A heart full of thanks to my agent, Marly Rusoff, who has believed in me from the very first day and has been a warm and fierce advocate for me and my work. My favorite of her heroic acts was introducing me to my editor, Tara Singh Carlson. Tara, thank you for your patience in coaxing this novel out of me and then shaping it into something that feels exactly right. What a gift it has been to be guided by your big brain and keen sense of story.
Thank you to my team at G. P. Putnam’s Sons—Ashley Di Dio, Katie McKee, Nicole Biton, Ashley McClay, Alexis Welby, Molly Pieper, Emily Mileham, Maija Baldauf, Erin Byrne, Claire Winecoff, and the great Sally Kim. The kindness you have shown me and the effort you have put into getting my books out into the world have been staggering. Special thanks to the sales force for working so enthusiastically to get me on the shelves.
Thank you to the brilliant cover designer Sanny Chiu for taking such care to create covers that make my books pop off the shelves; and thank you to Aja Pollock, my whip-smart copy editor, whose understanding of grammar and how time works completely outshines my own. Thank you to Ashley Tucker, the interior designer who made my books such a lovely visual reading experience.
In the category of people who are there when I need them—I am so grateful to psychologist Brook Picotte, who vetted Dr. Judy and Sam’s state of mind. Thank you to David Wilson, who talked hedges and surfing with me and never asked why. And to my sister, Stefanie Wilson, who took me in during a revision panic and made me snacks while I wrote in her attic. There really is nothing like a sister.
Thank you, always, to my writing friends for standing up and cheering me on. I am so happy to be working in a field where the better we all do, the better we all do.
The book world is full of so many bighearted and creative people, and I am so thankful for their kindness. Thank you to the independent booksellers, the librarians, the Instagrammers, the TikTokers, and the whole world of book reviewers for all you do to get books into readers’ hands. Your work is surely paving the path to a better world.
To my sons, only one of whom has read this book (yes, cash changed hands), thank you for all the ways you have bent and grown around the recent downturn in household services. Thank you for asking about my work and encouraging me along the way. I am beyond proud of the young men you’ve become.
Tom. What can I say? If you played the guitar, someone else would have scooped you up a decade before I had the chance. So thank you for being the best part of my life and for not playing the guitar.
Same Time Next Summer
Annabel Monaghan
A Conversation with Annabel Monaghan
Discussion Questions
A Playlist
A Conversation with Annabel Monaghan
What inspired you to write Same Time Next Summer?
The Philadelphia Story has always been one of my favorite movies. At the highest level, it’s the story of Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) who comes home to get married and finds her ex-husband C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) living next door. When I was a kid, I loved it for the funny dialogue and the scandalous way the adults were always making bad choices. When I was older, it made me think about how we move through heartbreak—both in our own relationships and within our families—and often reinvent ourselves to keep our hearts safe in the future.
I wanted to write a story that explores how heartbreak shapes identity. I find that when people are about nine years old, they know exactly who they are. But, of course, life happens. We grow, we rub up against the world, we get our hearts broken, and we might even be let down by the people we trust the most. And all of that friction shapes who we are as adults. I am fascinated by the lengths we go to in order to reframe our life stories and reimagine ourselves. Some people can do this for their whole lives and safely inhabit a new, false persona. But I think the truth usually surfaces, and the happiest people are living their most authentic lives.
In your debut novel, Nora Goes Off Script, the main characters fall in love later in life as adults. Why did you decide for the relationship in Same Time Next Summer to be about first love? What was your favorite part of writing this dynamic?
The great thing about first love is that we don’t know enough to protect ourselves from it. We dive in heart-first, and it feels endless until it ends. In my memory, you don’t even go looking for first love, it just sort of finds you and, once it gathers momentum, it feels inevitable. While I loved writing about adults later in life because of all of the complications Nora and Leo brought into their relationship, I also loved writing about first love because of its singularity of purpose. First love is a highly focused freight train of emotions, and I wanted to write about those very real feelings with the respect they deserve. Sometimes first love lasts, mostly it doesn’t. But it informs how we approach love in the future.
Sam’s family home on Long Island, New York, feels like the perfect oasis to escape to for the summer. Is this beach town based on a real place?
Oak Shore is a made-up Long Island town. Long Island felt like a perfect place to set this story because of its natural beauty and its proximity to Manhattan. When I think of Long Island in the summer, I think of hydrangea growing like weeds and the dunes moving with the breeze on the beach. I imagined a lot of sensory memories being stored on those beaches, and it felt like a good place to fall in love.
When we return to where our childhoods happened, it’s hard not to slip back in time. I grew up in Los Angeles and went to the beach most days. The ocean was not right outside my door—I drove there—but the anticipation that I felt driving to the beach became part of the experience. Sam walks through the dunes that give way to the sand and the ocean in the same way I drove down the California Incline onto the Pacific Coast Highway. There is so much sensory memory tied up in this for me. When I am at that beach, the smell of the air and the rough feel of dried salt on my skin whispers at me about who I used to be.
Music plays an important role in Sam and Wyatt’s love story. Do you have a connection to music or the arts, and why did you choose to include this aspect in Same Time Next Summer?
I love music as a listener (and as an awkward but enthusiastic dancer), but I have no talent for it and don’t play an instrument. But still, I find that certain songs contain full years of my life, and others can take me back to a single moment. This is particularly true of summer music: songs that played over and over on the radio on long, lazy days can bring back the smell of Coppertone and the feel of hot sand under my feet. There are studies that show that the music we listened to during our teenage years actually attaches itself to our emotional memory in a much deeper way than music we hear for the first time as adults. If anything was going to unlock the fortress around Sam’s heart, it would be music.
Who was your favorite character to write, and why?
Probably Wyatt. He’s a bit introverted like I am, and I liked watching him bide his time with Sam, both as a kid and as an adult. He keeps his feelings hidden for a lot of the novel, but I could always tell where he was emotionally. Also, it was fun writing about a person with a secret, who isn’t exactly lying but isn’t exactly being forthcoming either.
Why did you decide to structure the novel between the past and present, and from Sam and Wyatt’s perspectives in the past? How do you think this storytelling technique adds to the reading experience?
Memory is such a subjective thing. If I told you the story of an old summer romance of mine, I’d give you the general idea of when it was and where we were, but I wouldn’t do it justice because I can’t quite see the details from this far away. I might tell you that I really liked him, but I would trivialize the whole thing because I don’t remember exactly the way it felt when he looked at me or what it was like when we broke up. This is especially true for this story because of how much work Sam has done to dismiss the importance of her relationship with Wyatt. I thought it was important for the reader to experience what falling in love was like for Sam and Wyatt in real time so they could understand why it still mattered.
Although this is a story about Sam and Wyatt, Same Time Next Summer also feels like a story of the complicated nature of family. Why is it important that family be represented in this story? How does it inform Sam and Wyatt’s choices and behaviors?
I grew up in a family and I’m now raising one, and I can tell you one thing for sure: a family is a complex living organism. Everything that happens to any family member affects the others. Our moods, our victories, and our horrible mistakes shape how everyone else in the family grows. We are limited by one another’s beliefs and thrust forward by one another’s successes. This is why family stories intrigue me so much. Human beings who are woven together by proximity, genetics, and love have a lot to sort out.