Writing Barefoot

            In my house, we call Barefoot “Elin Hilderbrand’s Greatest Hits” because it brings together my favorite themes: the parenting of small children, friendship between women, and falling in love with the “wrong” person.  And let us not forget an important presence in all of my books: summertime.  I’m referring here to “summertime” as the American fantasy: corn on the cob, long beach days, sunburned skin on cool, crisp sheets, fireworks on the Fourth of July, front porches and back decks, bicycle rides and blueberry picking. 

            Any writer will tell you, a book comes from many places.  My novel Barefoot started with a recurring middle-of-the-night fear of mine: That I would die and leave my three children motherless.  They would still have a father, of course, but that is, pointedly, not the same.  I am the one who masterminds the family’s daily survival.  I am a control freak, overseeing every detail of the kids’ lives – when the library books are due, what level for swimming lessons, who likes mayonnaise on his sandwich and who likes mustard.  Without me, the kids would become hapless ragamuffins – and then my husband would remarry and someone else would do an (inferior) job of raising my children.  And I, formerly the most important person in their lives, would be forgotten.  These fears are encapsulated in my main character, Vicki Stowe, a 32-year old mother of two boys, who is diagnosed with lung cancer.  Vicki spends the summer trying to heal in the tiny cottage on Nantucket where she spent summers growing up.  She is joined by her sister, Brenda, newly fired, and her best friend, Melanie, newly pregnant and newly separated.  These three women are so focused on their respective crises that they find themselves unable to care for the children.  They hire 22-year-old Josh Flynn, Nantucket native and rising senior at Middlebury, to babysit the boys – and, boom, you have a novel.  (Full disclosure is that I did, in the summer of 2004, have a male babysitter or “manny,” as we called him – and he may write his own novel someday.)

            I set out to write about these characters and I put them, intentionally, in a house that is way too small for all of them, in order to turn up the heat, as it were.  In any book worth its salt, the “plot” develops from the characters, and it was through Vicki, Brenda, Melanie, and Josh that I learned my novel was, ultimately, about healing.  Healing through medicine, through sisterhood and friendship, healing through love, and – this is a beach book, remember! – healing that happens when you’re in the place you love better than any other.  As my character Brenda says, “Spending the summer on Nantucket might cure anything: cancer, ruined careers, badly ended love affairs.”

            Yes, it might.