A Love Letter to Friendship: A Guest Post by Emily Giffin
The strongest bonds of friendship can be formed at the delicate precipice between childhood and adulthood. In Emily Giffin’s The Summer Pact, a group of longtime friends reunite after a decade, and what happens next makes for a tender, big-hearted story. Read on for Giffin’s exclusive essay on what she hopes her readers take away from this novel.
Hardcover $30.00
The Summer Pact: A Novel
The Summer Pact: A Novel
By Emily Giffin
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
From Something Borrowed to Something Blue and beyond, Emily Giffin knows how to write a story full of friendship, humor and heart.
From Something Borrowed to Something Blue and beyond, Emily Giffin knows how to write a story full of friendship, humor and heart.
The Summer Pact is a love letter to friendship. More specifically, it’s about the importance of our coming-of-age relationships and the intense bonds we form as we lose our innocence. For some of us, that loss happens during our early teens. For Tyson, Hannah, Lainey, and Summer, this bridge was crossed at the end of their college years. When their tight friend group was rocked by tragedy, they made a pact to always be there for one another. Ten years later, that promise is tested when Hannah finds herself at a major crossroads. Hitting rock bottom, her friends rally to her side, each of them discovering they are also in need of a change in their lives. The story is about their impromptu trip to Capri, but also about their inner journeys as they struggle to chart their own path against the weight of familial expectations and how the time together served as a rebirth and reset for all of them.
About midway through the writing of this book, I found myself in an unexpected crisis. As life imitated art, the friend I leaned on the most was my own college bestie. Nancy and I met on our first night at Wake Forest University when we were both feeling too antisocial and homesick to attend a welcome party for freshmen. Ever since that night, we have been there for one another in good times and bad. She is my chosen family and my second sister and having her in my life is a constant reminder of the healing power of friendship. (Fun fact: she is also my first reader of every novel and my most diligent proofreader!)
In addition to friendship, The Summer Pact explores mental health, substance abuse, and the toxic culture of perfectionism including its impact on college athletes. Having twin sons who run track and cross-country at Columbia University, I’m extremely tuned in to the pressures that young people put on themselves to perform at a high level, both academically and athletically. I never write with a moral message in mind, but I hope readers come away from The Summer Pact with the reminder we are not the sum of our achievements, accomplishments, and accolades. Those things are nice, of course, and I fully believe in the importance of following your passion and putting in the hard work and long hours to pursue your goals and dreams. But in the end, life is about our relationships. They are what define us, and in the end, they are what matters the most. I am proud of my career as a writer, but I’m way prouder to be Edward, George and Harriet’s mother; my mother’s daughter; a “little” sister to Sarah; and Nancy’s BFF. I like to think that the characters in my book go through the rest of their fictional lives with that gold star in mind.
