**Next book for your nightstand queue** alert! Wading River native Brooke Lea Foster is set to release her newest novel All The Summers In Between next month. Critics are calling her novel a “dynamic examination of friendship”, and “a summer book to read all year long.”
All The Summers In Between takes place in the Hamptons and in a dual timeline format. Moving between the years 1967 and 1977, the novel chronicles main characters Margot, the classic wealthy summer girl, and Thea, a “hardworking and steady local girl.” Foster touches upon female friendship, marriage, and a version of the Hamptons some of us were never able to experience. Let’s learn more about Brooke Lea Foster and how the East End will work as the setting in All The Summers In Between.
Q: Where on Long Island are you from? Tell me more about where you grew up.
A:I’m from Wading River. Exit 68 on the LIE. I grew up on one of those tiny roads by the public beach and our neighborhood had a small private beach on the Long Island Sound. It was 168 steps down the cliff to the sand but when we got there, we would be the only people in sight. As a kid, I thought this was so boring. As an adult, I can’t believe I was so lucky to grow up like that! Now we have a summer house in South Jamesport on the North Fork. My dad’s side of the family lives or summer in Montauk, and I go to Road D in Southampton as often as I can!
Q: Why did you choose the Hamptons as the setting for All The Summers In Between?
A: My parents met in Montauk in the early seventies, and all my aunts and uncles were there during that time. I grew up hearing all these legendary stories of Andy Warhol’s mythical parties, how the Rolling Stones stayed at the Memory Motel, how different the Hamptons were back then. It made me curious: What was it really like in the sixties and seventies in East Hampton and Amagansett, Montauk and Sag Harbor? Once I started doing research, interviewing local historians and individuals who lived there at the time, I realized it was very different. There was still traffic, of course. There were still city people everywhere. But it was also artsy and creative, and I loved how locals and city people seemed to fall into the same parties and bonfires at the beach. I wanted to center my story on a hardscrabble, local girl, the daughter of a plumber, who becomes best friends one summer with a wealthy city girl whose parents are in media. The Hamptons are interesting in that way. There are the people who work in the beach towns and the people who can afford to live there, but sometimes their kids end up being camp counselors at the same sailing camp. I loved the idea of these two girls getting at some of the area’s class divisions through one pair of friends who fill a hole in each other’s lives, despite their differences.
But honestly, I set my story on Eastern Long Island because it’s where my heart is. I’m a beach girl, and I grew up spending all of my carefree summers on the beaches out east. Part of my summers were spent in Montauk with my cousins at Gin Beach and Ditch Plains. I love the unspoiled miles of ocean the Hamptons offers, and I love Peconic Bay and Gardiner’s Bay and how the light shimmers off the water in summer. I wanted my characters to harbor this terrible secret, and I wanted the land to play a big part in what they got away with, and what tore them apart. And it is. The traumatic moment that breaks apart their friendship happens on a boat in Gardiner’s Bay.
Q: Should our readers look forward to any local -Easter Eggs, so to speak, in the plotline?
A: Oh yes! So much of the local area will be recognizable! My characters ride their bikes to Indian Wells Beach, which they refer to as “Asparagus Beach,” since that’s what they called it in the 1970s for the throngs of single people who flocked there. The two main characters, Thea and Margot, work at a local record shop, which is in East Hampton in one of the shopfronts on Newtown Lane. Thea’s house is on Gardiner’s Bay – you’ll have to use your imagination for which one — and when she meets her husband in the earlier timeline, they have pizza in Amagansett in what I’m imagining to be Astro’s Pizza and Felice’s Restaurant. Also, one of the highlights: Thea visits the famous 30-acre oceanfront compound where Andy Warhol was living in Montauk in the 1970s called Eothen. Writing that scene was so much fun, especially creating dialogue around the artist.
Q: Is there anything you’d like our readers to know about this new read?
A: I think I’ve always been fascinated with female friendships and how some relationships come so natural to us, and some are more complicated and feel traumatic. I mean, from our earliest years, girls are made to feel like they’re part of the group—or not. But then there are the friends that sink their teeth into you, particularly in your teenage years or early twenties. You feel like you can’t live without them. I remember feeling so close to my friends at those times, almost like I leaned on them to define me and elevate me and make me feel more interesting.
As I grew older though I needed less from those close intense friendships of my youth, and I thought those changes were interesting. I chose to explore two friends during the late 60s and 70s because it allowed me to go deeper into how women’s lives have changed in the last fifty years. I’m fascinated by history and what we can learn from it, finding patterns in the past and looking for wisdom in what our mothers and grandmothers got right and wrong. Plus, I set the book in the past because I didn’t want my friends to be scrolling social media or texting. I wanted them to spend hours on the phone. To send postcards to one another. To examine what friendship looked like without as many distractions. Mostly, though, I wanted to zoom in on the times, and explore how the time period in which we live impacts our choices and identity. In the late 1960s, Thea and Margot are riding the wave of protest and feminism. There are marches on Washington, Betty Friedan formed the National Organization for Women, women are having a political moment, so these young women have great reason to think that their lives will be dramatically different from their mothers. But ten years later, the 1970s felt like one big hangover. After all the bra-burning and verbal tearing down of the patriarchy in the 60s, women living a decade later still found themselves facing “the problem with no name.” They were doing most of the housework, taking on the bulk of the parenting and their lives felt eerily like their mother’s had. So where did that leave two friends who started out idealistic and close, and then find themselves jaded and distant? That point of tension gripped me.
Brooke Lea Foster will be visiting the Bridgehampton location of Barnes & Noble on June 15th, BookHampton on June 22nd, and speaking at the Quogue Author Series on July 14th. Don’t miss a chance to hear Foster speak about her forthcoming novel! You can preorder All The Summers In Between here!
Brooke Lea Foster is the author of previously published novels, Summer Darlings and On Gin Lane. She studied at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Her articles have been published in The New York Time, Good Housekeeping, The Washington Post Magazine, and many others.
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