Bestselling author Jamie Brenner returns to the podcast to discuss A NOVEL SUMMER, a delightful, sun-soaked beach read about a novelist who returns to the beach town where she spent her college summers… only to face her old friends’ reactions to the recognizable elements in her novels. Jamie reflects on how summer triggers nostalgia and introspection about friendships—and then delves into the different types of friendships, from college friends to “mom trenches” friends. She touches on her writing process, the publishing industry’s focus on books for younger women (driven by TikTok!), and her next project.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome Jamie. Thank you for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

For what? Is this your fourth time? I mean, this is great.

Jamie: I mean, I've lost count. Fourth? Fifth? Who's counting when you're having so much fun? 

Zibby: Who's counting when you're having so much fun? Writing so many books, it's like a piece of cake. 

Jamie: There you go. 

Zibby: Okay. A Novel Summer. Tell everybody what your book is about, please.

Your most recent book. 

Jamie: My new book coming in July, July 16th. The plot of the book is a novelist is called back to the beach town where she spent her college summers to help out at the indie bookstore there. But when she gets to town, her old friends are really upset about some of the things she's written in her novels, things they recognize about themselves.

So while it's about her return to this beach town, the book is really about college friendships and how the friendships we make during that time in our lives just can never be matched by the friends we make later in life. But also about how life tends to pull us away from those friends and the pursuit of our careers and our dreams that we shared so closely with people in college are often the very things that that separate us in adulthood.

And it's sort of, um, often it's inevitable, but at this point in my life, I see a certain poignancy in that, in the trade offs in life that we have to make. 

Zibby: It's this time we're all thinking so much about friends and friendships and how they affect us forever. And I know I've been thinking about that. I feel like everybody I talk to is like, okay, cause I, I don't know.

There's something also with the summertime and the end of the year and getting that moment to step back from craziness, even though it's still crazy, and just be like, what did I miss this year? Did I see my friends? What's going on with my old friends? And how much do you write about your friends and your people?

Jamie: Yeah. I mean, summer, you know, no matter how busy we are, summer makes us stop on some level and think of like the happiest times in our life. I think, at least for most people I know, and talk to about why do you like summer books or what is it about that? Yeah, the past few years, you know, I look at my closest friends from college and high school and remarkably, we've all found careers doing exactly what we said we wanted to do.

You know, I have a friend who's a broadcast journalist, a friend who's a TV producer, you know, I write books. And at the time, these goals seemed really lofty. And now I realize, honestly, the hardest thing is just keeping in touch with people. And, you know, we're all in different states because of where we have to be for work reasons or family reasons.

And if we get together once every few years, we consider ourselves lucky. And I don't think I realized at the time that we left school, it will never be like this again. I knew it, you know, intellectually, but I didn't understand what that meant emotionally. So those were the feelings I was kind of sitting with when I started writing A Novel Summer.

Zibby: What about mom trenches type friendships? 

Jamie: Definitely. It's a different type, you know? And of course my mom friends, now that our children are just graduating college that seems like a lifetime ago, and that I've known them forever. And, you know, when I see their grown children, I remember them wreaking havoc in my living room during the playdates.

And that's its own thing. And the fact that I knew that I have friends from even before that seems almost impossible to me. Because I can barely remember when my 23 year old was a baby. And yet I still have a friend that I met in a children's clothing store on 3rd Avenue on the Upper East Side called Ben's.

It's now long gone. But we met in the aisle, and to this day, you know, she's in London now. I go to London, she comes here. Mom, friends. That's pretty real too, but it's still an adult friendship versus the naive childhood friendships. And I still in college, you know, they are still children and they're adults, but they're little like child adults.

So the way we confided in each other and the way, you know, female friendships in college can be almost like, romantic relationships and how they can break your heart, and how attached you can feel, and how petty little things can make you feel so betrayed. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Jamie: The competition, you know, all those little things.

And then you look back on it as adults, and what remains, you know, a lot, all the stuff that really matters. 

Zibby: Oh, this is making me, like, very nostalgic. 

Jamie: I know, but hopefully in a good way. And so, basically, in a novel, Summer These three best friends, they reunite on Cape Cod, and it's three years after graduation.

And it's really a turning point to whether or not they're going to make that transition from college friends to lifelong friends. And the book is about the summer where the little decisions they make are going to tilt the scale. So that's the essence of the book. And how did you come to this plot? So three years ago, oh my gosh, maybe it was five years ago, my friends from college, we met up in the city.

One lives in D. C., one lives in the suburbs, I was living in the city. We met up and we had, we took a picture where we recreated our graduation pose standing together. We took a picture in this restaurant on the Upper West Side and we said, We're not going to wait this long to do this again. And it hasn't happened again.

And I have accepted that. But you know, the trade off of living busy lives and pursuing the things that we need for our own goals or families or whatever, it's always, there's a little sacrifice. And that's what I was sitting with when I started writing this book. It's interesting to be older. I'm in my fifties.

and be able to write characters in their 20s because I know things they can't know. And so to play around with events, um, or obstacles that tease them with what I already know is going to happen in life is a really fun way to sort of time travel. Like what I wish I could have told myself or What I try to tell my daughters that they really don't want to listen to.

Well, I can explore that in my characters and, you know, their inner lives versus what they're experiencing in the real world. 

Zibby: So what do you really want people to know? What was something you were like, Oh, I wish I could. My daughters would listen to me say this, like, what do you know? I mean, obviously we all know a lot more, but what?

Jamie: I've, I've really come to believe in life that what is meant for you will find you. And to stress out so, I think we are raised with the illusion that if you push, push, push, you're going to get whatever you want. And sometimes if you're pushing really hard, it might just be that you're pushing in the wrong direction.

And people who are very ambitious or type A, they, they feel like if, if there, if something isn't happening, it's because they're not doing something right or they're not working hard enough. And I've really come to see that if you just take a step back, like the path will ease a little bit. Maybe not the path, the way you wanted to direct it, but in a way that might get you someplace. Unexpectedly. And if someone had told me, I remember watching the, the show, 30 something. Which was a big show when I was in college.

Zibby: I loved, and there's this one, loved 30 something. 

Jamie: Loved it. 

Zibby: I watched it again, by the way, I got like the, I started going into it when I think like five or 10 years ago.

So interesting. So good. But to be older now than them, whereas before I 

Jamie: Does it hold up? 

Zibby: Yes. But it's just so different. You should go back and watch it again. Just different, different experience. 

Jamie: I want to, I'm afraid I'll, it'll be such a, anyway, a character, a peripheral character says to the main character, life can be as simple as a fall.

It's also easy once you just let go. And I remember, I remember that for, you know, it's been 30 years now or something, but only recently have I started to understand how incredibly true it is. I wanted it to be true, but I didn't believe it. 

Zibby: But false can hurt. 

Jamie: Life hurts, you know? 

Zibby: I feel like if you hold on for dear life, maybe it doesn't hurt as much.

Jamie: But I think sometimes we hold on to the wrong things. And because we, a lot of people, it's like you don't want to give up. You don't want to be a quitter. You don't. But it's like sometimes letting go or giving up is actually being wise and brave and clearing the way for like whatever is supposed to be there.

Zibby: True. Very true. 

Jamie: And I just, that's just not a, it's not a conversation we have that often. And like I said, when you're in your twenties, someone tells you that you're not going to necessarily believe it. Some things you have to experience on your own. 

Zibby: You need to write 50 something. 

Jamie: Oh my gosh. Well, you know, Erica Zhang wrote that great book, Fear of 50.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Jamie: Which I also read when I was in my 20s. And the one thing that stuck out from that book was she wrote the idea of marriage, like one person for your whole life. She's like, that just didn't work for me. She's like, what I found really worked was I had a different partner for like almost every decade because I wasn't the same person I was from 30 to 50.

So I needed a different person by my side for like different phases of my life. And I was like, wow, that was like a little mind blowing. 

Zibby: Yeah. I remember before I got married, I was like, well, I don't understand. Like, maybe we should have like re up decided, you know, like it's not a divorce. It's just like every five, 10 years, you just like, just, let's just say, are we both still in it?

What do you think? Or should we, you try something else. 

Jamie: Absolutely. I mean, we, we renew our passport, our driver's license, I mean, why should this massive decision be something that is made and, you know, I think marriage would be so much healthier if there was built in a 10 year check in and option to renew or not.

Yeah. Um, you know, the pressure. Yeah. 

Zibby: Well, that's like the argument now of all the people who are not getting married. Is that they can do that whenever, right? Like, I feel like a lot of people now are not getting married. I know we're totally off topic here, but I, I, but I'm having a really nice chat. Um, uh, I, you know, there's like this whole trend of people not wanting to get married anymore, because why?

Jamie: Yeah, I mean, look, things change. I don't know. I mean, I think being totally against marriage is maybe cynical, but thinking marriage, one marriage for life is the only way is also a little, perhaps, unrealistic for most people. So, you know, I have, my daughters are in their 20s now. I can't imagine, you know, my oldest daughter is the age my mother was when she had me and I still see her as, you know, she's, she's, she's a kid.

So look how much things have changed in that regard since the seventies. I think it's a positive change, you know, like she views her twenties as having her whole life ahead of her. I feel like my mom was married at 20 and, um, She probably felt like she was behind not having me till she was 23. So who knows?

But, you know, 20s are a really interesting time. And I think in book publishing right now, you know, I've had conversations with people, editors, because TikTok is such a influential realm of books. You know, I've had conversations where people are like, oh, you know, we write, don't necessarily write about older women, you know, it's also write about younger women.

So I've had to think about like, well, what's interesting to me about writing about younger women? Because older women, you know, you know, so much younger women don't know as much as they think they know. So the way I, I made it interesting for myself to write about younger women. is to, like I said, hold both in my mind at the same time and see where that tension leads narratively.

So I'd say A Novel Summer is the first book where I do not have an older, wiser point of view. all three young women kind of finding their way in this time of life. 

Zibby: Do you think your daughters got the messages? Like, have they read a draft? Do you think that? 

Jamie: Oh, no. No. Okay. No. I have one daughter who only reads like the most, like, you know, obscure literary texts.

And one daughter who is reading whatever that like dragon quadrilogy is, right? 

Zibby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quadrilogy. 

Jamie: My books don't appeal to either of them. 

Zibby: Well, that's okay. It's 

Jamie: fine. 

Zibby: So, when I first read about your book, I was like, okay, so writing about a community afraid to go back, like Jamie writes about all these communities, like did something happen in one of the towns in which you based your novel, like a prior novel?

Like did something, did anything come from that that inspired this or was it just a plot point? 

Jamie: Oh, because she, the protagonist wrote Shelby Archer is the protagonist and she, you know, drew from her best friend's life to plot her debut novel. That has not happened to me. I've, I have never based a character on a real person, but it's amazing how many people think you are, like, who see themselves in characters.

The one book I sent, I set in my hometown, which was The Husband Hour, you know, people read into it, like, oh, is it this person from high school, that person. And I also feel like there is this, especially now, I think it's scary to think of offending someone or what's your, what's your, the question is of the, I think a big question today is, what is your story to tell?

You know, I think it's really dangerous for art to say, like, you can't write about this. Like, write what you know, but don't write about what you know too well, because that's You know what I'm saying? Yes, yes. So I think there's a little bit of that, too. Do you write what you know, or do you have to make everything up so you don't, like, you know, upset the apple cart in your own life?

I don't know what the answer is, but I'm sure, I'm sure many novelists have written things that have offended people in their lives, whether they know it or not, and that's just, I think, goes with the territory. 

Zibby: This one, a girlfriend of mine from college, speaking of old dear friends, when I showed her a draft of, I can't remember, it was something, it might have been a book that never saw the light of day.

But anyway, I remember I showed it to her and she was like, that was so nice how you made me blah, blah, blah character. And I was thinking, what on earth is she, like, what? Like, it didn't even cross my mind. Like, in my head, that character looks and acts and is totally different. What, how did she see that?

But people continually see themselves, right? In your fiction. There you go. Exactly. Well, I guess when you're looking, I don't know. Not that I don't adore her, but, you know, I just didn't happen to make her into a character. 

Jamie: Yeah. Well, in the book, in the novel, Summer, she did, she did use her friend's secrets and she has a possible lesson to learn about that.

And it's also about, you know, choices. What's important in life? Is your career the most important thing? Are friendships the most important thing? Is love and finding a partner the most important thing? And if you had to choose one out of the three, what would you choose? You know, that's the type of thing that I explore in the book.

Zibby: So, there are so many. Great books that come out in the summer. Like, I feel like it's a great time, but it's also a really hard time because there's a lot of competition, but there's a lot of great stuff, but there's a lot of time, blah, blah, blah. You could go back and forth. So when readers browse, like all the summer reads that are coming out and you have yours that, you know, at your lemonade stand, right?

Like, how do you, differentiate. Like, what do you say? What do you think? Like, how do you position? And I mean this, I could ask this of literally any, anyone with a book coming out this summer, but particularly in this genre, right? Where the covers are looking more similar because readers are supposed to know what type of book this is quickly, which is important, right?

How, how can you make your book stand out? This is like the age old question, but do you think about all this? 

Jamie: Well, this is a really interesting question, Zibby, because. This is my seventh, seventh or eighth summer book. Okay. And there were times when I, like, it's not my job to market, decide on the cover. All of that is out of my control.

To be honest with you, like my preference and instinct as a writer would not to be have not to have a book. with summer in the title, okay? Like, I wrote a book once, summer was not in the title, it was a summer book, and my editor was like, we have to put summer in the title. And I'm like, okay, we'll change the title.

Then I had books Okay, then my last summer book did not have summer in the title. It did not have a beach on the cover. And when I went into some bookstores, they didn't have it on their like summer reads table. So I had to explain to them, Oh, this is a summer book. And they're like, Oh, we didn't know. So I'm like, okay, I guess summer has to be in the title and we have to the beach in the cover.

That's just the way it goes. How to differentiate. It is beyond me, Zibby, because frankly, I mean, all I can do is hope because I've written a lot of books, there's There are people out there who sort of know what a Jamie Brenner book is, and I build on that. But if this were my first book, and it was, you know, this is sitting on a table with every other one, it's a Herculean task to make it stand out.

I do not know, and I think that's sort of the question that It's central to publishing right now, but it's also out of my hands. Like all I can do is tell the best story that I can tell and how to make it stand out with all the noise. I kind of let that be someone else's brainchild because A, it's not ultimately my decision and B, I don't have the answer.

I don't even know if anyone has the answer to that right now. A part of me. you know, I have, I'm starting to have fantasies about writing in an entirely different season or mood just so I can maybe, like, try something that looks and sounds a little different, just for my own, like, creative stimulation, you know?

So my next book I'm working on is set in a small river town called New Hope. And it's about a mother and daughter who think they're best friends, and they go to a knitting retreat together. And it's what happens to their relationship over the course of this long weekend. So that, depending on when I hand it in, that might come out in the fall or winter, which I actually would like, just to shake things up a little bit for myself.

Zibby: Interesting. 

Jamie: But who knows? 

Zibby: What are you calling it? Unraveled? 

Jamie: That's how I feel right now on my deadline. I don't know. I'm going to have to talk to my, my Eric, my editor is Erica Imrani and she's just amazing. And I know when the time comes, we'll have a conversation. I trust her so much that I let her take the lead on things like that.

So we'll see. But that's where I am creatively. 

Zibby: You know, FYI, just to add to this summer, you know, seasonal positioning thing, we have a book coming out from Zibby Books that takes place, like, in, on a ski mountain, right? It's about, like, skiing. And the, and the feedback was that it felt too wintry. And would people I don't want to read it in the summer if there was a ski cover.

So what was the decision? I don't know. Now we're messing around. Now we're messing around with the cover. I don't know. It's just always something. Do you know what I mean? Like, I just, I don't know 

Jamie: if people, I mean, this is maybe an interesting question for like when you're with a bunch of, like, I don't know if people read necessarily as seasonally blocked as we believe that, right, they do.

Yeah, I see plenty of people reading stuff like summer books in the middle of winter and I see people reading serious literature poolside, you know I think it really has to be writers should write in the headspace they're in and readers are going to come to the book when that matches their headspace bottom line and I don't think I don't know if it's I think we get very locked into like our ideas of what people read when I don't know.

I don't know how like percentage wise, how true it is or not. 

Zibby: But 

Jamie: it's interesting. I mean, interesting survey. 

Zibby: Yeah. Well, it's interesting for me having this conversation with you specifically because you have been cranking out a book a summer for how many years now? I mean, how many books do you have?

Jamie: 2016. 

Zibby: I mean, it's crazy. It's so many books. 

Jamie: I know. I know. And the genre has changed so much even in this amount of time. And to be honest with you, if I had known how, like, crazy the summer books landscape would become, By 2024, I probably would have never, I would have been too intimidated to even write in this space.

So it's like, sort of like, I'm glad I didn't have a crystal ball to tell me what it would look like this summer. There was a certain naivety to when I started writing summer books. And it was just because I loved Ellen Hildebrand books so much. And I was reading those books in the winter, absolutely, like to escape New York City in the winter and to be on Cape Cod, you know, weeding as the ultimate armchair vacation.

So it's ironic because I, I liked summer books. not in the summer. That's when I read them. 

Zibby: Yeah. So we can make it look however we want. 

Jamie: Exactly. Ski book in the summer. Sign me up. 

Zibby: Amazing. Jamie, what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Jamie: Ah, I have one of those. I gave birth to one of those, and this is the advice I tell her, A, keep your day job for a while, write what you want to write, and read a lot in the space that you're writing in.

Zibby: All very good advice. 

Jamie: Those are my three rules to live by, firing writer life. 

Zibby: And I know that you feature a bookstore in a novel summer. Is it based on a particular bookstore? Do you have a particular bookstore that's like your dream to escape into as you're writing? 

Jamie: Well, it's set in Provincetown, and the amazing thing about Provincetown is it's really a very small place.

I think maybe Main Street is like two miles long, three streets wide, and there are many bookstores along the path. And there's one bookstore that had been there forever, and my first summer in Provincetown, a new bookstore opened. The booksellers in Provincetown are the most passionate, interesting people, and I definitely had this place, East End Books, in Provincetown in mind when I wrote this book, like I pictured it physically, the space, and Yeah, it's very much a reflection of the book selling vibe in Provincetown specifically.

Zibby: Amazing. Well, congratulations. Enjoy the summer. Hope you read lots of seasonal or not books. 

Jamie: And maybe I'll see you in the winter next time. 

Zibby: Yeah, that'd be great. Save yourself. 

Jamie: Who knows? 

Zibby: Okay. 

Jamie: Thanks so much, Zibby. 

Zibby: Thanks, Jamie. 

Bye. Bye.