The Beach Club
49 pages • 1-hour read
Elin HilderbrandThe Beach Club
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
Authorial Context: How The Beach Club Came to Be
Hilderbrand was born on July 17, 1969, in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where she was also raised. During her childhood, she spent summers on Cape Cod with her father, stepmother, and several siblings until her father died in a plane crash in 1986. Hilderbrand remembers these childhood summers as idyllic. She went on to get an undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University and worked in New York City before moving to Nantucket in 1993. There, she met Chip Cunningham, who, like Mack Petersen, was the manager of a beach club hotel. They two married in 1994 and traveled extensively before settling on the island. In 1998, Hilderbrand enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop but felt “miserable” away from home in the workshop’s ruthless environment (Vaughan, Kelly. “Elin Hilderbrand On Swan Song, Retiring.” Today, 2024). On advice from a therapist, she began writing a novel about Nantucket: “On the final day of the program, a literary agent named Michael Carlisle visited Hilderbrand’s class. He had read a draft of Hilderbrand’s book, The Beach Club […This] would be the start of a 25-year working relationship with Carlisle, who has represented her ever since” (Vaughan).
The Beach Club was successful, thanks in part to a positive mention in People magazine. Hilderbrand signed on to write more books, but her career did not truly take off until 2006, when she switched publishing houses for her fifth novel, Barefoot. As Today notes, since then, “Twenty five of her thirty novels became New York Times best sellers and seven debuted in the No. 1 position […] She has sold over 20 million books” (Vaughan). This period was not without personal challenges. From 2000 to 2018, Hilderbrand raised three children, went through a divorce, and survived breast cancer. In 2019, her novel Summer of ‘69 debuted and became a New York Times bestseller, and New York magazine dubbed Hilderbrand “Queen of Beach Reads” (Heaney, Katie. “How Elin Hilderbrand Became the ‘Queen of Beach Reads.’” The Cut, 2019). Although “beach read” is often used semi-pejoratively to denote novels of questionable depth, David Forrer, a member of Hilderbrand’s agent team, argues that she has “invented the elevated beach read. People now will think of a beach read as something that has a great plot and great characters and great dialogue” (Vaughan, Kelly. “30 Books and 25 Years Later, Elin Hilderbrand Is Ready for a Vacation.” Today.com, 2024). After her 30th novel, Swan Song (2024), Hilderbrand decided she would no longer focus on Nantucket in her fiction but would continue to write novels.
Geographical Context: Nantucket Island
Nantucket is a small island off the eastern coast of the US state of Massachusetts. It is known for its scenic beachfront overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The town, also named Nantucket and first settled by European colonists in 1659, and its surrounding area are designated a Natural Historic Landmark District due to Nantucket’s important architecture and historic landmarks. For many decades, Nantucket was the center of the US whaling industry; when other ports began to eclipse it in the early 19th century, Nantucket fell into decline until approximately the 1890s, when beachfront hotels began to make it a destination for wealthy New Englanders. Now, Nantucket hosts a summer colony that dramatically inflates the island’s population by nearly 90,000 people for the season. The island is accessible by both sea and air.
The Beach Club broadly presents a true-to-life depiction of Nantucket, from its emphasis on the tourism industry to its smaller details. Hurricane Freida is fictitious, but two significant storms did hit Nantucket in 1991: Hurricane Bob made landfall in August, and in October, a severe nor’easter called “The Perfect Storm” caused millions of dollars in damage. Freida is likely an imaginative combination of these two events. Hilderbrand also populates her book with several of the town’s landmarks, including “Brant Point Lighthouse” (29), “The Pacific National Bank” (32), “The Hadwen House” (33), and the “Unitarian Church on Orange Street” (116). Her characters describe the town’s unique features, including its “gray-shingled buildings” (29), “cobblestone streets” (43), and “antique homes, […] postage-stamp gardens and friendship stairs, […] screened-in porches and widow’s walks and transom windows” (345). The influx of visitors is also evident; the novel describes “the streets of town [being] clogged with cars coming off the ferry, bicyclists, and pedestrians, people holding their maps, crossing the street without looking” (109). Nantucket’s environment, from the beach to the sand dunes to the ocean, also looms large in The Beach Club:
Over the winter, northeasterly winds blew the sand into smooth, rounded dunes, in some places six and eight feet high […] The Beach Club sat on the north shore of the island, on Nantucket Sound, where the water was as flat and placid as a fishing pond. The white sand was clean and wide (2).
After her death, Lacey’s ashes are spread off Altar Rock, where “Sankaty Lighthouse, Nantucket Harbor, and in the distance, Great Point Light” are visible (327). Before Maribel leaves Nantucket, she jogs around all the beaches and through the town’s streets, naming them. This specificity enlivens the character of the island for the reader.
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