Late Summer Blues

My son spent the days before school wracked with anxiety, anxiety about school starting and summer ending, about all the things that could go wrong (teachers being mean, kids being mean, accidentally getting in trouble for something he wasn’t aware of - whew, there’s my genetic contribution to this little being). I held him and attempted to both give empathy and perspective. It makes sense to be nervous, and the things he’s nervous about are not yet here, not yet actual problems. The thoughts and feelings can both make sense and also not be true, so it’s best to be here and now when the brain is trying to take you to all the possible future disasters. After he calmed down, though, I had to laugh: he’s just like me, wracked with summertime sadness. Summer isn’t a time as much as it is a feeling, and the end of that feeling, even if summer didn’t truly provide it, is hard to give up.

I’m writing here in late August, as my novel Summer Girls is about to enter the world for real, thinking about how fitting it is that a book about the desire to feel a certain way and the reluctance to let go of the hope for that feeling is coming into the world during the most summertime sadness time of the year.

When I think of August I think of The Virgin Suicides (the 1999 film, which is superior to the book, though I like the book as well), which takes place over a span of time but feels like late summer in essence. In it, we follow a group of sisters in a reclusive, religious family. The parents keep the girls, all teenagers, on a tight leash, not allowing them to partake in most normal teenage activities. When the youngest, Cecelia, attempts suicide, the family is made aware of the possible consequences of their isolation and opens up, just a crack, by allowing Lux (played by Kirsten Dunst) to go to homecoming with Trip, the school heartthrob, along with her sisters. It doesn’t go as planned, and Lux ends up abandoned on the school football field after having sex with Trip, and her family folds down into itself, not allowing the girls to leave the house. So, these teen sisters pick the most dramatic, most fuck you way possible to escape the situation: they stage a suicide pact, played out in front of a group of boys who serve as our narrator(s) in a Nick Carraway kinda way, boys who are curious about the girls but can never quite know them or understand their choices or their sorrows.

The film plays this horrifically tragic outcome like a fever dream. We see each of the girls die, not graphically, but just a glimpse, each staged like a painting. This doesn’t strike me as grotesque, but appropriate - the Lux sisters are a mystery, their actions are ultimately a mystery, and the extremity of the violence they are willing to do to themselves means we can never understand them, never get to the bottom of what happened or why the story ended with so much death.

In Summer Girls (copies arriving soon if you pre-ordered! & you can order here or message me to buy directly from me), this unknowability is my primary topic. My character Mariah, like Lux Lisbon and her sisters, is at the vulnerable age where every new thing, bad or good, can feel like it will last forever. Do you remember your first heartbreak? Did you believe it would never end, because you hadn’t felt that way before, and the feeling was so exquisitely awful that it felt like nothing could relieve it? This is the danger of having big emotions but little experience. You don’t yet know that everything will eventually pass, bad or good. But what if you cling to that teenage version of yourself? That part that can see a breakup as a disaster that will never end, that hangs on connections even if they are unhealthy because they feel like all we will ever have? And what if you begin to build your idea of yourself and your life around that one, fleeting summer feeling? What if you devote your life to getting that feeling back, at any cost?

I feel a pinch of this at the beginning of every summer. I make a new summer playlist of songs that feel like I want summer to feel. I plan trips (too many, this summer) to make me feel like summer is happening, something new is happening, but by the end, I’m always longing for Fall again, for things to start again. I’m chasing a summer feeling, but it’s more the freedom of summer, a freedom that always came with loneliness for me, a kid living on an isolated piece of land way out in the country in Bennington, Vermont. I saw no friends (and rarely had any to being with) over the summer and went few places. I grew up kind of like the Lisbon sisters, not allowed to go visit people or do much, but where I was free was in my head - I could read as many books as I wanted, watch as much tv as I wanted, and wander (within strict limits) around on our land, experiencing such acute boredom that it would turn right back around to pleasure, a feeling I’ve only experienced in one other place: when getting tattooed. The moment the constant low-level sting starts to feel pleasurable makes me think of those long, hot days of being out on the violet-thick yard on a grass-stained blanket with nobody to talk to and nothing to do except build up stories in my head. I could feel so much despair one moment and then have it open up into possibility almost without me realizing the turn had happened.

Unlike the Lisbon sisters, I responded to being restrained by getting smaller and smaller and more self-sufficient within my own mind. I’m not allowed to see any friends or do any school activities? Fine, I’ll become a person who doesn’t need friends. I will read every book in the house and watch every episode of Voices and Visions. I’ll create such a rich inner life, one so far above the everyday activities of teenagers, that I won’t need to talk to anyone else at all. I will want absolutely nothing and so will never be disappointed.

Now, summer is waiting and waiting and waiting for the fertile void to bloom, but my adult brain is having trouble allowing this to happen. That turn feels like it never comes, and then the cycle of the school year and holidays resume and it feels like I took a deep breath that never got released. It’s just waiting there to explode.

I took a staycation from my therapy work this week, and just as soon as it started, I experienced a big failure in one of my non-therapy jobs. I’m beginning to accept that this failure came from burnout: my brain simply couldn’t hold everything anymore. I have not given myself enough space to breathe. So I’m going to do that. Maybe my exhale can still happen, I just have to allow the fertile void to be here, heavy in my chest. I have to sit here in my last few days of freedom and allow the terror and the anxiety and the void to open up and just stay, allowing myself to fall and fall and fall and never land, to get comfortable with never landing, to love equally the gut-drop of the fall and the way the ground will hold you once you find it.