Elin Hilderbrand explains why she’s retiring from writing summer beach reads

The New York Times bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand has been writing about summers spent on the island of Nantucket, Mass., since 2000, when she released her debut novel, The Beach Club. But now, after 30 books, she’s retiring from the genre. Her latest beach read, Swan Song, will be her final novel set on the island.

“I’m stopping writing these books because, frankly, I am out of ideas,” Hilderbrand tells Q‘s Tom Power. “Nantucket is small. I’ve covered every part of the island, every festival, every time of year. The last few books, although I think they are my strongest, have been the hardest to write. I’ve gotten to the bottom of the well.”

With a dedicated fanbase and more than 20 million books sold worldwide, Hilderbrand is an extremely successful writer by any measure. She’s a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which counts Flannery O’Connor and John Irving among its alumni, but at times, she says she’s grappled with the fact that her novels are considered more commercial than literary.

“I write books that I think people feel are maybe a little bit lowbrow or [for] mass consumption,” she says. “One of the things I love doing is selling books and so I love having an audience.”

But Hilderbrand didn’t experience overnight success with her work. She says she didn’t hit it big until her sixth novel, Barefoot, which came out in 2007. It was only when her books started to be promoted as beach reads that she was able to break through.

“My first publisher did not do a great job with my first five books,” Hilderbrand tells Power. “Then I moved publishers and my new publisher saw an opportunity to really market these as summer beach novels and they just started taking off from there.”

One of the things Hilderbrand loves about writing beach reads is the escape, comfort and wish fulfillment she can give her readers. Her fans aren’t judging her books by whether they’re considered lowbrow or highbrow — they know they can count on her for a good story.

“I was very adamant about not wanting to let the quality of my novels suffer,” Hilderbrand says. “I feel like everyone out there has read an author like me who is putting out a book a year, or even several books a year, and that author will inevitably deliver a dud. I was adamant that that person was not going to be me.”

Though her Nantucket series may be done, Hilderbrand isn’t hanging up her writing hat forever. She’s currently writing two novels with her daughter that are set at a New England boarding school. 

“They are adult novels,” Hilderbrand says. “In fact, they’re very adult because we get all the sex, drugs and rock and roll. I’m really, really proud of Shelby, my daughter, and the way that she has embraced this project, bringing a Gen Z boarding school novel into the culture. I grew up reading A Separate Peace, I know the millennials all read Harry Potter, and there hasn’t really been the Gen Z boarding school book moment. So we’re going to hopefully create that.”

The full interview with Elin Hilderbrand is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Elin Hilderbrand produced by Vanessa Nigro.