UP CLOSE & PERSONAL
Author Elin Hilderbrand’s Bucket List Weekend takes simple fan get-togethers to a whole new level
I haven’t gone so far as to put the bumper sticker on my car, but I can certainly appreciate the sentiment it expresses: “I’d rather be living in an Elin Hilderbrand novel.” I get it — not just now, during these high-anxiety times, but also when I picked it up, in January, at a gathering of 150 Hilderbrand superfans.
The party took place on Nantucket, where many of Hilderbrand’s books are set, and over the course of four days, it became clear why Hilderbrand — whose novels, I confess, I didn’t always appreciate — is more than just “the queen of the summer beach read,” as she is known to many. Her annual Bucket List Weekend is her attempt to re-create for her most loyal readers the warm and sunny world of her fiction.
Wearing skinny white jeans, a peach sequin tank and pointy heels, she was hostess, friend, confidante and, if necessary, politician. She greeted her fans lovingly. She smiled; she hugged; she clinked wine glasses. When one attendee showed up at a cocktail hour in a hot-pink homemade fan T-shirt, she leaned in for a selfie. She listened as her readers offered twists for her next novel (“I’ll take any suggestions on how it should end,” she gamely joked), asked for tips on their own literary endeavours and told her about their personal woes. When she learned that one fan had to cancel because she was having emergency surgery for a brain tumour, Hilderbrand politely snapped her fingers and had flowers sent.
The Bucket List Weekend felt like many things that may not ever be (or be the same) again: an all-girl destination wedding; a bat mitzvah; a sorority party; a cancer survivors’ support-group meeting; a (single-author) book festival; the most decked-out book club meeting ever. There was yoga with Elin, wine and cheese with Elin, book signings with Elin, a live Q&A with Elin (and her enthusiastic sister, Heather Thorpe), two gala dinners with Elin, cooking classes with Elin and the highlight for many: dive-bar dancing with Elin. Buses shuttled attendees to sites that appeared in many of Hilderbrand’s books — mansions, restaurants and beaches where her characters have frolicked and fought and fallen in and out of love.
Hilderbrand writes escapist novels. Characters with names like Tabitha Frost and Deacon Thorpe meet, squabble and reconcile — all while getting really tan on the toniest New England beaches. As Jake Mccloud, the hunky male lead in Hilderbrand’s latest book, 28 Summers (an epic love story that pays homage to Same Time Next Year), puts it: “This place is a slice of heaven.” The sun shines, the food is delicious and, as another writer once said about another place: All the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
As the “serious” literary world looks on with binoculars, Hilderbrand is selling books — lots of them, roughly 10 million and counting. Her 23 books have been on national bestseller lists, and her 2019 novel, Summer of ’69, was a nine-week No. 1 New York Times bestseller.
On top of her commercial success, Hilderbrand has built something else: a sisterhood. To many of her readers, Hilderbrand is both a celebrity and a bestie.
Not only does Hilderbrand, a 50-year-old mother of three, occasionally give out her cellphone number at book signings, but she also actually answers the handful of fans who use it. She checks in on their health, their relationships, their children. She has even worked their names into her novels: Three attendees of her 2019 weekend appear in 28 Summers.
Many of the women who made the Bucket List pilgrimage are survivors — of cancer, divorce or simply life. In 2014 Hilderbrand had a double mastectomy, an experience she began speaking about at public events just days after it happened.
At this year’s party, attendees came from as far as Missouri, California and Toronto. Many had made reservations more than a year in advance — roughly 400 people vied for one of the 150 spots.
Sure, there was a lot of partying, but something else also took place: a kind of communion that, several months later, feels especially poignant. As one reader said at that Q&A: “We want to be seen and appreciated.” And here, they were.
Trish Balas-chambers, a retired registered nurse from Rye, N.H., who’s battled cancer, had come with three close friends, colleagues she’d met years ago. As we talked in their hotel suite, some of them quietly confessed to not having read many of Hilderbrand’s books, or even to not liking them so much. It didn’t matter. For these 50-something women, the weekend was more than just a break from daily life.
On the final day of the Bucket List Weekend, Hilderbrand surprised Balas-chambers with a gift — signed manuscript pages from her story Summer of ’79.
All these months later, as the world hunkers down in isolation, that intimacy — of women sharing not just their love of a book or a writer, but of one another, in person — feels as distant as a carefree Nantucket summer.
“The mindset has changed now,” Hilderbrand said by phone from her home on the island, where she’s in lockdown with her children. “That weekend, I never gave a second thought to throwing my arms around my readers and dancing together. Now, I don’t know.” The Washington Post