2 Photos
Ann Brashares brought her readers on a journey around the world in her acclaimed book series “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”; now, she’s bringing readers to the East End in her latest novel, “The Whole Thing Together.”Released on April 25, the book follows the complex relationships of an unconventional family—one that split in a divorce and now includes children from different parents—as they spend the summer in Wainscott. Ms. Brashares spent many summers with her family in the area and thought that it made the perfect setting for her newest book.
“When I was in college I guess until I was in my early 30s—so, for a number of years—my family rented on the East End in East Hampton and Wainscott, primarily. And there was a particular house we went back to for many, many summers and it serves as the model for the house in the book,” Ms. Brashares said during a recent interview. “I haven’t stepped foot on that property in a decade at least, but it’s sort of a numb, slightly nostalgic-tinged place for me so I don’t try to invoke that literally. It’s more how I remember the place and then making some changes that suit the story.”
Ms. Brashares added other subtle biographical elements to this story, apart from the setting. Her parents divorced when she was young, so she drew on the complications and feelings of bitterness from that experience to portray the family in the book.
The New York City-based author has published nine novels in the last two decades, but she takes a new direction in this book, delving into the ramifications of divorce and the dynamics of a fractured family. However, she still includes romantic and feel-good qualities found in her other novels.
“It’s a fairly naturalistic, realistic contemporary novel. It’s really about relationships—friends, family, romantic—and it has a lot of qualities that the ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ books have,” Ms. Brashares revealed. “It’s about summer and about freedom and about being young and falling in love for the first time, so there are definitely scenes and feelings I think that are very much connected to the ‘Sisterhood’ books, among other things I’ve done.”
Although the story follows the family as a whole, it zooms into the budding and complicated relationship of the two teens who have half-siblings in common—the dad’s daughter from his second marriage, Sasha, and the mom’s son from her second marriage, Ray. Ms. Brashares creates a peculiar juxtaposition with these characters’ stories as they apparently shared many things growing up, but never met until the book begins.
“I was beginning to imagine what was the relationship between these two children kind of on the outside of the original family,” Ms. Brashares shared. “This half-sister and half-brother are not related at all and share a huge number of things, but are kind of split by the bitterness at the center of [the divorce]. How would that form their lives? And what relationship would they bear to one another? And then the story really began to grow out of that.”
Ms. Brashares gained so much success with her five-part “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” series that it spawned a film adaptation in 2005 and a sequel in 2008. With this new novel, she explained that she isn’t trying to meet the same level of success she achieved from the “Sisterhood” series, but rather focus on her growth as a writer.
“It feels incredibly lucky when a book really works and it feels disappointing, naturally, when a book doesn’t work as well as you want it to or your publisher wants it to. But I feel like I mostly just want to focus on good work and growing as a writer,” she said. “I can’t really control how things are received or how successful they are; I can really only control what I put into it and how I relate to characters.”
“The Whole Thing Together” is now on sale with a first printing of 100,000 copies. Ann Brashares will appear at East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Saturday, August 12. For more information about the author and her literary works, visit annbrashares.com.
on May 2, 2017