Synopsis:
Rachel has been in love with Alistair for nearly two decades. Even though she’s now married to Tom. Even though she was just seventeen when they met. Even though he is twenty years older than her.
Her love affair on a remote, sun-trapped Greek island has consumed her since that momentous summer, obliterating everything in its wake. But as Rachel becomes increasingly obsessed with reliving the events of so long ago, she reconnects with the other girls who were similarly drawn to life on the island . . . where the nights were long, the alcohol was free-flowing, and everyone behaved in ways they never would have at home.
And as she does so, dark and deeply suppressed secrets about her first love affair begin to rise to the surface, as does the truth about her time working for an enigmatic and wealthy man who controlled so much more than she could have ever realized at the time.
Part of an important post-#MeToo discourse, The Girls of Summer grapples with themes of power, sex, and consent. Debut author Katie Bishop explores the complicated nature of trauma and memory . . . and what it takes to reframe — and reclaim — your own story.
Review:
Seasoned journalist Katie Bishop had been toying with the idea of writing what she calls a “one that got away story,” a light-hearted, escapist novel. But it was about three years after the #MeToo movement exploded. Through conversations with other women and reflections on her own experiences, Bishop realized that “so many women had been looking back on their early romantic and sexual experiences, and realizing through the sharp lens of the #MeToo movement that things hadn’t been quite how they remembered them. Or maybe even things weren’t quite how they had experienced them at the time, with the gloss of youth and naïveté. . . . I thought how interesting it would be if these two ideas came together in a ‘one that got away’ story about a great romance that really shaped a woman’s life and she’d never quite been able to move on from. What if that was the story that you were looking back on and realizing, ‘Wow, that wasn’t quite how I remembered it.'” The breezy story Bishop initially envisioned evolved into a much darker tale.
The Girls of Summer is a powerful story of awakening, reconciliation, forgiveness, and healing in order to move forward, told through alternating first-person narratives from Rachel. In one she details the events of the summer when she was seventeen years old and permitted by her parents to go on a seven-week, island hopping vacation with her best friend, Caroline, before returning home to continue her education. They end up on an idyllic Greek island where they join a group of girls living and working together in a local backpacker bar. Rachel has never been among the most popular girls at school and has no dating experience. Innocent and gullible, like most teenage girls she is insecure about her appearance and desirability. So when the handsome bar manager, Alistair, turns his attention to her, she instantly knows that the moment he asks her name is one she will never forget. She is flattered, enchanted, and secretly satisfied that the attention Alistair showers on her appears to make Caroline jealous, as she “nurses the special secret glow that had taken root when Alistair had touched my arm, his fingers hot against my skin.” In subsequent chapters, Rachel describes her interactions with the twenty years older Alistair, who insists that they keep their relationship a secret to avoid the bar’s owner finding out about Alistair’s fraternization. Alistair’s employer is a mysterious, wealthy businessman for whom Alistair performs a variety of duties, including serving as the caretaker of his large villa to which he invites Rachel for clandestine sexual rendezvous. Rachel quickly falls desperately in love with Alistair and, eventually, decides that she will remain on the island with him rather than return home to resume her studies, believing everything he tells her. And willing to do anything he asks of her.
Rachel’s present-day narrative is brutally emotional and heartbreakingly honest. Now nearing her thirty-fifth birthday, her life appears to all outside observers to be settled. She had no other boyfriends after Alistair until she met Tom, and Rachel just fell into their relationship and marriage, which has proven comfortable and provided her with stability. She enjoys her career. But in actuality, she is deeply unhappy. She has never been able to move on from what she fondly recalls as a magical summer and is, according to Bishop, caught up in her memories of it. There are two painful aspects of it, however, that haunt Rachel, remaining unresolved in her mind and preventing her from moving forward in her life with Tom.
On vacation, Rachel returns to the island with Tom. She seeks out Helena, who was one of the girls with whom she lived and worked during that fateful summer, and now owns and operates the bar. She implores Helena to tell her how to reach Alistair, with whom she has had no contact since the traumatic morning when Rachel woke to find he had fled the island without her. Helena provides the information, along with a stern warning. “You should be careful. I’m just not sure you know quite what you’re getting yourself into.” But Rachel’s “need for him feels primal and urgent.” When Rachel hears that Alistair is, like she and Tom, living in London, she works up the courage to contact him, but is disappointed by his initial reaction: “How did you find me?” Soon, though, she is again ensnared by Alistair’s charisma and their passionate sexual relationship.
Somewhere deep down inside me, the island is the same. That place has been my whole life. Everything I thought I knew about myself was constructed in those few months I spent within touching distance of the sea. Everything I am is because Alistair loved me. My dreams have always been tied up in him.
Tom is a richly relatable and empathetic character. He loves Rachel deeply and is earnestly committed to the marriage, believing that they are united in their desire to start a family. But Rachel inexplicably rebuffs his suggestion that they seek medical advice when the months tick by and Rachel does not become pregnant. Tom does not know the truth or any of the details about Rachel’s past because she has never shared her experiences with him. He does not know that there is literally nothing he can ever do to make Rachel happy and their marriage a thriving union. He has no idea he is fighting a losing battle because, in Rachel’s mind, no man can or will ever measure up to Alistair . . . as she remembers him and persists in perceiving him once they reconnect. As the story proceeds, it becomes evident that Tom’s heartbreak is inevitable and will be emotionally wrenching.
Bishop’s choice to relate the story through Rachel is highly effective, and her use of the present tense in both narratives heightens understanding of Rachel’s thought processes and journey. Bishop says she wanted to illustrate that “even though Rachel is seventeen years older, and her life is in a very different place, in many ways she is still trapped in that summer, and she’s never really been able to move on. It still feels so present, so visceral to her, even though she is so much older and is in many ways in a different place now.” Indeed, Rachel’s reunion with Alistair opens a proverbial Pandora’s box of memories, emotions, and complications that ultimately lead to Rachel’s reckoning with the truth about that life-changing summer.
When Helena contacts Rachel to say that she is coming to London and would like to meet, Rachel is reluctant. Eventually, she relents but when she arrives at their appointed meeting place, she is met not just by Helena, but also three of the other girls who spent that summer on the island, Priya, Eloise, and Agnes. Rachel wants no part of the conversation Helena has secretly orchestrated. But is curious and persuaded to hear the women out by Helena’s shocking declaration that Alistair “lies. He always did. He still does. To both of us.” That meeting proves to be a milestone moment in Rachel’s life. Priya is now a successful attorney who has been retained to find answers about that summer by the parents of another girl who was there: “Kiera, who never came home.” The women confront Rachel with the truth about the events of that summer and the men who preyed upon them, including Alistair.
Initially disbelieving, Rachel gradually begins to recognize the truth. It is an excruciatingly painful ordeal, realistically portrayed by Bishop. She can no longer delude herself, instead struggling to reconcile her memories and beliefs about what happened with the facts and evidence supplied by Priya and the others. Back then, Rachel lied about a significant incident, but is forced to acknowledge that “perhaps I was protecting the wrong person.” Bishop explains that, in many ways, Rachel is still the seventeen-year-old girl she was all those years ago. She stopped maturing and, in critical ways, has been sleepwalking, mentally checked out of her own present-day life. Now, she starts to recall that summer differently, the filter of innocence, infatuation, and obsession finally torn away. Alistair asked her to keep his secrets, no matter what it cost her. “They feel like parts of the same puzzle, lines from the same song, chapters of the same story. Fragmented things that I had never thought to put together before, feeling suddenly sharp and solidified.” At last, she understands and is forced to accept that Alistair, his boss, and their business associates were predators, and must reconcile the ways in which she and the other girls were lied to, manipulated, and used . . . as well as her own blind culpability. She is forced to choose whether she will help Priya at long last secure justice for Kiera. And must discern how to heal and move forward with the knowledge she has acquired.
Bishop says that through Rachel, she “was trying to capture the experience that many people have with trauma.” A common theme is that they feel “almost stuck in that moment of trauma,” so Rachel is “still feeling those experiences that she had back then.” Victims of trauma also rewrite history, remembering people and events in ways that defy reality. It is a defense mechanism employed by the psyche as a shield from pain. Rachel exhibits both long-term effects of sexual abuse. Bishop credibly depicts the ways in which her vociferous denials eventually give way to realization. Her story is deeply disturbing and infuriating. It is at times tempting to lose patience with Rachel, viewing her as quite stubborn and unlikable, but Bishop conclusively demonstrates that she is merely reacting in a manner consistent with symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Ultimately, Rachel’s story is one of survival, redemption, and carving a path toward a happy, healthy future. Bishop’s goal in writing it was to help readers who have experienced trauma feel “less alone in the experience” through the experiences of a character to whom they can and perhaps have not seen represented in literature until now.
The Girls of Summer is a stunning debut. Bishop’s characters are fully developed and multi-dimensional. Her prose is evocative, often chillingly straightforward and lacking surplusage. She keeps the story interesting not just by alternating the two narratives, advancing the action incrementally in each and building the dramatic tension at a steady pace, but also by injecting a compelling mystery involving Kiera’s fate. The story is a contemporary, yet also timeless cautionary tale about innocence, sexuality, awareness, and female empowerment and autonomy. The Girls of Summer is a provocative and absorbing. story that continues to resonate long after reading the last page.
Excerpt from The Girls of Summer
Then
It’s too hot to be outside for long. Sweat is starting to dampen my scalp, thickening in the roots of my hair and pooling in the crevices of my collarbone. My T-shirt sticks to my spine and my arms are tinged pink, an ungainly line of skin beginning to blister along the top of my thigh. I curl my toes into the damp sand and feel the sharpness of a small shell against the sole of my foot.
Please, don’t let him have left without me, I think. I’ll do anything. I need him to come for me.
From my spot on the sand, I can just make out the dock. Rising out of the sea is the rickety wooden platform where I disembarked almost four months ago seasick, and tired. A small boat is tethered there bright blue, and bobbing in the slow swell of the tide. It will leave in ten minutes, and I am supposed to be on it.
When I arrived here this morning the sea was still far out, the sand stretching white and vast. Now the waves are edging close to my legs, their unrelenting progress beginning to dampen the ground beneath my heels. I should move back. I should gather up my things and drag them to a drier vantage point. But earlier on, as the beach began to slip away, I had made a promise to myself.
If he’s not here by the time the tide comes in then I will go without him.
I shiver as saltwater laps the tip of my toe.
Just a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes and he’ll be here.
“Rachel!”
Someone is waving one arm in my direction, their figure silhouetted against the brightness of the sky. I lift one hand to shield my eyes and see that it’s Helena. She’s walking quickly, half jogging, and as she collapses down next to me her chest heaves, her breath tangled up in her throat. Her hair is damp and salt crystals are beginning to form and glitter at her neck, a white and grainy sheen that edges in one long streak from her jaw down to her collar bone.
“They came for him,” she says, her voice ragged and airless. “This morning.”
I’m already shaking my head, clambering to my feet.
“No,” I say.
“They didn’t find him. He’d already left. He got away.”
It takes a moment for me to find the words, for the shapes that Helena’s mouth makes to form into something resembling meaning.
“He can’t have.”
“I’ve been to the house. Everything’s gone.”
“You’re lying.”
“We knew this would happen, Rachel. We knew they’d come for him, in the end.”
I gather up my bags, staggering in my hurry to get away. She opens her mouth as if to say something before I go, one arm raised up as if to catch me, and then seems to think better of it. There’s nothing she can say to stop me now.
My things are too heavy as I tumble up the beach. My shoes catch in the sand and I bend down to tug them off. I throw them on to the ground so that I can dash to the road, away from Helena and towards him. I flag down a car, a local man who pulls up looking concerned at me, barefoot and weighed down by too many things. I splutter out an address and then hold out a wad of notes, my entire boat fare.
“Please,” I say. “I’ll pay you.”
He shakes his head, obviously misreading my distress as something more sinister. It takes me a moment to remember that it is.
“No money,” he says. “I’ll take you home.”
As his car veers up the hillside and away from the dock, I try to compose myself. I take deep, desperate breaths, sucking in air through my nose and exhaling in long hard gasps. My face is wet, and when my tears reach my lips they taste as salty as the sea. As the driver wrenches the steering wheel in a way that only someone who has grown up around these vertiginous roads can, he glances anxiously in the rear-view mirror.
“Everything OK?”’ he asks.
I nod.
“It will be,” I say. “It has to be.”
How many times have I climbed the hill to this white-painted house, spent the night, left early in the morning with my head spinning? I remember the first time, when he sent a car to pick me up and I wore the nicest dress I had with me. It was flowing and white, and I felt like a Greek goddess. But then of course, that was before. Before the whispers started to curdle the summer air like an impending rainstorm. Before police descended on the island, their uniforms oppressive and dark beneath the midday sun. Before the body washed up, broken on the beach. I heard she had been there for hours by the time they found her, her skin swollen by the sea, her face no longer recognizable.
“Here?”’ the man says.
I nod and wipe my sodden cheeks.
“Here.”
I abandon my bags at the roadside and rush towards the wooden door. I can already see that it is open. He would never just leave it like that. He worries endlessly about locking up the bar at night. I call out his name as I step into the cool shade of the entrance hall. At first it looks the same: the wrought-iron statue on the side table, the white rug at the bottom of the stairs. Yet his keys are missing from the bowl next to the door, his jacket no longer hanging and ready for him to throw on against the evening chill. I dash upstairs, still calling out for him.
I’m sobbing by the time I reach his bedroom; guttural, animal-like noises. The wardrobe doors are thrown open, shirts scooped off their hangers as if by someone who left in a hurry. Sheets have been torn off the bed and a fallen lamp sits in pieces on the floor as though whoever broke it didn’t have time to clean up. A door to a balcony has been left ajar and thin curtains drift lazily in the breeze, their movement absurdly calm against the chaos he has left behind.
For a moment it feels like everything should stop. The world is still spinning. The sun is still shining. But he is gone. I lie stomach-down on his bed and try to capture the smell of him. I breathe in hoping to find the remnants of his aftershave, a small part of him still left behind, but the white expanse of the mattress only smells of detergent. I wail into a discarded pillow, not worried about who will hear, my body arching into the bed. Around me the house remains cavernous and still, as though nobody has lived here for years. As though none of us were ever here at all.
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