The Beach Club

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.