Elin Hilderbrand, the Queen of the Beach Read, Is Closing the Book

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You never forget your first Elin Hilderbrand novel. For me it was Nantucket Nights, its glossy lavender cover calling out to me during a summer getaway. I devoured the descriptions of skinny-dipping moms and forbidden love as I became enraptured with Hilderbrand’s sun-drenched world, often trading soft-cover copies with friends and discussing boss-employee affairs and potential murder suspects in a conspiratorial tone usually reserved for gossiping about people we actually knew.

To read Elin Hilderbrand is to join a delicious subculture. One that whisks you away to a lightly fictionalized Nantucket, where friends, frenemies, and billionaires populate the seasonal island. The characters are as flawed as they are fabulous, passing time between micro-dramas and major life changes, tanning on Jetties beach, drinking a few too many martinis at well-known establishments like The Club Car, booking the captain’s table at The Nautilus, and generally experiencing the island like real-life tourists and locals, which Hilderbrand herself has been since 1993.

So-called Hilderbabes—as her ardent fanbase calls themselves—are almost a Swiftian-level army for the feminist beach-read set and often flock to the island to interact with the author. The Nantucket Hotel offers a Hilderbrand package for avid fans; the Perfect Weekend occurs every autumn and convenes hundreds of readers who venture through Nantucket to check out the myriad local spots they know intimately from reading Hilderbrand (and maybe even get to dance with the undisputed queen of beach reads herself at storied dive bar The Chicken Box.)

Year-round, Hilderbrand’s readers will find her autographed, signature blue-hued novels at both of Nantucket’s independent bookstores and shops nationwide. Enthusiasts pack into book talks across the country where she discusses her path as an author and her journey with breast cancer following a 2014 diagnosis.

Hilderbrand, now 54, grew up in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, and spent her childhood summers with family in Cape Cod. After earning a degree at Johns Hopkins, she moved to New York City to work as a middle school English teacher, enjoying summers off on New England beaches. A year after visiting Nantucket for the first time, Hilderbrand made Nantucket her permanent home in 1994, with a short break at the Iowa Writers Workshop’ to earn an MFA in 1998. By 2000 she’d published her first novel, The Beach Club, which debuted positively, and she’d go on to write over 30 books. A Netflix adaptation of Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel The Perfect Couple is in the works starring Nicole Kidman, and Ellen Pompeo is producing a series based on the Paradise trilogy for ABC.

This summer Hilderbrand will wrap up more than 20 summers of releasing new novels, their aquamarine and cerulean covers seen on beach towels from Capri to the Hamptons and, of course on every coast of Nantucket. Swan Song, out June 11, reprises some of Hilderbrand’s most beloved characters, introduces a new cadre of enticingly problematic Nantucketers, and—no spoilers—ends in a way that indicates Hilderbrand, this time, is done for real.

Granted, she’s not done with writing broadly—Hilderbrand is working on a two-book series with her daughter, Shelby Cunningham, based on her experiences at a northeast boarding school, and from there, who knows?

Glamour talked to Hilderbrand about her impressive career, her explosive fandom, and why Nantucket is the love of her life.

Glamour: Your Nantucket novels, for so many of us, have been the literal fabric of our summers. How did you decide it’s time for your—sorry for the pun—swan song?

Elin Hilderbrand: Honestly, I wanted to retire three years ago, in 2021 with Golden Girl. I felt like I was coming to the end of my natural material, and writing novels got harder and harder. I didn’t really have any good ideas. Golden Girl felt like an ending because the writer dies. But my publisher really wanted a new contract. At that point I’d just delivered 28 Summers, which I thought was one of my best novels. They really were very persuasive. Well, they wanted a four-book deal. There was no chance. I asked for a two-book deal. I sort of had an idea for another novel about a hotel and then I wanted to write a women’s friendship novel, which ended up being The Five-Star Weekend. I didn’t have a final idea. We decided to do three books, and I thought, Okay, let’s hope I get another idea. I wanted it to be an ending to the Nantucket-based novels. So I came up with the plot of Swan Song.

It’s such a fun read, seeing old characters come back. How did you map out this final Nantucket book?

I wanted the Chief to come back, and a mysterious crime to involve him and his family, because I always feel like that’s a good device. This time it’s personal, so I decided I’d bring back the castaways just because I loved them so much. The Castaways was a book where I realized that creating a Nantucket world was working. That’s the first book where the Chief appears and really, I love that novel. Blonde Sharon has been in my last few books, so I brought her back. And Fast Eddie. I wanted to write a novel about a couple who move to Nantucket and then start to take over Nantucket society and how the established people in that society feel about it. I thought the best way to do that is to use people that I’ve already created.

Are your characters inspired by people you see living on Nantucket?

I love Nantucket so much. It’s the love of my life. I go to the specialty grocery store once a week to get one or two things. Today I saw a woman in front of me who had full on done her grocery shopping there, which, I could see over her shoulder, was like $875. For, I don’t know, two or three bags of groceries. I’m like, Holy shit, that is the kind of person that lives in my novels. Not a main character, but the quintessential sort of summer person who comes and literally does not care how much anything costs because they have unlimited sums of money. I was laughing, like, Okay, so that’s a character straight out of my book.

Hilderbabes, your fans, are like the Swifties of beach reads. What’s that like for you?

In the shoulder season, Nantucket is filled with Elin Hilderbrand readers. They have their blue books, and they go to the places that I recommend. It’s very gratifying for me. I sign every Wednesday at the bookstore through the season, and the line’s long, long, long, long, long—like down the block, along the street, around the block, down the street. I have to keep my interaction with the fans to that. I used to go into town, and people would say, “Oh, I’m here just because of your book.” I would go to town and meet every single person that came up to me. That was unwieldy. It was too much time. Rocky, who owns The Chicken Box, used to call me every time one of my fans was in there, and I would go to see these people. Eventually he was like, “This is ridiculous, there’s just too many.” If I bump into people, I always will take a picture and say hello and meet them organically. People know that my son is a bartender at Cru, and he gets fans in all the time.

Did you expect your books to have this sort of impact, and for so many people to know the island through your lens?

Oh, absolutely not. This is the culmination of years and years and years of just writing the books and not even giving a second thought to the culture that I was creating. I never set out to create these devoted fans who make Nantucket their destination. I was writing the novels and raising my family and making sure that each book was as good as the last or better. I’ve been writing for 24 years. People notice, and I did develop a little bit more of a following every year. And now here we are and I’m retiring in it. I feel like retiring for me is definitely the right answer, because if I could keep going, my publisher would happily, joyfully give me another contract. But I do not have confidence that I have any more books in me that would be as good or better. I don’t want to put out a bad product.

You have so many novels written in the span of just over two decades. How did you churn out a book every year?

It was hard! The ideas were coming to me. I was raising my children here. Summer after summer would just give me ideas and material. I’d think, I’ve never set anything during Daffodil Weekend, so I did that with The Matchmaker, When my publishers came to me for the Christmas books, I said perfect. Nantucket’s so charming at Christmas. There was always a lot of material. Nantucket is small. I’ve written 27 novels set on Nantucket. I’ve done it. There isn’t a lot of ground I haven’t covered. I don’t want to repeat myself. It’s time to say, “Somebody else can take up where I’ve left off.” I’ve definitely documented Nantucket in the first quarter of the 21st century. That’s done.

In addition to the beach scenes, you have a ton of great food stories in restaurants and home kitchens, and you include really nice recipes in some books, from fictional chefs and food celebrities. Where does the culinary focus in your fiction come from?

That sort of happened organically. I have always loved to cook. Sophomore year of college at Johns Hopkins, I had an apartment with a kitchen. I could eat every meal at a restaurant, which I did not have the money to do, so it was time to learn to cook. Christmas of my sophomore year, I got pots and pans and the San Francisco Junior League cookbook, and I just proceeded to teach myself how to cook. I loved it and I also love eating out. I really became a foodie, and the foodie culture in the United States grew as I was becoming a young adult.

I lived in New York City right after college, and there was no reason to eat bad food in New York. I ate all these different cuisines. There was a Burmese restaurant downtown that I loved. Nantucket has one of the best food cultures anywhere; all of the restaurants are outstanding. I have a lot of friends who have worked at them.

In the decades you’ve been writing, we’ve seen a shift as the genre formerly—and pejoratively—called chick lit is now women’s fiction. How has your work been affected by the way readers think about books by and about women?

I’ve always been labeled a beach read. And for a reason—the novels are set on Nantucket. Earlier in my career I sort of wrestled with the term beach read, because I went to the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. I was very classically trained. I was going to be a literary novelist, write the great American novel. And in my head, I did—only it was set on Nantucket. Because it was set at the beach, people put it in a less-than category, so it couldn’t be with the Great American Novels, of course; it’s a beach book. But I wrote the best book I possibly could. I continued to do that year after year, summer after summer.

At some point it became clear to me that writing a beach book is an enormous honor and responsibility because this is the book that people are choosing for their leisure time. What an honor, right? I found out that people were using my novels as an escape. I’ve heard from people who were in the chemo chair, and they read my books, or they were caring for an elderly parent. One girl wrote me a letter that she had taken my novels with her to the hospital when her father was dying. She read my novels and it gave her a mental vacation. When people are in their darkest hour and they are choosing your book, that is the greatest sense of purpose I could ask for.

Over the years your books have become noticeably more inclusive and diverse. How did representing more types of people in your work come to be?

Back in the day, let’s say 2009, it wasn‘t at the forefront of my mind, And then at some point there was a shift, and I needed to have these characters be way more diverse and inclusive. It was a conscious choice on my part to represent more of what the country looked like. I think a lot of that was due to coming out of my bubble and waking up. I really think it served my fiction, because I prefer reading novels that are diverse and inclusive, and I should be writing those as well.

You mentioned it may be time for someone else to be crowned the queen of beach reads. Do you have any advice for writers who aspire to your level of success?

I was not the most talented person in Iowa, but I can finish my work and get it done. That’s my advice for anybody who wants to be a writer in any genre: Just finish it. So many people have three chapters of a novel sitting at their computer somewhere. To be successful, you have to just do the work and get it done, and that has always been my strong point. I wrote a novel every year for 24 years, and for seven years, I wrote two novels a year. And when I look back on that, I’m like, How did I get that done? Those were the years when my kids were growing up, and they had school and they had sports, and how was I getting it done? The answer is I really worked all the time. Work ethic is the most important quality in a writer.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Originally Appeared on Glamour