The Summer Place

by Jennifer Weiner

Ruby understood that, unlike Molly, one of her roommates, unlike Gabe, she was cosplaying poverty, experiencing it with a safety net underneath her, which meant she wasn’t really experiencing it at all. She was lucky; she was privileged.

She knew that Gabe hated cilantro, that he’d been raised nominally Catholic but never went to church, that he was bisexual and could understand but not speak Spanish.

I love this detail. Bisexual representation in a heterosexual relationship.

Once, she’d been deliciously curvy, even though she’d wasted years despairing of her body, trying to wish and diet and Jazzercise the weight away; starving off the same ten or fifteen pounds that always came back, usually with friends.

She tried to be grateful for everything that her body could still do, that she could still drive and carry her own groceries; that she could walk. That she could swim. That she was still here at all.

I was good, Sarah would think. And I might have been great, if I’d worked for it.

Alice was that confident that she’d be able to sell the book Ronnie had agreed to call The Summer Sisters (Summer being the surname that Rosie, the fictional matriarch, uses to replace Shulevitz when she reaches New York City).

Perhaps an homage to Judy Blume here?

Was he gay? Was he bi? Was he—oh, God—into hobbits? A hobbitsexual?

Dead

When Sarah had been little, she’d had a fantasy of being constantly observed; watched by an invisible but surely vast audience as the star of the story of her own life, a story that someone else had already written and that it was her job to perform. Here’s Sarah on her first day of school, walking into her new classroom. Who will be her friends? Here’s Sarah on soccer-team tryout day; here she is at her piano recital; here she is in the cafeteria at school. With every new development in her life, she would imagine an audience watching, with approval or shock or delight. When she performed in front of an audience for the first time, at her first recital, she felt, instead of stage fright, a click of recognition. Ah, she thought, looking out at the assembled faces as they waited for her to begin. There they are.

Sarah also pictured herself as an observer; that she was both the star and someone waiting to see how the action would unfold. Oh, she’d think to herself, so that’s what happens next.

Maybe you couldn’t get the life you wanted, but you could have a life you wanted.

She hadn’t decided how it felt to have her life mined for fiction, and had been swinging between feeling deeply flattered and slightly exploited. She could hear her mother in her head: That’s what writers do.