by Meg Donohue
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my husband, Phil Preuss, whose love, support, and continued willingness to endure the pressure of being my first reader mean the world to me. Phil, you are a brave man, and I love you. Finley and Avelyn, you fill me to the brim with joy and gratitude.
Thank you to my parents, Carol Mager and James Donohue, for their love, and for bringing me to Avalon, New Jersey, when I was still in the womb and every summer since. Part of me is always with you in Avalon.
Thank you to Jeanette Perez, an exceptional editor, whose insight enriches my work time and time again, and a warm, spirited, and much-cherished friend. I am indebted also to a wonderful team at William Morrow, including, but not limited to Liate Stehlik, Jennifer Hart, Kaitlyn Kennedy, Tamara Arellano, and Carolyn Bodkin.
I am beyond grateful for the guidance of my kind and whip-smart agent, Elisabeth Weed, whose enthusiasm for this book from its earliest pages brought tears to my eyes. Thank you also to Jon Cassir at CAA for representing my books in the world of film and television.
Thank you to Carol Mager, Meg Kasdan, Sarah Blanton, and Francesca Grossman, whose thoughtful feedback on the first draft of this book made it stronger, and whose encouragement made me stronger.
Thank you to Jay Donohue, Brianna Andersen, Ellen Mager, Mimi Mager, Jackie Mager, Barbara Preuss, Charles Preuss, and the many other friends and Donohue, Mager, and Preuss family members who have been so lovingly supportive and excited for me. My appreciation knows no bounds.
Finally, thank you to the generous readers, book bloggers, and booksellers who have reached out to me, encouraging me and flooding me with awe at the kindness of strangers. Then again, perhaps no book lover is truly a stranger. Thank you, then, new friends. I’m so glad we’ve found one another.
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
Meet Meg Donohue
MEG DONOHUE is the author of How to Eat a Cupcake and All the Summer Girls. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and a BA in comparative literature from Dartmouth College. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she now lives in San Francisco with her husband, their two young daughters, and their dog.
A Conversation with Meg Donohue
When did you start writing?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to write. My parents are both lawyers and it seemed like there was a yellow legal pad on every surface in our house when I was growing up; I must have filled fifty of them with my stories. During those early years, which I refer to as my “Damsels-in-Distress Period,” I was really wrestling with the roles that beautiful orphan princesses and horses play in our society. I remember taking a writing class in third grade with a teacher I loved named Mrs. Watters, so I was certainly hooked on writing by then. I still remember the poem I wrote for her class: When a secret is told / its heart turns cold / and it’s banished from the world of untellables. / It lives alone / in a tower’s cone, / broken and unsellable. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Even then I was obviously a little obsessed with secrets.)
Do you remember the first book you fell in love with and why it affected you so strongly?
I’m sure I fell in love with many books before reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but it’s the one that immediately comes to mind. I loved how it was dark and atmospheric and romantic and the characters were all so deliciously tormented. So much angst! I lapped it up, copying long passages into my journal. I remember feeling completely transported to those windswept moors and damp, shadowy manors—maybe that’s when I first fell in love with the idea of novels with mood-inspiring settings. I wonder what I would think of Wuthering Heights now? I should reread it.
Who are some of your writing influences? Do you have influences outside of the literary world?
I find I’m influenced more by specific books than writers. Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold really captivated me when I read it in college and for years afterward—it’s a book I return to time and time again. More recently, I’ve loved and been influenced by Jennifer Close’s Girls in White Dresses and J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine (see my Summer Reads list on page 10 for more on these novels). Outside of books, I love music and movies and art, but books are easily my main influence. If I fall in love with a book, I’m writing the whole time I’m reading it, jotting down notes and dog-earing pages so I can go back and study how the writer moved the plot along or made me feel a certain way. Nothing makes me long to write quite like reading something I love.
What’s the best writing advice you ever received?
Write every day. It’s common advice and I’m not sure where I first heard it or read it, but the more I embrace it, the better I write. And I don’t embrace it nearly as much as I should because I have young children and am also a world-class procrastinator, but I do write at least four days a week. When you’re disciplined enough to write most days, magical things start happening. Your thoughts are never far from your story, you’re immersed in the world you’re building, and suddenly ideas and connections and dialogue appear in your mind like gifts. The more you write, the more open and receptive you are to inspiration.
Where do you write? Do you have any writing rituals? Or perhaps vices that help you get through writing a novel?
Unlike Kate, I am not a creature of habit. Sometimes I write at a café; sometimes I write at a desk in my bedroom. Sometimes I drink coffee; sometimes I drink tea. Sometimes I listen to music; sometimes I don’t. I’m all over the map depending on my mood and how much childcare I have on any given day. One of my many vices is checking social media (mostly Twitter) too frequently throughout the day, but there is such a warm community of writers posting all sorts of helpful and supportive writing- and industry-related news that I only feel horribly guilty doing so about half the time.
If All the Summer Girls were to be made into a movie, which three actresses would you pick to play Dani, Kate, and Vanessa?
This is actually really hard for me! I see Kate, Vanessa, and Dani so clearly as real women that it’s difficult to think of actresses who could fill their flip-flops. I suppose Anna Kendrick could embody Kate’s girl-next-door combination of intelligence, self-consciousness, and warmth, and she’s fair and brunette to boot. As for Vanessa—perhaps Jessica Szohr? She’s gorgeous and could pull off that Chelsea gallerist mix of downtown style and uptown sophistication. And I feel like Kirsten Dunst could capture Dani’s troubled, sardonic, adventurous edge and unlikely blondeness.
The ups and downs of female friendships have been at the heart of your novels. What is it about this relationship that you find inspiring to write about?
Friendships have a fascinating ebb and flow; they’re never static. There’s something about childhood friends in particular—the friendships that have withstood decades of change—that are especially endearing to me and ripe with storytelling possibility. Being with an old friend might be the closest we get to traveling through time—when else are you so acutely reminded of the person you used to be than when you are with someone who has known you through all of your various self-reinventions? I’m also interested in writing stories that explore the lives of more than one woman, and writing about women who are tied by the bonds of friendship allows me to create a tapestry effect in which multiple families and conflicts and settings are woven together.
The settings of your novels tend to be a big part of the plot and the characters’ lives. How do you decide where to set a book and how does place inform what you write?
With both of my novels, the decision of setting has been tied to the earliest seeds of the story. For How to Eat a Cupcake, I think my first imaginings of the novel included a cupcake shop in San Francisco’s Mission district, a neighborhood that is so diverse and complex and teeming with energy that its ambiance and potential conflicts practically write themselves. For All the Summer Girls, I was eager to write about summertime, and for me, as for the novel’s protagonists, summer is Avalon, New Jer
sey. So, again, the setting was right there in my thoughts from the beginning. Once I started thinking about that setting, and putting in the hard time of writing, that magical thing I mentioned earlier started happening: it seemed like the setting offered up all sorts of metaphors and themes. For example, before I sent Dani walking through San Francisco, it never occurred to me that both Avalon and San Francisco are set on seven-mile-long landmasses surrounded by bay and ocean. That connection only occurred to me—to Dani, really—when I sent her wandering through the city.
How much of what you write comes from your own experiences? Are any of your characters based on real people?
Sometimes a character might initially come to me with a collection of traits that I’ve culled from various people I’ve met, or from myself, but once I’m fifty pages into writing a novel, if that character hasn’t completely taken on a life and identity of her own that is far removed from anyone I know, then I’m doing something wrong. I pepper my work with a few of my own experiences, and I almost always use settings with which I have deep familiarity. But once I set those fictional characters loose in those nonfictional environments, they experience things in a way that is all their own. So even the parts of my novels that might contain some echo of my personal history become little more than jumping-off points. One of the great joys I get from writing fiction is that it feels so wonderfully free to me—the possibilities are endless. It wouldn’t be nearly as fun or rewarding for me if I were only recounting my own experiences, or inserting people I actually know into the story.
If you were not a writer, what would your dream job be?
This is hard because being a novelist is truly my dream job. I guess I’ve always been a little envious of singers, but I envy their talent more than their job. How amazing would it be to just open your mouth and sing in your own beautiful, unique voice, or to record a song so that when someone listens to it for just a couple of minutes, she is instantly sent back to the time in her life when she first heard the song, or she’s moved to dance or cry or sing along? That is a beautiful talent. Sadly, I’m a terrible singer. I did karaoke recently and at one point when I was singing on stage I realized that not a single person in the audience, made up primarily of close, supportive friends, would meet my eye. I heard the sound of that dream shattering. Okay, it might have been glass breaking. Either way, I think I’ll stick with writing.
About the book
The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent
WHAT SPARKS INSPIRATION? It’s a question I’m asked with some frequency, and one that can be tricky to answer. It is often difficult to retrace the steps I’ve taken to develop a story, to identify the moment, the spark, that sent me off and running down a particular narrative path. Other times, the root of a story remains so vivid to me that I could practically stub my toe on it. All the Summer Girls has a distinct root like that, and it serves as a wonderful reminder that the most unlikely occurrences can be a source of inspiration, opening doors to places that I did not expect to go. So what surprising thing sparked this novel that is, in a way, an ode to the East Coast summer? In a word: fog.
As a Philadelphian accustomed to East Coast seasons—and one with particular fondness for summertime, the muggier the better—I was shocked by San Francisco’s weather when I first arrived in the city on an August afternoon five years ago. Damp gray fog moved quickly over our new home and snaked its way under my clothes, making me shiver. My husband and I had spent the days leading up to our arrival in San Francisco driving the length of the country in short-sleeved shirts, our skin golden from a stay at my parents’ beach house in Avalon, New Jersey. We hurried into our new home and dug through stacks of moving boxes until we located our heaviest down-filled parkas. And then we turned on the heat. The heat! In August! Only our dog seemed pleased with this turn of events, his fur coat finally coming in handy.
Before that day, I’d always figured Mark Twain was using artistic license when he so famously said “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Turns out, I was wrong. (On two counts, actually: Apparently the quote, though commonly attributed to Twain, is of unknown origin.) Five summers later, I still haven’t come to terms with that August chill. I don’t think I ever will. Don’t get me wrong—I am in love with San Francisco. But like any passionate love affair, there are times when I loathe this city nearly as much as I love it, and those times are frequently in the summer, when I’m wearing a wool sweater and thick slippers, and dreaming of the beach in Avalon.
Which is exactly what I found myself doing—shivering through another San Francisco summer and pining for Avalon—when the seeds of All the Summer Girls first planted themselves. As a novelist, you spend a lot of time thinking about your book; you immerse yourself in the story you’re telling, and sometimes it’s hard to shake the story from your thoughts even during your nonwriting time. So I figured that if I were going to spend the next year deeply immersed in a place and a time, where better than Avalon, New Jersey, in summertime?
Like the protagonists in this book, I grew up spending time each summer in Avalon. For more than a decade of my youth, my parents rented a tall, crumbly Victorian home a few blocks from the beach. It had the sort of nooks and crannies that enchant a child, and an excruciatingly hot attic room where my cousins and I slept in rows on the floor. The house used to be red so we called it the Red House . . . until the year we showed up and found it had been painted blue. After that, we called it—wait for it—the Blue House. There was a big—or so it seemed at the time—kitchen with a peeling linoleum floor on which lobsters were raced (in a cruel turn, the winner would be dropped into the pot first). Out front, there was a wide wooden swing hanging from chains on the wraparound porch. In the back, there was a small yard where, above my head, an ever-changing rainbow of beach towels hung from the clothesline, and my bare feet were bruised by pebbles and pine needles (this was before landscapers and irrigation systems descended on those sandy-soiled New Jersey beach towns and turned them lush with greenery). My grandfather would create boats out of sand for us to play in at the beach, and after dinner he would walk us down Dune Drive to Dippy Don’s for bubblegum ice cream. My father was the oldest of eight siblings and nearly every summer another cousin—who only a year earlier had seemed like a baby—reached an age when he could be inducted into the fold by way of mischief. The elderly neighbors once called the police because they thought we were being robbed—turned out they just spotted two of my cousins shimmying down the side of the house using bed sheets they had tied together to form a long rope. At night, my cousins and I would stay up late in the sweltering, sloped attic, plotting these schemes—stunts that often involved unscrewing every lightbulb in the house a half-turn or hiding all the toilet paper in the cobwebbed crawl space under the porch or hanging an uncle’s underwear on the front screen door and spraying it with the Fart Spray we’d bought in the ever-marvelous kids’ aisle at Hoy’s Five and Dime— while two stories below our parents and aunts and uncles would stay up late drinking beer and laughing so loudly it seemed to make the old house shake.
Later, Avalon became a place where I also spent time with friends. I rented a house there with my best friends from childhood the summer after we graduated from high school, and—just as it was for Kate, Vanessa, and Dani—that was a magical time for me, both in the actual moment and in retrospect. We were so free and it seemed so much lay before us and we just had a whole lot of fun. I’m relieved that, unlike the friends in this book, no tragedies befell us; that summer holds nothing but happy memories for me.
So when it’s August in San Francisco and I’m pulling on my winter coat, in my mind I’m in Avalon—reading on the beach, soaking up the sun, or riding a bike under a star-filled sky. Ironically, it seems the cool San Francisco summer sends me straight back to the warmest summers of my life. I’m very grateful to have spent this past year in Avalon, even if only on the page. So, thank you, San Francisco fog, for the spark of inspiration. You’ve reminded me that t
here is great comfort—warmth, even—to be found in memory, and that we are never far from our favorite places, or our childhood, when we hold them in our heart. Summer, after all, when boiled down to the emotions it so often invokes—happiness and hope—is a state of mind.
Read on
Meg Donohue’s Favorite Summer Reads
MY FAVORITE NOVELS ARE ones that I call “smart page-turners”—they’re fast-paced, frequently funny, and laced with astute observations. For me, the only thing better than a smart page-turner is a smart page-turner that takes place during my favorite season: summer. Here’s a list of six summer novels I’ve recently loved and am sure to reread, probably on beaches, in the years to come.
Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close
I fell in love with this group of women as they poignantly and hilariously fumbled their way through questionable relationships and career choices during those hazy postcollege years when nothing seems to go the way you thought it would. The dialogue sparkles, the friendships are touching and real without veering anywhere near sappy, there’s a hysterical chapter entitled “Summer Sausage” that allows me to feel perfectly justified including this book in a Summer Reads roundup, and the novel ends with what might just be my favorite final line of any book, ever. I’m certain Lena Dunham and fans of her show Girls would adore this novel as much as I do.
A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin
Reminiscent of Nora Ephron, Colwin writes with warmth and wit about marriage, motherhood, work, and food. This novel isn’t set exclusively in summer, but the protagonist—a New York book designer— and her husband frequently visit his family’s country home during weekend escapes from the city, and the idea of that special home-away-from-home always invokes the idea of summer for me. A delightful exploration of how even an essentially happy life is full of novel-worthy twists, this book manages to be both realistic and refreshingly hopeful.