You know when you read so much of a certain author or book that your own writing or thoughts start to come out sounding like someone else’s? Reading definitely begets writing, for me at least– nothing helps jumpstart my writer’s block like picking up a good book– but there are some authors whose voice and style and tone stick with me more than others.
No one does style like Elin Hilderbrand– her beachy novels set in Nantucket are as much character study as they are plot driven, and they make me feel like I am in Nantucket eating something fabulous with someone interesting at pretty much any given moment I’m lost in her pages.
Characters I have nothing in common with are at once familiar and understood. Places I have never been to begin to feel like old haunts. For years I’ve been nodding along as I read Hilderbrand’s books– “of course, they’re drinking mudslides at the Gazebo!” (Nevermind that I hadn’t been to the Gazebo until 2025, and I still have never had a mudslide. I don’t even actually know what’s in one!)
It was Hilderbrand’s books that finally got me to Nantucket for the first time and inspired an annual tradition for me each summer, and after getting home from Nantucket Monday night with a desire to recap the experience for my newsletter, I started dreaming something up, sort of like my own fan fiction…
What comes below is a somewhat fictionalized recap of my trip to Nantucket– but written in the style of an Elin Hilderbrand novel.
I hope you’ll enjoy, and that the beach readers among you can spot my attempts to pay homage to her style! Click here to read in full in your browser— this is too long for your inbox!
This feels, somehow, like the most vulnerable (and also silliest!) thing I’ve ever written— writing about myself as a character!?— so please be nice, share it if you like it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts or any Nantucket anecdotes in the comments! Thanks for letting me use a semicolon for the first time.
P.S. If you’re like “Elin who?”— check out my book coverage here, and my beach read coverage here.
P.P.S. My friend said all I’m missing here is a super preppy and ridiculous name, like some of the characters in an Elin book. (Example names of some of her characters: Dabney Kimball Beech, Clendenin Hughes, Ellery Thorpe, Hollis Shaw.) Do you have preppy stage name/alias ideas for me? Or pick your favorite below!
Okay, if you have better suggestions, drop them in the comments!
It’s a Tuesday in July when Emily calls. An actual phone call, no warning text, which between two millennial best friends can mean only one of three things: someone is engaged, someone is laid off, or someone has a proposition.
“I have a proposition for you,” Emily declares.
Zoe flops down on the futon, the small, hard one she and her boyfriend have draped in Mexican blankets to “protect” it from the dog’s plush fur, as though the futon has any dignity left to protect. It came with the beach shack, which is grungy and run-down and, this being a beachfront summer rental on Long Island, still far from cheap.
“The sisters and I were looking into tickets, and we found a hotel room…”
Zoe is already composing her graceful decline. Thanks for thinking of me, but we’re renting the bungalow all summer, money is a thing right now, maybe next…
“What would you think about going to Nantucket?”
Zoe sits up. “Nantucket?”
“Nantucket.”
“How much?”
“Well, you know how Nantucket is like, Dubai prices. But I think we can get it down to like, a thousand each. For the four days.”
Here is what a thousand dollars means to Zoe in July of 2024: it means the credit card debt from her start-up, may it rest in peace, which grows quietly in the background like a hedge nobody trims, never mind that she has worked two jobs for other people since. That’s the thing about interest, she has learned.
But here is what Nantucket means to Zoe in July of 2024: it means every Elin Hilderbrand novel in existence, read and reread. It means the hardcover of Hotel Nantucket so mottled with ocean water by the end of last summer that she had to leave it behind, a casualty of a summer well spent. It means the place where the books that brought her back to life are set. She has never been there.
“Send me the details,” she says, sucking in a breath. “I’m in.”
The week before Nantucket, the universe invoices her for the trip. The job she was so excited about in March catches fire; the company officially runs out of money to pay her in July, not long after she sends Emily the thousand dollars, which is, of course, non-refundable. Then comes a flu-like monstrosity, nose-blows with enough thrust to get a SpaceX shuttle halfway to orbit. Mild self-pity descends into weeping on the rock-hard futon.
Her boyfriend fluffs the Mexican blankets and puts his arm firmly around her. “You are going to Nantucket, Zo. You need this. Don’t worry about the money. You’re going to be fine, and we’re going to be fine.”
He packs her suitcase while she sleeps and tucks two boxes of DayQuil and a sleeve of Cepacol cough drops into her carry-on, which is how she knows he means it.
The flight from JFK to Nantucket Memorial takes forty minutes, and Zoe spends all of them hopped up on cold medicine and adrenaline. When the island finally appears below, it appears all at once: the shoals striping the water green and gold, the gray shingles, the hydrangeas detonating in every yard. She has the keen, feverish feeling that she will be forever changed.
She’s right, is the thing— that’s what nobody warns you about once-in-a-lifetime trips. Sometimes they refuse to stay that way.
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