Poured Over: Jennifer Weiner on The Summer Place

“I was thinking about caretaking. And I was thinking about mothers because I lost my mom last year, but just the places that feel familiar and how they almost become characters in our heads. Like when I think about the house where I grew up, and I can remember it so specifically right down to the way like the closet smelled or when I think about all the time I spent in Cape Cod, the way the sand on the beach feels at low tide or the way the wind sounds when it’s late at night.” Bestselling author Jennifer Weiner (Mrs. Everything and That Summer among others) joins us on the show to take us behind the scenes of her newest novel, The Summer Place, and talk about love and loss, family and home, motherhood, money and much more with B&N’s Marie Cummings. And we end the show with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Margie and Marc.

Featured Book: The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Marie Cummings and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (and occasional Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: Hi, I’m Marie Cummings. I’m a bookseller at Barnes and Noble and I’m so excited to talk with Jennifer Weiner today. You know her from her best selling novels In Her Shoes and Good in Bed and, of course, 2019 Barnes and Noble Book Club pick Mrs. Everything, and so many others. But we are here today to talk about her latest book, The Summer Place. Hi, Jennifer, how are you?

Jennifer Weiner: I’m terrific. I’m so glad to be here.

B&N: I love this background. I love wherever you are. It looks so pretty.

JW: Thank you. It’s my little office for years I worked in my closet. And then the pandemic happened. And then like my husband was working from home I had two daughters like attending school from home. And I’m like, I should have an actual office with an actual door that closes and so we were able to like reclaim a chunk of closet. So this office is like eight feet by 12 feet. I can barely stand up and turn around in it. But it’s perfect. It’s all I need. Cozy

B&N: Is that where The Summer Place started for you? Because doesn’t Sarah work in her closet?

JW: Yes, yes, yes. I gave Sarah, one of the protagonists of the summer place. I gave her a lot of my pandemic life. And I gave her husband Eli my own husband’s orthopedic flip flops which, basically Sarah, she’s a stepmother. She’s a mother. She’s a daughter. She’s a wife, she runs a music school in Manhattan. She’s doing all the things. She’s doing them from home because of COVID. And her husband has plantar fasciitis. And so he is flip flopping around their house in these orthopedic shoes that make the flip flop noise and the flip flop noise like haunts her dreams. And she feels like if she hears like one more flip flops, she’s going to like lose it and like tear the shoes apart with your bare hands. Anytime you’re writing a book, you want things that feel true, but then you want to sort of you there’s some comic exaggeration in there. But I feel like for a lot of people for a lot of women who are working at home and like finding out that their husbands or their partners or like their circle back dies, like, hey, let’s circle back, let’s put a pin in that having everyone at home was hard. If you were somebody who was used to being home alone for at least some of the time, some of the days.

B&N: I was watching other interviews for your last book, big summer, and you were pretty emphatic about no not gonna write a COVID book too close to it, we’re still in it. And then here we are, and with The Summer Place, and they’re having this COVID experience. What made you change your mind?

JW: I didn’t want to write a COVID book. And I don’t think I wrote a quote unquote COVID. But I didn’t want to ignore it like that felt a little dodgy to me, we’d all been through this communal experience that changed us. I think it changed just about everybody. And I wanted to make it part of the book without making it the whole of the book. And also very early on in the pandemic, I had read this article, I think it was in the New York Times about people who were dating casually, or they’d only been on like two or three dates, and then the stay at home orders came down and they were like let’s move in together. Let’s just see where this goes. And I was fascinated by that. What is it like to have a relationship fast tracked that way. So that was one of the ways that COVID made itself manifest in this story, I definitely can see the thing both ways. I wasn’t ready for like a full, I’m going to walk you through every twist and turn. And just I mean, I still can feel like my heart start beating faster when I think about some of that stuff. And just like what it was right at the beginning when nobody knew what was going on, or how long it would last or when we get out of it or how many people would die. And I hope I found the right balance there of like not ignoring it, but not centering it.

B&N: Ruby and Gabe seem to do pretty well at home in Brooklyn. And then things started shifting when the COVID regulations started loosening, and then they got to move out and be on their own. And I just thought that was interesting to how things sort of shifted for them.

JW: I was interested in this idea of like enchantment, almost. COVID was this very specific period of time and I think that maybe for some people, it was a way to kind of postpone adulthood. Ruby and Gabe should have been starting their adult lives. Instead of having to do that they were able to move in with Ruby’s parents or her father and her stepmother and live in this beautiful imaginary palace of a brownstone in Brooklyn where all their meals are prepared. All the premium cable channels are there for their enjoyment. They have their own floor so I wanted it to be like they’re living in this fairy land castle. And then they are cast out into the big wicked world or a studio apartment in Queens in their case, and what is that like? All of us got sort of spit back out at some point. And in some way and so I was imagining Ruby and Gabe, also, as sort of Sleeping Beauty in the castle full of thorns before the prince comes and kisses her and wakes her up. I always loved that fairy tale, but I was always like, Well what happens after she wakes up she’s in a castle full of thorns, her loners have like rotted on her body, like there’s probably nothing to eat, what happens when the enchantment is over. And that was one of the driving questions of The Summer Place.

B&N: I really liked that you said that the enchantment of place. I felt like the book really had such a sense of place. The house in the cape even felt a little whimsical. It had its life of its own. It nurtures the children as they grow up, it takes care of Ronnie, what inspired you to inject a little bit of that whimsy.

JW: I was thinking about caretaking. And I was thinking about mothers because I lost my mom last year, but just the places that feel familiar and how they almost become characters in our heads. Like when I think about the house where I grew up, and I can remember it so specifically right down to the way like the closet smelled or when I think about all the time I spent in Cape Cod, the way the sand on the beach feels at low tide or the way the wind sounds when it’s late at night. And you can hear it kind of rustling through the beach grass. I think that those are such vivid, essential memories for so many people like so many people have really clear senses. And it’s like this kind of lost Eden, right? Like, the place where I grew up, or the place where I went on vacation or the place where I went on my honeymoon, the place where I was happy. And I think that for a lot of the characters in this book, like they’re all trying to get back to their happy place in one way or another or trying to find it in the case of this young couple that’s just still all figuring things out. Of course, everyone’s keeping these secrets or they’ve come to some new realization about themselves. And so it’s like getting back to happy and the way that the places we love are so central in that journey.

B&N: That’s sort of how I read it to New York was the place where the Levi Weinberg family and the Dan Houser family all had their dramas, and their stressors and their harsh experiences. And you know, for Sam out in California, too, it was hard for him. And then they all come back to mom’s house. In the game, they’re still stressed about stuff, like, nicer.

JW: I think about when Sarah and Sam, who are twins, and Sam is somebody who has struggled his whole life to kind of figure out his own identity, who he is he finally in his 30s gets married to a woman who has a child and becomes widowed almost immediately. And there’s just this moment where before he’s even called his sister to tell her what’s happened. Like she’s had a feeling that something’s gone wrong. And she calls him and he tells her what’s happened. And she says, Come home. And he’s I don’t know if I can, I don’t know what the deal is, you know, if I’m allowed to take Connor across the country with me, and she’s like, you know, just figure it out and come home. That was a really moving scene to write the idea that like these two, the brother and sister, they’re so connected, they know each other so intimately and what Sara can offer her brother who she loves is this home to come back to and heal himself. Home is the place where people love you where people see who you really are, where you can recover from whatever damage the big bad world has inflicted and become the best version of yourself.

B&N: And I found myself wanting to go to their home in the cape to and I was like don’t sell the house, Ronnie. Everybody needs to go back to exactly. The house loves you. I just loved that. I thought that was so nice.

JW: Thanks.

B&N: I’m so glad that you said you were inspired by mothers because that was really the bulk for me. I’m a new mother. So just to see the different forms that motherhood takes with all of the different characters, not just mothers, but parents. Eli takes care of his kids in a very different way than Sam does. And I just wanted to talk about that with you a little bit. I love these intricate family relationships. And it all comes down to mothers.

JW: I have two daughters. I’m divorced and remarried. My ex husband is remarried. So my kids have step parents too. And I think a lot about being a mother and my husband being a stepfather and just how it’s complicated how it can be wonderful that on the one hand, there’s all these people who love you and support you. But on the other hand, it’s like it’s complicated. It just is there’s a character in this book who chooses not to be a mother and that’s Ruby’s biological mother who has this baby and then it’s just like, This is not what I wanted. It’s not for me, I can’t do it. I’m not going to be a good mom to this baby and walks away. I think about how there’s nobody the world judges more harshly, I think then a woman who doesn’t want to be a mom, we make space for men, right? We extend all kinds of grace to them. Men who get divorced men who take jobs, other places, men who move across the country or move around the world. And it’s like the if you’re a mother, I remember and this is years and years ago, because my girls are teenagers now. But like when my daughter Lucy was like, three, I had just published a book, I was going on a book tour, and there was this reporter who had come to like, write a profile of me and she was 20 years old, just like, How can you leave your baby? What is wrong with you? Is that okay? How does that feel? Like, isn’t that hard? And I’m like, yes, it’s hard. But on the other hand, I can’t wait to be in that hotel room by myself. And no, I’m gonna get to sleep through the night, and nobody’s gonna lay you know, and eat my dinner with both hands. We, I still think Do not talk about how hard it is, how endless it is, how unforgiving it is, and how harsh moms are on themselves and on each other. And I have tried in every book I’ve written since I became a mother to like, really be honest about those parts of it. And no one wants to hear about that. Like, you can say something about, like, oh my god, I’m so tired or like, Oh, my God, like, if I don’t get a good night’s sleep, you always then have to add on to that. But I wouldn’t change like I’m exactly so much. And some days you don’t like some days, you’re like, I just want to run away and go like be in a hotel and get room service and sleep for 18 hours. And we don’t make a lot of space for ambivalence in mothers or for regret, or for women to say like I am flailing here. And I need some help. Yeah, just that honesty. And there’s a point in the book where Sarah sort of reflecting about this with her own mother, because there’s three generations of women in The Summer Place. All of them are kind of artists in different ways. So Veronica is a writer, Sarah’s a musician, Ruby does theater, something my mother used to say to me is it is very hard for a woman to have like a big career and a family. And the exception is women who are artists, because those skills don’t get stale. You’re not going to forget how to write or how to paint or how to direct in the 10 years or five years or 20 years that you’re home, you’re going to be able to hopefully pick up where you left off. But even women who are artists, even women who have like the best shot at being able to, quote unquote, have it all, which is a phrase I really dislike. Even those women have a harder time than the average man with a wife. And I will tell you, I have been asked a zillion times in resilience, like in a zillion different interviews. How do you balance it? What is your work life balance? How do you handle being a mother and a writer? And I will guarantee you that my male colleagues who are my age and who have been doing this as long as I have, they don’t get asked.

B&N: No one’s asking them that.

JW: I remember Tina Fey and Will Ferrell both became first time parents like the same year, and I watched as every interview Tina Fey did. You’re a new mom, are you bringing your baby to set? Like how is it for you? How are you handling it? You have a nanny like does she travel with you? How are you doing it? And nobody said anything to Will Ferrell except congratulations. Are we not expecting more from fathers? Are we not recognizing that women have ambitions that extend beyond bringing another human being into the world, which is a remarkable thing.

B&N: And there’s an expectation that you figure it out for the men, in general terms.

JW: They have wives. The answer is they have wives.

B&N: Yeah, for The Summer Place, too, you really speak to those moments where mothers have to make choices. Do I do this? Or do I focus on my kids like when Ronnie stops writing novels. She’s still writing because she wasn’t having that time with her children.

JW: Ronnie is an interesting character. In many of my books. They’re sort of the me character a little bit in this book. It was mostly Sarah except Ronnie’s the writer and Ronnie is like a very successful sort of right out of the gate has huge success with the first book, she writes, publishes a second book and then decides that she’s not going to publish anymore. What her rationale is, is that she doesn’t like the version of herself that she has become, she feels like she’s somebody who’s like using other people’s she’s collecting their anecdotes and putting it in her stories and not really bothering to change enough detail so that people aren’t like recognizing smells, and she wants to humble herself, and she wants to give her children and her husband the best of her. And also she’s been having this affair that she feels like crap about you know, has sort of convinced herself that these twins might have different fathers which it would be much more realistic that like either they both have one dad or they both have the other one. But you know, Ronnie’s novel, this brain goes right to the weird place of one of them. Is Gregory’s child and one of them is Lee’s child.

B&N: And it spirals and that’s the narrative forever.

JW: Yes. And so she gives up a part of herself. And I think that’s what that generation did. And even though she has like very specific and very valid reasons for making that choice, because that was, I think what my mother’s generation was encouraged to do. First of all, there weren’t that many jobs that were available to them, it was like you want to work, okay, you’re gonna be a nurse or a teacher, the ones who did sort of go on to become forces in their worlds didn’t have children, it’s one or the other. And I wanted to really show how deeply that cut and show how stark of a choice It was that it wasn’t a question of balance, or a question of sequencing it was this or that. And then we get Sarah, who has also put her big dreams off to the side for different reasons than her mother, like, maybe she wasn’t ever talented enough to make it. And maybe she just didn’t have enough courage to try. But I wanted to also send her on this road not taken journey that is kicked off when her husband is ignoring her, and she meets her old love. And it’s like, what if I hadn’t become? What if I followed this different path? And what if I become a concert pianist? And what if I lived in this tiny little studio that was basically a closet where I touched down in New York and just like, washed my clothes and flew off to the next place? And what if instead of meeting my husband, I stayed with this guy, I think most people I know, have some kind of road not taken. Everybody. This job, this person, this city, whatever. And I think those are such rich and interesting questions to me to sort of work out in fiction, because we don’t get sliding doors. Like we don’t get endless versions of our lives where we can sort of see, oh, if I’d done this, or oh, if I’d done that, it’s you pays your money and you takes your chances. And you’ve got to live with the consequences of those decisions, and just a hope that they were good ones.

B&N: And speaking of that, and that she makes a different choice. Yeah, she knows that she can’t handle being a mother knows that she doesn’t want this life that Eli definitely wants out in house in Long Island with everything. And so she makes a choice that definitely, I’m sure people in her life, judge her for a little day. But she still shows up for Ruby, especially in a big way. At the end, she she wakes up in the way that she can.

JW: And speaking of that, and that she makes a different choice. Yeah, she knows that she can’t handle I wanted her to be there right at the moment when Ruby needed her to be the parent that Ruby needed. And I don’t know maybe that was me as an author like pulling the punch a little bit because it’s hard for me to imagine a woman who would just be able to walk away completely even though Annette knows herself and she knows what she’s done. She understands that she’s has made by walking away from this baby, walking away from this man walking away from this marriage. She’s put a target on her back. Every woman is going to judge her and especially the women who fantasized about doing something similar even just for like a minute. I remember being a new mom and just being so overwhelmed and undone by it. And my daughter wasn’t nursing. I could not like I have this vision of how it was all going to be starting with my medication free all natural labor. And you know, I would just deliver her the bathtub or something. It would all be beautiful. And I breastfeed exclusively for six months.

B&N: Hold the baby up and it’s all shiny and perfect.

JW: Exactly. I got no none of that I showed up at the hospital with like a nine page birth plan. I am sure the nurses are still laughing about it to this day. And I had a C section which was I did not want that but there was I remember, like I was in a mother’s group and looking at the other women’s faces and trying to like, figure out is anybody like hating this even a little bit? Like, anyone exhausted? Is anybody like what did I just get myself into? And like, I felt like the babysitter like why isn’t anybody coming to take this kid home?

B&N: And it’s okay to say that it’s not perfect, or it’s hard. And that’s what I appreciate about the book. I mean, I did not make the same choice that Annette made but part of me can understand that it wasn’t the life that she wanted. What was the best way for her to murder Ruby was to leave. Yeah, it wasn’t going to be what Ruby needed.

JW: Yeah, that’s absolutely the case. And it was a hard thing to write because I feel like that’s almost the last taboo. It’s like you can have all kinds of like weird sex stuff on the page. You can have a woman who like steals from her husband, you can have a woman who like raids her kids College Fund, a mother who walks away feels still hugely transgressive. I think that books are places though, where we can explore those things and like you can have a character who does that and like, what feelings is this bringing up? Why is this still such a transgressive act? Like where are we as a culture in what we expect of women and mothers and what we expect of men and fathers? And because Eli, I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but he is not a good listener, you know, like she told you not, she told him. And I think that Sarah was sending out SOS signals, like you are checked out of this marriage and this family, and I need you to come back to us. And he’s just so lost in the fog of his own problems that he just can’t pick up what she’s putting down.

B&N: Well, yeah. And speaking of those problems, and those choices and writing mothers, Rosa, what was it like writing a mother who live in her life having so much fun, that’s pregnant and is like, oh, no, let me trick this guy that I think is rich, having a ton of sex. And I tell him that I’m pregnant, and then I need an abortion. What was it like writing that experience?

JW: So I think that that Rosa, she’s this very talented, very passionate woman who is still as are many women in their 20s. Like she is looking for someone or something to tell her who she is. And I think if she’d gotten the Broadway part that she was dreaming of, that would have been the answer. That would have been the affirmation. I’m an actor. I’m a dancer, I’m a singer. I’m a whatever. And I think that what happens with her is like, she gets pregnant, and she’s like, I’m a mother. That’s then her answer. And that’s how she lives her life. And I do believe that just as there are women who have their babies and are like, What have I gotten myself into that I think that there are women who are just like, this is all I’ve ever wanted? This is the only thing I want to be. But I think also for her, it was a little bit of like, get out of life free card, right? Yeah. Because she doesn’t have to put herself through those auditions anymore. She doesn’t have to keep trying and getting rejected. She can be a mother and know that no one is going to question that choice. And that, indeed, everyone’s going to affirm it. She’s the flip side of Annette. And that’s done the worst thing. Rosa has done the thing that everybody wants to cheer her for. And I wanted to complicate her a little bit by having her whole relationship with her child, her whole motherhood premised on this sort of duplicitous act. And on the one hand, I wanted people to think about the dynamics of privilege at play, okay, because Rosa is Latina, she doesn’t have a ton of money. She has correctly pegged Eli as somebody who’s at least comfortable, right? And she’s like, You know what, I am going to screwed his brains out. I’m going to tell him I’m pregnant, he’s going to give me however much money I asked him for, and it won’t even affect him. He won’t even feel it, which is mostly true. And I loved for him. This is the most transcendent sex he’s ever had in his life. This is the best it’s ever been like, she feels like a god of lovemaking. And for her, when we finally get her versions of things, it’s just like, how am I gonna get through this and convince this guy that he’s fabulous, and that I’m really into it? Yes. Right. Like she’s just like thinking of other things when he believes that she’s having the time of her life. And that was interesting. That was not a scene that was initially in the book. And then my editor said, Wouldn’t it really be interesting to see this from Rosa’s point of view, I am such a firm believer that editors make everything better. And a good editor can like push you to take a book places that you hadn’t even thought of bringing it. So I was really, really glad when John Moss who is the guy who works for my agent, actually that he was one of my first readers and he said I want to hear what Rosa thinks of all this, like how is this for her what’s going through her head and the idea that for women like beauty is a commodity, her beauty, her sexuality, all of that is a means to an end. She’s not exactly like living in her body as much as she is using it as a tool. Yeah, and that was interesting to me because I think that that’s something that for many, many women, the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the shoes, the shapewear, the extensions, the waxing the all of it, it’s all about my body is a tool that is going to let me get what I want, whether that’s male attention or moving through the world easily or respect or whatever it is, your body’s just a way for you to get it and Rosa kind of exemplifies that and I had a lot of fun writing her.

B&N: And getting her perspective really kind of changes your mind on her too. And this is a slight pivot but Sam And the choices that you’ve made and nations to, again, being a little bit spoilery as a single father of Connor, who he eventually adopts. He read some fanfiction, and he explored his sexuality and he reminds us like, Hey, I’m gay. I have. What do I do now though?

JW: Right. Like what happens when you’re like 30 or whatever, and you’re just coming out of the closet, Sam. He’s a twin, right? And he’s the younger twin. So he’s got his older sister who has made every decision for the two of them, she talks for both of them, she decides what they’re going to do, like she’s the voice and he is a follower. And he just kind of follows along the sort of well worn groove of how to be a boy and how to be a man and it just takes him a lot longer than it should to like kind of figure out what really lights his blood on fire. And I had a lot of fun writing the fanfiction or weakening story of you know, his sisters telling him about the Harry Potter slash book. And he’s like, what is that? And he goes looking and you know, there’s Harry and Draco doing all kinds of stuff that doesn’t happen in the book. And then he’s just like, oh my god, like, am I into Harry Potter? Am I in the hobbits? Am I a hobbit sexual and then like just figuring it out, figuring it out, figuring it out, until he lands on like the the one guy that he should not be landing on? Again, I guess it was another kind of questions about essential identity is every woman deep down just dying to be a mother and hold a baby in her arms? Is every man innately straight? You know? And the answer is, of course not. But I liked Sam’s kind of a twisty path to getting there where first he becomes a husband. Then he becomes a father. And then he falls in love.

B&N: And everything felt like nice and okay for him until he realized this is who I meant to be. Then it seemed right.

JW: Sam is somebody like Sarah kind of points out like every girlfriend he’s ever had, like, whatever she’s into, that’s what he’s into whether it’s like hockey or acapella, or like art and tattoos and journals and mourning pages, and when he gets married, it’s this kind of fantasy of rescue, right? She’s going to come in this poor single mother and her lonely son, and he’s going to save them the person he really has to say this, of course, himself.

B&N: And that brings me to Sarah and Owen, the pond people that I’m really interested in, the pond people, they have this love affair as young people, and then they go away to college. And she thinks, oh, he just broke up with me. But he’s had this whole lie he built things on. Yes, because he wasn’t the person that she thought he was. He felt sort of inferior and, and Ronnie knew didn’t say anything, because her daughter was an adult at that point. I love that you wrote that into the story, though. A little bit of like, he’s not just like the hot guy that Sarah reconvince.

JW: I was interested with sort of questions of class and money and status. And the idea that there’s Owens family, the pond people the long time Cape Codders, who live a certain way and think that that’s the way you’re supposed to live. You know, it’s like in these kind of ramshackle falling apart, like they’re not going to put any money into it. And maybe for some of them, it’s fun that way, it’s like going to summer camp. And so what if there’s a big hole in the screen door and like a million bugs are getting through and there’s no air conditioning? And then you’ve got people like Veronica and Lee who have like built this like summer palace with every convenience and double hung windows and climate control and who’s doing it right quote, unquote, and of course everyone’s judging everybody else. Veronica is just like, Oh my God, these people it’s so trashy. How could they stand it? Owen’s people are just like off those like, show off, you know, know who reached gaudy, ostentatious, like look at them. It was interesting to me to sort of think about that tension and just the way everyone’s judging everyone else. I mean, mothers judge other mothers like Emily’s judge other families, and then you know, I wanted there to be a little bit of kind of the Capulets and the Montagues with Sarah and Owen and like these warring families and these two young people who come together and have this very sweet romance you know, and again, though there’s questions of sort of like expectation and image and Owen feeling like he can’t tell Sarah the truth about he’s not really going to Duke to play lacrosse even though he would very much like to go to do to play lacrosse and wants it known that he’s going to do to play lacrosse and

B&N: I feel like he can see more of what his mom’s Sass and Ronnie are thinking and feeling and and that societal stuff. But Sarah is so focused on him that she’s just like, oh, yeah, I guess his house is kind of junky. Yeah, I don’t care.

JW: I guess it’s kind of junky but you know, maybe that’s okay. where she’s from. Besides that, she’s like, Oh, look at them living so gently in harmony with nature and not realizing that it’s like falling down around their ears because they don’t have money to repair anything.

B&N: Ah, Sarah likes this boy. Yeah.

JW: Right. And yes, and she just is a little sweetly oblivious and just doesn’t want to like imagine that there’s any fly in the ointment is here. When we the readers can see all the flies in the ointment.

B&N: It’s just the way that you can get enamored when you’re young.

JW: Yeah, I mean, this is her first love. And I remember writing the scene where like they’re in the canoe, and like she’s getting sunburned on her shoulders, and she can feel it in her mom keeps like waving the sunscreen at her, but like she’s not going to stop and reapply because like that’s going to break the moment. Or maybe he’ll say, you know, it’s time to go home and she doesn’t want to go home. That seems like a thing that pretty much anyone who’s like had that first falling in love experience. And remember, it’s like this is an enchantment, but it’s very fragile, and I will do nothing to break it or disrupted or threatened it in any way.

B&N: Like, oh, what if he thinks I’m weird for putting…

JW: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

B&N: I know. We’re almost at a time. I can’t believe this is really flown. So I wanted to ask you outside of a summer place. What are your literary inspirations?

JW: Oh, wow. So so many books. I mean, I’ve read so many, so many books lately. Sue Miller, I think writes really, really wonderful books about marriage and families and the way that tensions can sort of display themselves over a lifetime like the idea of doesn’t marriage have room for secrets? Monogamy. That’s the book I’m taking up. That’s the most recent one of hers that I read, what happens when the person you’re in love with isn’t who you thought they were? How do you parent, children who aren’t biologically yours? And how do you got to go back to something I hate but like, how do you balance wanting to be an artist and live in authentically artistic life versus I have obligations as a wife, I have obligations as a mother as a grandmother as a friend as a hostess as a public person. She’s a writer I admire tremendously. And I think that she’s got a really lovely touch with writing about all of those things. And then I mean, I read Rebecca Serle’s book One Italian Summer, and I like her sense of lakes of being able to like put you somewhere is really wonderful. And so I thought a lot about that I read Miranda Crowley’s Paper Palace, which I think was a B&N pick last summer, right. It was Yeah. And like that was said, also on the Outer Cape with a family that’s much more like a lens than Sarah’s. And that was some real inspiration for like, these people in her book. There’s so insular, you don’t really see many outsiders commenting on the way that they’re living their lives. And so I thought, like, Wouldn’t it be interesting to have like, people who are, you know, sort of the people these people would be making fun of like, with their giant houses up on the dunes and like, how’s that working out? Books are always in conversation with each other books are always talking to each other. My friend Curtis Sittenfeld’s book American Wife, there’s a scene where the Laura Bush character goes to the vacation home of the George Bush family, and there’s one bathroom, it’s like a nine bedroom house, one bathroom, toilet doesn’t work. sheets are like seethrough, like, towels are like 50 years old. And like the character actually thinks like, this must be fun for them. This must be like their little kids dressing up this pirates only they’re not little kids. They’re adults. And they’re dressing up as campers or as people like, you know what’s going on here. And that was something I always thought about, you know, the idea of like wealthy wasps, who will not put a penny into the care and maintenance of their second homes, because that’s not what you do. So lots and lots of books. If you go on my social media, if anybody’s listening to this, just curious about what I’m reading. If you go on my social media channels, I always talk about it there.
B&N: Oh, that’s great. Yes. In our last two or three minutes, can you tell us what’s next for you?

JW: Yeah, so I’ve been riding my bike a lot since COVID. I rejoined a Bicycle Club here in Philadelphia. I’ve been going on lots of bike trips, and I’m writing a book about a bunch of people who are on a four-week bike trip together. So there’s like, oh, there’s a family. There’s a mother and a daughter. There’s two guy friends and all of the things that happen as they make their way on the Empire State Trail. 750 miles from New York City to the Canadian border. It’s going to be fun. There’s like the father of the family is keeping this huge secret. He’s lost his job. He hasn’t told his wife he is transporting something over the Canadian border to like, make a little money and wife doesn’t know about it. And the things that always seem to interest me is kind of family romance marriages, people falling in love and people figuring out who they are. And there’s a lot of that in that book.

B&N: Oh, wow. Thanks for telling us about that. Looking forward to reading it. Thank you so much.

JW: This was fantastic.

B&N: I love talking to you. I feel like I could do it all day, but you’re a busy lady.

JW: This was fantastic. But thank you very, very much for making time for me.

B&N: Oh, of course. Always.