. I struggled to breathe. I struggled and struggled and struggled without ever thinking myself sick enough to need help, or considering that a future without anxiety was possible.
In a gift shop in Reykjavík, I purchased a vegvísir, the stave Adrian is given in the book, which is meant to give the bearer direction. I still carry it with me almost every day. Shortly after the trip, I started writing The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, the book that brought me back to life. So ending here, with three books and an Icelandic stave I hoped would give me direction, feels satisfyingly symmetrical in a way real life almost never is.
A Final Word on the Montagues
The Montague Siblings was never meant to be a series. It was hardly meant to be a book. For me, all three volumes represent finding joy and pride in pieces of my own identity that did not always inspire such feelings. I have always found strength and confidence in my sense of self by finding stories of people like me in history, and in those stories, the affirmation that we have always existed. More than existed, and more than survived in spite of their identity. They have flourished, and found ways to make happy, fulfilling lives without compromising who they were, in spite of society at large not always accepting or understanding. These books are tributes to the campy adventure stories I have always loved and the people I did not see populating them. I am so grateful they have found a home with so many readers, and so grateful you loved them enough to follow me all the way here to literally the last pages of the last book.