During her second year in the program, she decided to write about Nantucket and began what would be her first book, “The Beach Club,” which was released in 2000. She wasn’t happy there, didn’t like the area, found her classmates overly competitive and missed her husband and the island. Knowing that she wanted to write professionally, Hilderbrand applied to and was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She did some writing on Nantucket and in the off-season, she and Cunningham traveled the world. She liked teaching, but after spending a summer on Nantucket, where she met her now ex-husband, (and father of her children) Chip Cunningham, she taught for one more year then moved to the island permanently. From there she took a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing company in New York City, hated it, and decided she should teach, since she knew she would enjoy reading and writing with kids, and it would allow her to have summers off. That was my goal.”Īfter excelling academically in high school, Hilderbrand went to Johns Hopkins University, where she majored in creative writing. “My brother and I went to work in a Halloween costume factory that next summer and it was, as you can imagine, really bad because I was used to being on the Cape and having these idyllic summers.” It was while working in the factory, with plenty of time to think, that she made a decision: “I was bemoaning my reversal of fortune and thinking that I could not believe this had happened to me when I decided that if I do nothing else with my life, I am going to find a way to spend every summer at the beach. “Everything changed,” she says matter of factly of the year she turned 16. “Then we either went out for dinner or stayed home for dinner, and if we stayed home for dinner, we would walk down to the beach to watch the sunset like it was a Broadway show.”īut those summertime rituals came to a sudden end when, in the fall of 1985, Hilderbrand’s father, a 41-year-old tax attorney, died in a small plane crash in inclement weather. “They were very interested in us doing everything as a family, so we had all of these rituals that went with summer and that made it very special,” she recalls. Every July, they would rent a home in Brewster on Cape Cod. Her parents divorced when she was five, and she lived with her mother and two brothers during the week, and her father, his second wife, and their two children on the weekends and for one month each summer. Hilderbrand grew up in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, one of five children in a blended family. The prolific author, often referred to as the “queen of beach reads,” since her novels (21 and counting) are always set during the summer and almost exclusively on Nantucket-the island she has called home for 25 years-leans back on the couch and explains why the warmest season figures so prominently in her books and her life. Finally settling in on the comfy sofa strategically placed near the pool in her oasis-like backyard that abuts a vast expanse of conservation land, Hilderbrand, 49, takes off her University of South Carolina visor-a nod to her oldest child, Maxwell, who was to begin his freshman year there in less than a week (“I don’t think he’s even started packing,” she shares with a laugh)-and runs her fingers through her shoulder-length hair before pulling it back in a low ponytail and putting her visor back on. “I’m sorry things are a bit hectic,” she says as she clears a few items from the counter and fields a series of phone calls two of which are from her middle son, Dawson (she has three children-18, 16, and 12), ironing out details about what time he needs to be picked up from his summer job at the Nantucket Boat Basin. It is late morning and the only indication that the fit, attractive blonde is a New York Times best-selling author is the MacBook Pro that sits open atop her brightly colored mosaic-tiled kitchen island countertop, flanked by a stack of writing pads and an assortment of books about the year 1969, which is research for her next novel, “Summer of ’69,” which will be released in June 2019. This, she explains, is a pretty typical start to her day. Before that, she had run six miles and taken a barre class. Buzzing around her spacious kitchen, Elin Hilderbrand is poetry (or would it be fiction?) in motion: washing and preparing corn on the cob, tomatoes, lettuce and other vegetables and fruits she had picked up at a local farmers market just an hour earlier.
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