Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

It’s almost religious, that belief, that faith that a piece of silk or denim or cotton jersey could disguise your flaws and amplify your assets and make you both invisible and seen, just another normal woman in the world; a woman who deserves to get what she wants.

When readers started talking to me about BIG SUMMER, I thought they’d have questions about friendship, about the themes of transformation and revenge, about the way the Internet can help and hurt us on our quest for self-esteem. Instead, the number one question by far is, “Do the clothes you describe, the ones that Daphne gets to wear, actually exist? And if they do, where can I buy them?” The short answer is that the clothes aren’t real. I made them up. I thought about what I’d most like to wear, the clothes that I most wish existed (pockets are, of course, the Holy Grail, and who doesn’t love polka dots?) I stewed over why those clothes don’t exist (are fat women really so hard to dress? Don’t these designers know we’ve got money to spend? WHY DOES THIS DRESS HAVE NO POCKETS?) Then I thought about why clothes matter, about how you can feel in a dressing room, the way you can believe that every outfit has the power to transform you, to serve as armor and a lens that shows your best and truest self. Clothes that can make you both invisible and seen are what I think every plus-size woman wants. Maybe they’re what every woman wants. Finally, this is not spon-con, butI should also add that the closest I’ve come to Daphne’s imaginary wardrobe is eShakti, where you can customize dresses, and choose the neckline and the sleeve length. And add pockets!

The trick of the Internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real… which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all. The more followers I got, the more I thought about that contradiction; the more my followers praised me for being fearless and authentic, the less fearless and authentic I believed myself to be in real life.

I’ve been on these Interwebs a long, long time. I had a blog in the aughts, I joined Twitter in ‘09, I’ve seen the rise of Facebook and Instagram, and the fall of MySpace. God help me, I’m even on TikTok. Through it all, every time anyone woud advise me, or tell me what readers want from authors, the answer was always ‘authenticity.’ They want to peek behind the curtain, they want to see what your life is really like! Except I don’t think that’s actually what anyone wants. What people want is a version of the truth, but not the whole messy, complicated reality. We want to see how that movie star decorates her kitchen but we don’t want to see her dirty dishes or the dog hair dust bunnies on the floor; we want to hear the story of how the famous singer met her husband, but we don’t want to watch them argue for twenty minutes about why he can’t ever hang up his wet towels, or why she keeps inviting her mother on their vacations when he can’t stand her mother. We want to see enough of the truth that we feel we’ve learned something but not so much that our illusions are shattered. It’s confusing! When you add in the idea of ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ -- the way that, even if you don’t feel happy or confident, you need to appear that way, for your own sanity, and to keep your followers happy -- it gets even more confusing. Finding that sweet spot, that “right amount of real,” as Daphne puts it, is a challenge for any woman. For a young woman, just starting her life online, it’s a giant challenge. It’s interesting to consider how much, or how little, Daphne succeeds.

“I like to have a martini / Two at the very most / Three and I’m under the table / Four and I’m under the host.”

This is one of my all-time favorite Dorothy Parker poems. I think of it often, and I’m glad I finally got to use it in a book!

Name five things you can see. My mother. My father. The dining room table. The newspaper. The banana bread. Name four things you can touch. The skin of my arm. The fabric of the dining room chair cover. The wood of the kitchen table, the floor beneath my feet. The three things I could hear were the sound of cars on Riverside Drive, the scratch of my father’s pen on the page, and my own heartbeat, still thundering in my ears. I could smell banana bread and my own acrid, anxious sweat.

This is an actual technique that I was taught by an actual therapist (and, after BIG SUMMER was published, I learned that it’s being taught in schools, in yoga classes, just about everywhere!) It’s a way of centering yourself, putting yourself back in the here and now if you’re panicking or freaking out or worrying about the future or dwelling on the past. Feel your feet on the floor, listen to whatever you can hear. Notice the world around you, and it’s guaranteed to calm you down. Try it the next time you need a little zen!

In space, nobody could hear you scream; on the Internet, nobody could tell if you were lying.

I’m very proud of this line. It’s funny, and it’s mostly true. And if you don’t believe me, spend ten minutes scrolling through Facebook, looking at vacation pictures and school photos. Then think about how many pictures were rejected before the poster chose what she wanted you to see. Think about how the pictures were cropped, edited, brightened or dimmed or otherwise changed. Think about how easy it is to accept what you’re seeing as true, and how you have to consciously pull yourself out of the picture to remember that what you’re seeing is the result of choices, that it’s not just the truth.

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re angry, everything looks like a target. There are a lot of angry people in the world. And these days, they’re all online.

This is another gem straight from my therapist’s lips to the page of a book to you. There are a lot of angry people. They are all online. And being a keyboard warrior can make even the meekest man or woman brave enough to hurl invective from the safe remove of anonymity. It’s why I try to spend a part of every day in the real world, interacting in real time. It’s good to remember that Twitter doesn’t equal reality.

“Everyone tries to put the best versions of themselves across. To fake it. And when they’re not doing that, they’re sitting behind their screens, passing judgment and feeling superior to whoever they think’s being sexist or racist that day.”

Another drawback of the Internet is the way it lets us perform activism; the way it lures us into believing that simply commenting about racism or sexism -- or just liking someone else’s condemnation of the Twitter villain of the day, or just adding a #BLM hashtag to our bio -- is the same as actually doing something. It’s another example of the fakery that online life invites: if you *look* woke, it takes away the pressure to *be* woke. And, as I’ve said before, it’s a lot easier to look good than to be good!

“When you have excluded the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth,”

This is a restated version of Occam’s Razor. Eliminate the impossible, and what’s left is the truth. I think about this a lot (especially when my kids are trying to pull one over on me!)

I’m not brave all the time. No one is. We’ve all been disappointed; we’ve all had our hearts broken, and we’re all just doing our best. Make sure you have people who love you, the real you, not the Instagram you. If you can’t be brave, pretend to be brave, and if you can’t do that yet, know that you aren’t alone. Everyone you see is struggling. Nobody has it all figured out.

There are parts of my novels that are completely invented, and then there are parts that are ripped directly from my life, and this is one. As the mother of daughters, I think a lot about what to tell my girls about how to handle themselves online. As a mother, I think about what I want to show my daughters; as a public (ish) figure, I think about my responsibilities to the young woman and girls who are going to see what I have to say. These are the words I try to live by: if you can’t be brave, pretend to be brave, and if you can’t do that yet, know that you aren’t alone.

Acknowledgments

IN CONCLUSION: I started writing BIG SUMMER after I’d finished a big, sprawling novel that took place over seventy years and followed thee generations of women. That was my swing-for-the-fences book, and when it was done, I told my husband, “I just want to write something that happens over a weekend, where a fat girl gets a happy ending.” That was the seed that grew into Daphne and Drue and Nick….and, for a book that I’d initially thought about as a light-hearted, romantic romp, it turned out to have some things to say, about friendship, about the internet, about the differences between the way we are and the way we seem, and what we show the world. I hope that this book entertained you, and that it gave you some things to think about. My next book, THAT SUMMER, is out on 5/11: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55467800-that-summer