The Summer Pact

“In the days, months, and years to come, should we, the undersigned, find ourselves in a crisis, depression, or moment of deep sorrow or darkness, we hereby solemnly swear to reach out to one another before taking any drastic steps of making any permanent decisions. We make this pact in Summer’s name and memory.”

This is the weighty, formal rhetoric of the Summer Pact, which inspires the novel’s title and cements the friendship among the three surviving friends by establishing a promise to rely on one another in moments of distress. The legal language reflects Tyson’s voice and training, an example of how Giffin switches voices throughout as the chapters alternate among the first-person points of view of the three protagonists. The language also highlights the seriousness with which the friends take the pact and how binding they consider it.

“Perspective is a hard thing to come by when your heart is broken, and I feel myself completely unraveling, believing this is proof that I’m destined to be alone, maybe even unworthy of having a happy family.”

Hannah’s reaction to seeing Grady having sex with another woman demonstrates a key aspect of her character: She blames herself for his actions, in part due to her mother’s influence, introducing the theme of Managing Difficult Family Dynamics. This episode is Hannah’s low point, when she feels like her life is over, and that is when she remembers the Summer Pact. Grady’s betrayal is the inciting incident that sets the plot in motion.

“One thing life had taught me was how to keep my mouth shut. I was good at that.”

This passage captures Tyson’s outlook on expressing himself—as a Black man, he is held to different and higher standards and feels that he has to be extra careful in how he presents. This has most often led him to keep quiet. One of Tyson’s challenges over the course of the novel is to be more upfront and honest with his feelings, as he recognizes how his secrets have become a source of conflict and pain.

“Another part of me knows that I’ve built the vision for my entire future around Grady. Without him, I don’t know where I’m going or even who I am. The thought of figuring all that out is nothing short of terrifying.”

Each of the three central characters undergoes a dismantling of their life, beginning with the end of Hannah’s wedding plans, which she reflects on here. Keeping with a long tradition of self-discovery narratives, the characters go someplace new as they learn about or confront what they really want from life. The similar thematic impetus working out along the three different character arcs adds cohesion to the novel as they help and challenge one another.

“I bite my tongue, reminding myself that it no longer matters what Grady thinks or believes. I know the truth. I have the knowledge and the power.”

A strong theme in the book is Self-Awareness as an Aspect of Resilience as the characters gain the ability to feel secure about one’s abilities and choices. Hannah begins to learn this lesson when she breaks up with Grady and starts to reorient her life. When he challenges her, she takes the first steps on her character arc of change by holding to what she knows and not letting him gaslight her. Power over one’s future and choices will be important to all three of the protagonists.

“It occurs to me that it’s easier for me to say where I don’t want to go than where I do. Come to think of it—the same is true when it comes to my job. And my relationship. Maybe Hannah’s not the only one who needs a reset.”

The discussion over planning destinations for their trip reveals different aspects of each of the protagonists, reflecting their wishes. Tyson’s character arc emerges with the above realization and speaks to the novel’s themes of maturity and self-awareness as the action follows each character trying to determine, and then pursue, what they really want.

“I feel a burst of pride in my best friend. She is finally standing up for herself.”

One of the consequences of having the ensemble cast and the novel’s shifting points of view is that the conflicts give the characters opportunities to stand up for and support one another, as well as gently push the others along a path they need to take. Just as Hannah’s crisis begins the novel, she is one of the first to begin to navigate her path and discover what she wants, and the other characters follow this arc after her.

“No matter how often she proved me wrong, I couldn’t help hoping that someday she’d show me the warmth I craved from her. So I let it go. The way I always did.”

One of the conflicts that the three protagonists share is managing difficult family dynamics that have, in some way, shaped their personalities and character. All three learn to navigate a new and healthier dynamic with their families, which adds symmetry to the novel’s structure and conflicts. Here, Hannah addresses her difficult relationship with her mother and illustrates the approach she has always taken.

“There’s a different between your history and your legacy. Your history is what happened. Your legacy is what you set in motion.”

This lecture from Tyson’s father touches on a larger motif of how a life acquires meaning. Both Tyson and Hannah have parents who believe that one’s legacy depends on stature or being admired. Lainey’s career depends on her being liked. While the characters reflect on the history they shared with Summer and what that means to them, they also create a legacy for Summer in the end by joining the running team in her honor and raising money for suicide prevention.

“She really was our sun, wasn’t she? I mean, we were a foursome, but in a lot of ways, she was our center.”

Hannah’s reflection on Summer as their center works as an acknowledgment of the characters’ relationships as well as the premise of the book, as it is Summer—or, more precisely, the Summer Pact—that provides the plot device and narrative cohesion. Summer’s name also serves as a symbol of how her friends remember her.

“In that moment, I realized how much we take friendship for granted when we’re young, unable to grasp its significance until later in life. [After Summer’s death] […] Our perspective would never be the same. That’s the thing about innocence…Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

As much as the novel is an examination of the power of friendship, it also provides a reflection on innocence and developing resilience, classic coming-of-age themes. While innocence, once lost, can never be recovered, or so Hannah reflects, resilience can be learned or regained. Part of that recovery, the novel shows, can be effected through the support of powerful, lasting friendships.

“Although I relish the freedom of being my own man on my own timetable, I’m not quite sure what to do without all the usual goals that have guided my life.”

One of the ways that each protagonist matures throughout the story is by learning, sometimes through trial and error, what they want for their life or what they need to be happy. In realizing how he has internalized other people’s goals for him, Tyson, the narrator here, makes significant progress along his character arc. Without his parents’ expectations to direct him, Tyson needs to reconsider all his goals and decisions to determine what he wants.

“I’m not like you, Hannah. I’m not obsessed with this fairy-tale notion of marriage and family.”

One of the ways that the novel is successful in its characterization is by showing how different the major characters are. Lainey’s suspicion regarding conventional marriage proves to be her chief character obstacle and a major conflict for her. Ironically, in the Epilogue, it is Lainey who is engaged to be married, not Hannah.

“What makes a friendship? What makes us choose to love the people we love?”

This passage speaks to the novel’s prevailing theme about the power of friendship and takes up the question asked at the beginning about what lays the ground for enduring friendships. Asked here, through Lainey’s point of view, the question gains particular relevance because Lainey lacks family in her life; her friendships are the only enduring relationships she has.

“I can see now that we were both thinking about life the wrong way, and for the first time, I wonder if Summer had truly been passionate about medicine.”

Their trip serves as a catalyst for the three friends to change and grow, but it also serves as a way for the three friends to reminisce about Summer and reconsider their relationships with her from a new perspective. These discussions offer various points of connection and opportunities for reflection, as here, when Tyson reflects that he and Summer were both taught to be ambitious but that it’s possible neither had chosen their goals for themselves. To them, the tragedy of Summer’s death is a painful and vivid contrast to the opportunities they have to learn, make mistakes, recover, and grow.

“The Lainey effect, I think. Everyone follows her orders. People taking photos for her, hotel concierges, pretty girls in bars. Everyone.”

Though each of the three characters is working toward self-discovery during their trip, Lainey serves as the glue holding the three of them together. In this, she replaces Summer, who they previously thought of as their center. Tyson’s awareness of Lainey’s charm foreshadows his developing attraction to her, while the emphasis in this quote highlights the wide reach of her charisma.

“I still feel guilty—like I’m not being a fun date. I tell myself that’s ridiculous. I’m allowed to be tired. I’m allowed to change my mind about what I want to happen tonight. And I’m allowed to respond in a way that might not please a man.”

As part of the three protagonists’ quests for self-determination and self-discovery, Hannah’s character arc entails parting from the notion that she has to act in certain ways to please others. Being able to act on her feelings and inclinations is at first novel for her, but being able to do so moves her character arc forward to new discoveries, like falling in love.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, though. After all, there has never been any pretense or bullshit with Lainey. She is exactly who she has always said she is.”

While Lainey is also, on this trip, learning what she wants and needs, unlike Hannah and Tyson, she has never let other people dictate her wants and needs to her. However, like the others, Lainey has been hiding her wishes or denying what she really wants and pretending to want what she thinks she should want. Tyson’s appreciation for Lainey’s lack of pretense about who she is at her core, however, is part of what attracts him to her.

“Our pact, along with this trip, is about the sanctity of our friendship, but it’s also about following our guts. […] It’s my turn now. I need to be true to myself.”

As she gets ready to meet Olivia, Hannah realizes that this trip is, in addition to strengthening their friendships, an opportunity for reflection and self-discovery for each of the friends. Both are key themes of the novel, but deciding to follow her wishes, for once, signals a big movement along Hannah’s character arc.

“I tell myself […] that she’s the same old Lainey. But […] [m]aybe last night’s glimpse of her—stripped bare of all her usual bravado and defense mechanisms—is closer to the real Lainey.”

Along with the movements of developing self-awareness and self-discovery, the trip also allows the protagonists the opportunity to learn more about one another. As he reflects that he might finally be seeing more of Lainey’s interior self, rather than the image she projects to the world, Tyson’s realization suggests that the most viable and authentic relationships are those in which people are honestly themselves and not acting out a persona. Although the friends have always seen themselves as close, this recognition of a new level of intimacy through honesty is a shift for them.

“You can have whatever you want, Lainey. The world is your oyster. Just be certain. Be clear. With yourself.”

Tyson’s advice to Lainey speaks to the theme of self-discovery. In witnessing the ways the characters encourage one another to grow, Tyson has realized that Lainey is avoiding certain feelings with substance use and sex, and he encourages her to greater self-awareness. He applies what he has learned about defining one’s desires from others to try to help Lainey move forward.

“I want peace…and honesty…and the freedom to be myself. Something I’ve never truly felt before. With anyone.”

Reflecting on his growing relationship with Lainey, Tyson’s realization about his own goals comes shortly after he instructs Lainey to do the same. Acknowledging his wish to live authentically is a crucial moment in Tyson’s character arc, unspooling in parallel with Hannah’s, whose epiphany is similar.

“As horrible as she looks, and no matter what happens from here, I’m grateful for this moment. It’s something we never had with Summer.”

When Lainey hits rock bottom and ends up in the hospital, Hannah recalls the device that has helped bind the friends together and bring them on this trip: their shared bereavement over Summer and their shared guilt that they couldn’t help. This reference invokes the Summer Pact, the unifying device and premise, while also reflecting on what the friends never had the opportunity to do for Summer.