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?
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.”
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.
