What inspired you to write Summer Romance?
Summer Romance started out as a story about a woman who is trying to lighten up. She’s weighed down by grief, longing, and her cluttered house. I wanted to write about the finite (and light) nature of the summer romance, and how it can be something you dive into without caution because you don’t need to plan past Labor Day. I wanted her to get back in touch with her fun self and move through her grief around losing her mother and the adjustment to being a single mom.
Now that it’s done, I see in Ali and her relationship to her mother and her relationship to her children that a lot of this novel is inspired by my experience as a parent, particularly the tightrope I walk between not doing enough and doing too much. When my kids were little, they used to ask me to put the ketchup on their hamburgers because, apparently, I have a unique skill for squeezing out the exact right amount. As a result, my kids call me Right Amount Monaghan. This is something that’s rolled around my head a lot as they’ve grown up—ketchup is easy, but when it comes to mothering, what’s the right amount? When do you step in and when do you stand back and let them learn?
Ali’s grief over her mother is such a central part of the narrative. Did you always know Ali was going to be grieving her mother? Did you model Ali’s grieving process after your own or someone else’s?
My mother was the first person I ever really grieved. For one solid year, I lost my sense of humor. I had a hard time socializing with people and listening to them talk about their normal lives that didn’t involve losing their mothers. It took time and small steps to move out of that murky gray space.
While my mother wasn’t anything like Fancy, there is a big chunk of her heart in this book—her oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, her bright red lips. She was a bit like Ali’s neighbor, Phyllis, emotionally hands-on and, otherwise, completely hands-off. She never knew where I was or what kind of trouble I was stirring up, but when we were together, she was present and dialed in to my well-being. For me, this was the right amount of parenting. She thought the best way to parent was to “give birth and get out of the way.” I love how courageous that is and how much faith she had in my ability to figure things out.
Like Ali, Nora in your debut, Nora Goes Off Script, was also a divorced single mother. What interests you in writing about women with this experience finding love?
There’s no quicker way to complicate your life than by having kids. Throw in a mortgage, a job, and an ex-husband, and you have instant drama. I like the kind of chaos that naturally comes with parenting, where you’re rowing your own boat but also scrambling to row everyone else’s boats. Some days it might feel like life is pelting you with water balloons from the shore. Falling in love and connecting to your romantic self can be challenging with all of that going on, and I like the complexity of that challenge and how it raises the stakes. I also like how a big love affair at that stage of life feels unexpected, like a bonus.
Ali had wonderful traditions with her mother, some of which she carries on with her own children, like greeting the first day of summer at sunrise. Do you have any such traditions with your own children?
I love Sunday dinner. I set the table, I pull something out of the oven, I gather the people. But on Sunday nights during the summer, it all happens outside—my family packs a picnic, and we eat dinner at the beach. We are serious picnickers. We pack bug spray, plastic wineglasses, and a tablecloth that has been washed threadbare. We roll a cooler filled with meats, potatoes, coleslaw, and a hunk of cheese. We sit by the Long Island Sound, close to where Ali might have sat with her kids, and we play cards under a giant oak tree. We’re not quite welcoming the summer, just welcoming the week, gathering from where we’ve been scattered. Sunday dinner feels like a comma, a quick pause between what came before and what’s coming next. We usually drink seltzer and white wine, but these are my champagne days.
Ali learns about gardening from her neighbor, Phyllis, and the garden holds quite a bit of symbolism. Do you garden? If not, are there other outdoor spaces that are symbolic to you?
I am not a gardener, but I love a garden. I am fascinated by both the amount of work people put into caring for a garden and how much of the work the garden does on its own. Ten years ago, I was at Costco (I feel a theme coming on) and made an impulse purchase of a six-dollar peony bulb. I got it home, dug a hole with my hands, and stuck it in the ground. The following year, I had two giant peonies the color of pinot noir. I remember thinking, Wow, I wonder if this is what God feels like. By late fall, the whole plant turns to sticks, but it comes back to life again in the spring. Every year it feels like a miracle, and it makes me think of how nature, animals, and people have an innate sense for how to take care of themselves and bloom. This year I had twenty flowers!
Ethan is a skateboarder and you describe the experience of skateboarding well. Have you ever skateboarded? How did you capture the experience of skateboarding on the page?
Me, on a skateboard, is not a great idea. Just the idea of trusting your body to balance like that sends a small panic up my spine, but I have loved learning about how skateboarders master their fears. While writing this book, I listened to a bunch of podcasts about skateboarding and lurked in some online chatrooms where people were sharing their experiences. I watched hours of YouTube videos, and my main takeaway was that skateboarders have convinced themselves that they can fly, so they can. It’s all very spiritual actually, the amount of presence it requires to focus and the amount of confidence it takes to let go.
All three of your novels to date have been set in the vicinity of New York City. What draws you to writing about this area? What does New York City represent to you?
I live about forty minutes north of New York City, just south of Connecticut, approximately where Beechwood would be located if it was a real place. I lived in Manhattan for two years as a single person and then returned for eight years when I was married. (I had to leave Manhattan to meet a man. I always suspected that I was too short for a man to see me in a bar.) When I moved out of the city, I realized how much I need space and quiet. I love sitting in my backyard and watching the sunrise over the forest. But I also love knowing that the heartbeat of the city is right there. I love the electric jolt of stimulation I get when I visit, followed by the quiet of coming home. I think this is why I write about quiet places outside of New York City; it feels like the rhythm of my life—fast and slow, noisy and quiet, outside and in.
Without giving anything away, did you always know how the story would end?
I always knew how it would feel and who Ali would become, but, as usual, I didn’t know how I was going to get there.
What do you hope readers might take away from Summer Romance?
My personal takeaway from this story is that it doesn’t take a winning lottery ticket to get you unstuck from grief or sadness or general inertia. We don’t need to wait for a lightning bolt to strike from out of the sky. Any small action toward feeling better will lead to another. Make your coffee the way you like it, put on a pair of hard pants, take a walk, call a friend. It takes tiny steps and time.
And I’m serious about the dog thing. I have thought about this for years, watching friends fall in love with their dogs and then bury them. What madness it is to intentionally walk into that kind of pain. But then in 2018, Tom and I went on a thirty-day cleanse (this is not a joke) and felt like Super Us for a minute. The next thing I knew, we’d adopted a dog. Now I am two things: in love with my dog and certain he’s going to break my heart by dying. And I get it now: the joy is worth it. This is the nature of the summer romance, the act of throwing yourself all in, even though you know there will be a teary goodbye. The joy is worth it in the moment.
Also, don’t go on a cleanse.
What’s next for you?
I am hoping to write a bicoastal love story about a studio executive whose career is on the line.