Ask an Author with Brooke Lea Foster

There’s very little I love in publishing than watching an author whose first book you admired go on to write more great literature.

I was fortunate enough to read an early copy of Brooke Lea Foster’s excellent Summer Darlings before it’s publication in 2021. Her’s what I had to say about it then:

"Foster has written a compelling coming-of-age story that exposes the sparkling glamour and dark underbelly of the haves and have nots in the 1960s. Summer Darlings is utterly atmospheric and compelling."

Clearly I’m a fan! That is why I am so pleased that Brooke has just published her third novel, All the Summers in Between, which is a captivating dual timeline novel that weaves back and forth between 1967 and 1977 to tell a page-turning story of friendship and loyalty.

Brooke has kindly agreed to answer some questions about All the Summers In Between for this month’s Ask an Author feature! That is coming up, but but first, here’s a closer look at All the Summers In Between:

When wealthy, impulsive summer girl Margot meets hardworking and steady local girl Thea in the summer of 1967, the unlikely pair become fast friends, working alongside one another in a record store and spending every spare moment together. But after an unspeakable incident on one devastating August night, they don’t see one another for ten years…until Margot suddenly reappears in Thea’s life, begging for help and harboring more than one dangerous secret. Thea can’t bring herself to refuse her beloved friend—but she also knows she can’t fully trust her either.

Unfulfilled as a housewife, Thea enjoys the dazzling sense of adventure Margot brings to her life, but will the truth of what happened to them that fateful summer ruin everything? Testing the boundaries of how far she’ll go for a friend, Thea is forced to reckon with her uncertain future while trying to decide if some friends are meant to remain in the past.

Set in the dual timelines of 1967 and 1977, All the Summers In Between is at once a mesmerizing portrait of a complex friendship, a delicious glimpse into a bygone Hamptons, and a powerful coming-of-age for two young women during a transformative era.

1. In All the Summers In Between you introduce us to Margot and Thea, two very different women who have a shared past as friends. Can you tell us a little bit about why that friendship is so appealing to each of them when they first meet?

   Thea and Margot are twenty when they first meet at the beach in 1967, and they’re both at a tender point in their lives. For one, they are at an age when friends are paramount. In your late teens and early twenties, many of us, including me, look to our friends to boost our self-esteem, to help us shape our identity, to reiterate back to us who we think or aspire to be. Friendships in our younger years are so different than friendships in our later years where we’re more secure in who we are and where our lives are headed. 

   I think Thea and Margot also connect because in many ways they are broken-hearted young women. Even if Margot is illustrious and monied, her media parents don’t have much time for her. Thea is a local hardscrabble girl carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders after her mother’s unexpected passing. When they meet, they fill a hole in each other’s lives, a void that really needed completing, even as their friendship ebbs and flows. 

2. This is also a story about estrangement and all of the emotions that come with someone reentering your life. Can you talk a little bit about how you handled that part of the storyline in 1977 and how you balanced it with the story of these two characters meeting one another in 1967?

   We’ve all had a friend that got away. What I mean by that is there are people in our lives who we are so close to at one point who slip away from us, either due to distance and time or circumstance. From the first moment I had the idea for this novel, I knew that it would be about two estranged friends carrying a terrible secret who suddenly reunite, and they’d be faced with all these complicated emotions about what it meant to accept one another back in. 

   I think that Thea goes into the friendship very openly in 1967. For one, she’s younger and she gets caught up in Margot’s joie de vivre. When Margot comes back after ghosting her for ten years, Thea is much more cautious, even if she’s secretly thrilled at her friend’s return. I think that’s true with a lot of friendships: Friends can bring great joy into our lives, but sometimes they’re not the best influence and figuring that out can be very time consuming and painful. 

   What I loved about Margot in the two time periods is that she changes the least. She’s selfish to her core but she loves fiercely and showing the yin and yang of her personality felt very real to me. 

3. I’m always fascinated by what draws different historical authors to different time periods. This book is set between 1967 and 1977. What was it about that ten-year period that is so compelling to you?

   Such a great question because I could have set this story at any point in time since it deals with so many universal truths about the complexities of female friendships. I chose the late 1960s because young women were riding a tide of optimism. Betty Friedan had formed the National Organization of Women, and women were marching for their rights. Women rockers were singing of protest, and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane was yelling out at every concert: “We’re the people your parents warned you about.” It was young vs. old, us vs. them, and women truly believed that their lives were going to be incredibly different than their traditional 1950s mothers were. So I wanted my characters to be caught up in all of that change and to come of age at a moment as exciting as the late 1960s. 

   But I often say that the 1970s fell like a big fat hangover. Women found themselves feeling as though their lives were exactly like their mothers. Even if they were working, they were making 62 cents on the dollar compared to men. There was so much disappointment in that, and I loved that these women wouldn’t just be grappling with their friendship but with all of these ideas about who they were going to be. When old friends resurface in our lives it can remind us of who we used to be, and it can make us uncomfortable to realize that we didn’t quite get there. 

4. I found myself really drawn to Thea, especially at the beginning of the novel when she supposedly “has it all,” a loving husband, an adorable daughter, a house with a lovely view. However, under the surface she is grappling with a certain dissatisfaction with her life. How did you come to settle on that particular challenge for her as a character?

   It's funny with Thea—as I started writing her, I could hear her voice straight away. I knew she would live a quiet life in a pretty house in a fancy beach town but that she would feel ambivalent about some of her choices. She’s a local but in some ways, she’s living the life of a summer resident. She’s also a little stuck within herself. Still, there’s such a stark contrast in beach towns between the locals and the summer residents, and there’s often tension between the haves and have nots. I wanted Thea to feel these class distinctions, but I also wanted her to be a woman who was a little lost in young motherhood. There was a point when my kids grew a bit older where I remember looking around and thinking: But what about me? What do I want to do? It’s when I decided to transition from a long career in journalism to fiction. But I think that moment of reckoning happens throughout a woman’s life as we try to find ways to put our needs first sometimes. 

5. I want to be sure to mention your own excellent Substack Dear Fiction. What made you decide to start publishing on Substack, and can you tell readers a bit about your wonderful author confessions features?

   Since I spent over twenty years as a journalist, I loved the idea of publishing articles and essays about writing in between working on my novels. It’s funny because I transitioned into fiction because I wanted to flex a new muscle as a writer. When I started writing fiction all the time, I missed interviewing and reporting (other than research for my historical novels), so I started Dear Fiction. In the Author Confessions column, I chat with authors about their new books and try to get an insider take on their work and who they are as writers!

6. I can never resist a book recommendation, so I want to be sure to ask what you’ve recently read that you want more people to know about.

   I loved Allison Pataki’s latest historical fiction novel Finding Margaret Fuller—she’s a wonderful writer and a lovely person and this book really sucked me in! Margaret Fuller is a fascinating figure in American history, and she writes the story in such a captivating way. Love!

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Brooke Lea Foster is an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe Magazine, and People, among others. An alumna of The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, she is the author of three nonfiction books and the novels Summer Darlings, On Gin Lane, and All the Summers In Between.

You can find out more about Brooke’s books and where you can purchase them at https://www.brookeleafoster.com/.