Known for her long career in sapphic fiction, author Jennifer Dugan returns to YA romance with Summer Girls after some time spent in adult romance and graphic novels. In Newport, R.I., local Cassandra Adler fights a slowly losing battle against the gentrifiers, led by the Gordon family. Even if Cassandra’s family has a complicated relationship with the Gordon patriarch, she never expected he would come to her with a job: look after his grounded influencer daughter, Birdie, who crashed her car while livestreaming and now has to slum it in Newport for the summer. Despite a blossoming connection, the girls must navigate their different backgrounds to find out if their relationship is something real or destined to be just a summer fling. PW spoke with Dugan about finding connection in class differences, the ethics of being a teen online in the modern world, and how her writing process differs depending on genre.
Much of this book, and subsequently Birdie and Cass’s romance, is set against the backdrop of wealth disparity and a gentrifying town. How did you want their relevant places in society and Birdie’s wealthy family’s influence on the town to shape their relationship?
I have a lot of ties to Newport, and so the gentrification and Airbnb-ification of the area has changed the community in different ways. It’s made things very expensive and difficult for the locals. I really wanted to explore that, with people on both sides, like Cass’s father—who is somewhat reliant on Birdie’s father, in that he works for him as an assistant, handyman, and general contractor. I wanted to show the differences in these worlds and that there’s sometimes this symbiotic relationship, whether you want there to be or not. I always love telling opposites attract stories like this, ones that kind of shatter the stereotypes of what’s going on behind the scenes. Both girls start the book with these very set ideas about each other, and I like to see how that evolves throughout the course of things as they understand each other’s position more and try to find a middle ground.
Social media is used to spread the word about Cass’s family’s Affordable Housing Coalition but also has an overall negative effect on Birdie’s influencer life. What was the most important thing you wanted to portray about the girls’ relationships to social media?
I really wanted to show both sides of it. It can be a force for good and it can put the word out about these kinds of initiatives and getting involved in your community, but it can also cause a lot of problems. The things that are on the internet... kids don’t always realize they can be forever. Some of the stuff that Birdie says and does is going to follow her and set expectations of how people think she really is and behaves. It can make your life harder depending on how you use it. Social media is definitely a force and it’s here to stay, but we have to be mindful of how we use it and the pitfalls.
Birdie’s job as an influencer means her entire life is under pressure to be commercialized and packaged as content, which includes her sexuality. The ethics of teen influencing is still a fairly new topic—what drew you to discuss this?
I have kids myself—teens currently—and seeing how they utilize social media has made me very interested in the topic. But social media was also becoming so massive when they were born and we started seeing parents putting everything out there without their kids’ consent. There were a lot of debates over the last few years in different parenting communities over, “Should we do that? Should we not do that?” And then once we started to see Instagrams, TikToks, and YouTubes where families were making livings off it, it kind of become a lot more than, “Are you going to put your babies’ embarrassing pictures on Facebook?” And I thought that was so fascinating.
I always try to explore consent in my books in different ways, and we have Birdie in a situation where she really hasn’t given this consent, but to a certain degree she has bought into it. We need to dissect that with her: how that has shaped her as a person, and whether that’s still something that’s important to her once she gets a little bit away from it. These conversations are evolving, especially as these parents are getting very rich off these family shows. I think it’s a very important conversation now that the kids have aged up. We’re starting to realize they’ve been used as props in entertainment and that can have a serious impact on them.
You have a career writing across a myriad of genres: contemporary, romance, fantasy, and even horror. How did writing Summer Girls compare to your previous books?
I’m really known for writing characters who are trying to find themselves. Whether they’re running from masked men with machetes or having this summer romance in Newport, the theme throughout all the genres is that they’re trying to get to the heart of who they are and who they want to be and how they interact with the world, and if they’re going to make it better—or not! Which is also a choice some of them make. I think my readers know they’re going to get some little awkward disaster characters who are really trying their best for reasons they believe in, whether or not we believe in them or they’re the choices that we would make. Of course, my process changes a little bit if I’m covering a darker story, but in general I get there by utilizing different types of playlists and absorbing different types of media. As I go into writing a novel, I kind of live as the character: I listen to what they would listen to, I watch what they would watch, and so that changes if I’m writing a rom-com or if we’re getting chased with machetes.
Summer Girls by Jennifer Dugan. Putnam, $19.99 May 13 ISBN 978-0-593-69689-7
