Jennifer Weiner on Why 'Beach Reads' Matter Now More Than Ever

When I was a kid, my parents and my three younger siblings and I would spend a week in a rented cottage on the Outer Cape. Now that I am a parent myself, I can appreciate that it wasn’t so much a vacation as a relocation. The cottage colony had a laundry room, and our cottage had a kitchen, so my mom was stuck cooking and doing the laundry for four kids. At least we were right on the bay, with its pleasant breezes and the soothing sound of the waves. Every afternoon, we’d make a pilgrimage to one of the ocean beaches to dip into the frigid water and sun on the sand. 

We’d deflate the tires of our Chevrolet Suburban and drive out through the dunes. When we’d found the perfect spot, my father would somehow contrive to remove the back seat, wrestle it out of the car, and set it up on the sand. And there he would sit, working his way through six months of piled-up New Yorkers and New England Journals of Medicine. I would sit beside him, my sweaty thighs sticking to the vinyl seat cover, with my own, smaller stack of New Yorkers (I didn’t even bother with the medical stuff), trying to read the articles and the short stories, hoping to discern some shred of meaning that I could spin into some clever observation that would display my intelligence and my wit.

It was unpleasant and difficult and glare-y. There was sand in places that sand did not belong. The entire experience was fraught with anxiety, with fear of failure, the terror that I would accidentally say the wrong thing and reveal that I had no idea what John Cheever or John Updike was writing about. It left me feeling sweaty, with my stomach in knots and a headache throbbing in my temples. Plus, I had to do it all in a bathing suit, which didn’t help.

I understand that when most people say “beach reading,” they are talking about something else. A beach read is a book that is fast-moving and diverting and sexy and fun, a book that perhaps prioritizes plot and characterization over beautiful sentences or time-honored themes. In other words, it’s the stuff that I wish I’d been reading instead of the stuff that I was desperately trying to read. But when I became a writer, you can, perhaps, imagine my dismay at seeing my own work called beach books. There are themes! I imagined myself moaning to my critics and frequently would moan to my husband and friends. There’s serious stuff! There’s family dysfunction, there’s sibling rivalry and body issues, there’s class and gender and religion!

It wouldn’t have mattered. Between the titles, the covers, and the admittedly breezy tone, my books were, and are, beach books. And I’ve learned to be OK with it. I have also learned to interrogate my own disdain for the label, to ask myself why it was so hurtful when someone would call my books fluff.

Some of it is sexism. It’s not hard to discern a whiff of Coppertone-scented sexism in the label. Fast-paced, diverting books that are by or for men are called thrillers or mysteries or sometimes just plain old books, while the ladies get every kind of label, from chick lit to women’s fiction to upmarket women’s fiction to domestic fiction to, well, beach books. Some of it, I’m afraid, is due to the part of me that’s still longing for my father’s praise and still imagining his scorn at a book called Good in Bed, or of one with a cover depicting two women strolling on the sand, one of them with her hand positioned in such a way that it looks like she’s trying to remove part of her gauzy white sundress from her butt crack (lookin’ at you, Best Friends Forever). Some of it is what I’ve absorbed from our puritanical, capitalist, up-from-your-bootstraps society, where all pleasure is somehow suspect, where leisure time is meant to be devoted to self-improvement, and that books are meant to be salubrious and important and improving. A book should give you something, this worldview instructs, and just enjoyment isn’t enough.

To that I say, bullsh-t. Especially now. Pleasure is something. Pleasure matters. Pleasure is more than enough. And the idea that a book is just entertaining, that it’s merely escapism, that it’s easy reading or a page-turner or a romp, the idea that any of that is pejorative, at this moment in time seems crazy. If ever there was a time for the unapologetic embrace of books that “just” bring us pleasure, that time, she is now.

And so, a taxonomy of beach books!

There are beach books set at the beach, usually in upscale communities in Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard or the Outer Banks, that follow the romantic or familial travails of a relatable, familiar-feeling heroine. Elin Hilderbrand is the reigning queen of the on-the-beach beach book, with the late, great Dorothea Benton Frank forever reigning in our hearts. This year, there’s a beach book called Beach Read, by Emily Henry, about two authors living in a beach community—he’s a highbrow literary author, she writes romance, both of them are blocked, and so they swap.

There are books that are fast-moving and fun, populated by rich people. (Bonus points if they’re set in NYC, with lots of drool-worthy details about fashion, real estate, and home decor.) Think The Nanny Diaries, think Candace Bushnell, Lauren Weisberger, Rebecca Serle.

There are books about friendship, where the characters feel as familiar as your own BFFs, where you’re invested in their stories and hanging on every twist and turn until they get to a happy ending. Terry McMillan’s books hit the sweet spot: There’s Waiting to Exhale for the OGs, but if you haven’t read her lately, I Almost Forgot About You, about an optometrist named Georgia Young who’s accumulated everything the world has told her to want and decides to make some big changes, is a great place to start.

There are chilling beach books, where the experience of flying through the pages is akin to feeling an ice cube slide down your neck: Zoë Heller’s unreliably narrated Notes on a Scandal or Maile Meloy’s vacation-gone-wrong Do Not Become Alarmed (if the current situation has not put you off cruises permanently, that book will).  

A romance is always the perfect thing to read in the summer sun. Eloisa James is my go-to—When Beauty Tamed the Beast is a chef’s-kiss-perfect combination of a crotchety doctor and the woman who wins his heart and turns out to have brains as well as good looks. And if you’re looking for a book that combines set-on-the-beach scenes, rich New Yorker lifestyle porn, mystery, romance, and friendship, allow me to recommend my own Big Summer. After spending years researching and writing my historical novel, Mrs. Everything, I was burnt out, exhausted, and ready for some fun. “I want to write a book that takes place in a weekend on the Cape, where a fat girl gets a happy ending!” I told my husband. The book turned out to be much more than that—my protagonist is an Instagram influencer, so I thought and wrote a lot about the ways the internet has changed the way we live and present and feel about ourselves. But overall, the book is pure escapist fun, with the push-pull of a friendship drama, a dollop of the-rich-are-different, a romance, a mystery, and some smoking-hot sex scenes. And yes, the fat girl gets a happy ending.

The important thing to remember is that any book that you read on the beach is, by definition, a beach book. You can plow your way through that difficult Russian classic you never got around to in graduate school, or you can go for escape and entertainment, without apology. Beach books are a primal pleasure, and there should never be a reason to feel bad about feeling good.