You pull themes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream into The Summer Place. Talk about the ways that the play inspired you in telling this story.
I love the idea of enchantment—about people taken out of their familiar surroundings, shipwrecked on an island or lost in a forest, where there are supernatural forces that work to bring lovers together. I love the tropes: Forbidden love! Love triangles! Love potions! And, of course, I love a happy ending.
I’ve also felt—correctly or not—like the last two years have been sort of like an enchantment （not necessarily a good one!）。 We’ve all been pulled out of our familiar lives and “shipwrecked” somewhere else. There are supernatural forces at work, or at least invisible ones, in the form of an ever-mutating virus. We’ve all started off one place and ended somewhere else, whether it’s a happy ending or not.
And, of course, books are their own kind of enchantment. They have their own way of taking us out of the familiar and setting us down somewhere else, where a bunch of actors or players or fairies say, “Let us tell you a story.” You bring your own imagination to the table; you work in concert with the storytellers to imagine the setting and the characters, even as you understand that someone else is dictating the action and bringing everything to what’s hopefully a satisfying conclusion.
Storytelling is the most human kind of magic. It’s maybe even the only magic we have. And to me it feels like that particular kind of magic has never been more necessary.
Veronica Levy is a novelist who pulls back from publishing for a long time. Is it strange to write as a character who is a novelist like yourself? Are there similarities that you share with her?
This isn’t the first time I’ve written a character who is a successful novelist whose career goes in a different direction than mine has. Midcareer is an interesting place to be—you’re not the ingenue, not the hot young thing, not any big tastemaker’s delightful new discovery. I’ve always tried to push myself, to make each book better than, and different from, the one before it. With the Cape Cod trilogy, I’ve tried to play with the idea of a “beach book,” using the elements of the label that appeal to me （the seductive seaside setting, the idea of romance and happy endings） while pushing the boundaries of the genre. But I think every writer is interested in the road not taken and uses characters to explore directions in which her own life hasn’t gone.
With Veronica, I wanted her to make what I regard as the ultimate sacrifice. She’s disappointed in herself. She doesn’t like the person she’s become in success. She wants to make amends. And so she gives up her art, or at least the public expression of her art （it was hard enough to make her give up publishing, and I think that asking a writer not to write is akin to asking her to cut off a limb!）。 It’s a huge sacrifice, but I think a lot of women who become mothers usually do give up something, whether it’s in the personal or the professional sphere. I think that Ronnie’s story is a version of many women’s stories when what they want in the professional world bumps up against marriage and motherhood, and something’s got to give. It’s my hope that this book will occasion some interesting conversations about how women still seem to have to pick one or the other—being the best mother or excelling at work—while men seem to more easily be able to do both.