Welcome to Golden Doors

What, you may ask, is Golden Doors? It's a house. You can't go there, not yet. Soon! Very soon, I promise! Well, not until Summer 2021, which is when The Summer We Found Us releases.

Golden Doors is one of those giant, sprawling houses with acres of gardens that don't end until they reach a cliff that falls down to the sea. There's rose gardens and a gazebo and a widow's walk. Its cedar shingles are grey, as are most of the stately, elegant houses on Nantucket. 

I love books with old houses in them, houses where you can get lost in the many rooms, some tiny nooks, others great halls. I love grand staircases and winding back staircases, privet hedges and open lawns. I'm not a gazillionaire, so I don't have one myself (I have a tiny apartment!) which is why I wrote a book with one. 

A website's not quite like a house, of course, but you can still poke around and explore. Learn more about the book featuring Golden Doors, or my inspiration behind it, or the books I've written before. Enjoy! 

Capturing Wild Yeast (ie I, too, have fallen prey to the sourdough craze)

In which I realize, belatedly, that I might not actually like sourdough

Guys. I don’t know what you’re up to lately, but if you’re anything like me, you’ve been doing a lot of:

1) Sitting

2) Reading

3) Staring out the window

4) Valiantly attempting to do your day job at 100%

5) Checking Twitter

6) Being depressed

7) Getting really, REALLY obsessed with sourdough bread!!!

Let’s skip 1-6. With the exception of 2, they’re not so much fun.

I am so into sourdough bread baking? How did this happen? I don’t even like sourdough that much. If anyone had asked me to name my favorite bread (why has no one asked me this before) I would have said fresh baguettes, or perhaps cinnamon-raisin bread, or maybe bagels, if we’re getting broader here. And yet. Here I am, with everyone else on Twitter and Instagram, newly obsessed with sourdough bread.

In, my defense, I did not have any yeast when we started quarantining. So if I wanted to bake bread, I would need to CULTIVATE MY OWN YEAST. In my non-defense but sort-0f-explanation, I’m also incredibly stubborn and like a challenge.

And thus, I embarked on my tw0-ish week adventure!

Day 1: Start the starter

This turned out to be wicked easy! All I had to do was mix one part flour to one part water. Done. Sit in in a

Days 2-9: Feed and monitor the starter

Feed the starter! I love this! That’s a weird thing to say, that you’re feeding something, so I’m into it! Also it made me feel like time was passing and I was doing something, which I highly recommend if you’re trapped inside your small city apartment for 23 hours a day save during your state regulated constitutional.

This did turn out to be much messier than I expected, which left me stressed and constantly cleaning the kitchen. Each day - and soon, twice I day - you reserve 113 grams of starter, toss the rest, and add equal parts flour and water. I hated wasting so much flour, so instead of tossing the discard, I made endless amounts of these tiny crumpets. Half of which are now parked in my freezer, ready to perform their duty as snack at any moment.

I got stressed around Day 8 that my starter wasn’t doubling in size, the way it’s supposed to - thus proving your yeast is working - but luckily I have a lot of friends who are just as bougie as I am who were also making sourdough starters (my work has a SLACK CHANNEL devoted to sourdough, yes, this is real life) and one suggested using bottled water instead of tap. Who knew! Sourdough starter can ALSO be bougie! Apparently salt inhibits yeast growth, and the local tap water has a high sodium count, which was really slowing it down.

Day 10: Bake Bread

I AM QUEEN OF THE SOURDOUGH BOW DOWN TO ME

Turns out I don’t like sourdough that much?? Also this was dense AF. But at least it was pretty and instagramable so I counted it as a win, because I am basic like that.

Day 18: Second Bake

Your sourdough starter needs to be removed from the fridge and fed each week, which also means throwing out the discard - or cooking with it. So I made two more loaves. And! They turned out! BEAUTIFULLY! By which I mean they actually tasted good. And there was celebration throughout the land.

Anyway, who knows how long I’ll keep this up for, but

Inspiration

I was nervous the first time I got on the phone with my editor. I’d prepared for the call; I’d made a list of questions and read up on her imprint. I was thrilled when everything flowed easily, until she asked me something I’d been wholly unprepared for: where did you get your inspiration?

I drew a blank.

This shouldn’t have been an unexpected question. But I’d never actually thought about it for this book.

I managed an answer and we moved on, but it left me wondering: why did I write this book?

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The Summer We Found Us is a romantic comedy. It’s about a nosy girl named Abby who wants to learn more about her grandmother’s past, so she gets a summer job at a bookstore on Nantucket. Nantucket is the summer homes of many exceedingly wealthy people, with mansions perched on cliffs, and soon Abby finds herself tangled up with the son of one of those houses, who quite decidedly thinks she should go home and leave his family alone.

Some of those elements felt less like they’d been inspired and more like breathing. That I’d write a romance, for one: I grew up reading Meg Cabot and Sophie Kinsella and scores of romance novels. I love witty banter and sizzling chemistry and opposites attract and hot tempers (and hot guys, apparently. My dad read my book and said, “you mention how pretty the boy is a lot”). So of course the heart of the story would be a fiery romance. That was never in doubt.

Abby’s background came from my own experiences: I spent my teenage years working at Barnes and Noble (I thought I was the queen of that bookstore), and for a week every summer my family visited Cape Cod. So when I wanted to capture the feeling of summer, I set it in that beachy landscape of quaint towns and sandy dunes and long grasses and crashing waves.

The nosiness also came naturally. I basically think I’m Sherlock Holmes at social media. (I’m kind of joking, but only kind of!!) As a teen, I was obsessed with learning more about my grandmother’s past. But while she was fairly free about her childhood in France, or her twenties in New York, she stayed tight-lipped about her teenage years. “What was it like,” I asked her once, “in Paris during the Occupation?”

She pursed her lips. She wore, as always, lipstick, a gold necklace, and Chanel No. 5. “It was very sad,” she said, and did not say anything more.

“A lot of survivors don’t like to talk about it,” my mom told me soon after. “It’s too hard.”

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If romance is the heart of The Summer We Found Us, relationships between mothers and daughters is its core: the way we talk, and don’t talk, the way knowledge is restrained and revealed, the way we try to protect each other, with varying results. It’s about love and frustration and guilt and hope. That’s where the inspiration lay: how do we tell a story about daughters and mothers who are also daughters, about relationships between the generations, about what you give up for love, about what you do for it?

Happy early Mother’s Day, Mom.