How Jennifer Weiner Embraces the Beach Read All Year Long

Photograph by Isa Luzarraga

“Being born female meant spending years of your life at risk, and the rest of it invisible, existing as prey or barely existing at all.” This sentence, from Jennifer Weiner’s “That Summer,” doesn’t read like a typical line from a pastel-covered, poolside paperback. The author and television producer Jennifer Weiner has made a career out of stretching the boundaries of genre. 

Weiner has penned over ten bestselling novels, most often shelved as domestic or women’s fiction, including the “Promising Young Woman”-esque novel “That Summer.” On the surface, it might be easy to characterize her books as fluffy, New England beach reads. This is an oversimplification.

From “The Summer Place,” a matriarchal examination of blended family dynamics, to the multidimensional portrayal of female friendship in “Big Summer,” the Connecticut native’s knack for depicting the multitudes of womanhood within makes her stories must-reads for anyone looking to shake up their summer reading.

Take “That Summer,” for example. What appears like your typical, dual timeline, multiple perspective story about a young woman nannying for a wealthy family in Provincetown quickly turns mysterious with a delightful hint of sinister retribution. Decades after being raped by a college boy at a beach bonfire, the protagonist Diana crosses paths with her assailant’s wife, hurtling both women toward a shared understanding of patriarchy’s ubiquity as well as an uneasy friendship.

Another of Weiner’s novels, “The Summer Place,” proves equally suspenseful. As a New York-based blended family prepares for a wedding on the Cape, individual and familial secrets unravel, threatening the fragile peace that the protagonist Sarah Danhauser has fought to maintain. Following a year of pandemic lockdown, Sarah grapples with her marriage’s deterioration while helping her stepdaughter plan her wedding. At one point, she reflects, “A little selfishness could be healthy. It could even save your life. That, she thought, was a message more girls and women could stand to hear, a thing that few were ever taught.”

While varying by novel, Weiner’s protagonists are all breathtakingly flawed. Some, like Diana, are resolutely stubborn. Others, like Sarah, find it difficult to remain present and invested amidst interpersonal conflict. Weiner’s ability to create faceted female protagonists elevates her writing beyond the cookie-cutter storylines and flat characters readers might associate with what she calls “chick-lit.”

In a 2010 interview for The Wall Street Journal, Weiner expressed her longtime desire to write commercial books like beach reads. 

“My stuff was super-duper mainstream,” she told the reporter Marshall Heyman, regarding her early writing at Princeton. “I wanted to write stuff people would read.”

After ten years of working as a journalist for outlets like The Philadelphia Inquirer, she did just that. Weiner published her debut novel, “Good in Bed,” in 2001, which quickly became a New York Times bestseller. The novel embodies Weiner’s auteur-like presence; the protagonist Cannie Shapiro can be read as a fictionalized version of Weiner herself. Cannie is a Jewish female journalist based in Philadelphia who grapples with the implications of her father’s abuse and abandonment (Weiner’s own father left when she was young and eventually died of an overdose). 

While “Good in Bed” is by no means a beach read, Weiner’s debut novel was revolutionary and laid the groundwork for her later work. 

The landscape of female authors is now the strongest it has been in recent history. Women publish more than half of all books, according to a study by the economist Joel Waldfogel. The average woman author also sells more books per year than her male counterpart. In particular, the sales of romance and women’s fiction novels have skyrocketed within the past three years. From 2022 to 2023, physical sales of romance books increased by 50%, while collectively, romance literature is estimated to be a $1.4 billion business.

The recent popularity of women’s fiction genres like romance and beach reads has allowed readers to embrace what was historically a denigrated area of literature. At the same time, its current widespread regard has also led people to turn their noses up and dismiss books in these genres as not enriching or serious. 

But since the start of her career, Weiner has been a stalwart defender of women’s fiction as a worthy genre of literature, advocating for chick-lit and its sub-genres as valuable representations of women. As a columnist for The New York Times since 2014, Weiner’s op-eds reflect the gradients of girlhood explored in her novels, from promoting bodice rippers and their portrayals of female desire to examinations on tightening female beauty standards. 

“I’d love more stories about women and money,” Weiner said in a 2020 New York Times interview. “Not women who marry money, but women who have their own money, and have to figure out what that means for them, for their friendships and their marriages and their relationships with their families.” 

In Weiner’s beach read “Big Summer,” the protagonist Daphne reunites with an old friend from childhood following her success as a plus-size Instagram influencer. Daphne’s newfound wealth and fame irreparably change her dynamic with her former bestie Drue.   

There is a prescient-like quality to Weiner’s body of work and attitude towards books about women, for women. 

Back in 2010, she told the Journal, “Men are the secondary readers. A wife or girlfriend will hand them a book. I get emails from guys: ‘I was trapped in a summer cabin. It had rained for three days straight, I had read my ESPN The Magazine twice when I picked up ‘In Her Shoes’  and I really liked it.’”

Given the success of popular beach-read authors like Emily Henry and Elin Hilderbrand as well as romance authors like Ali Hazelwood and Rebecca Yarros, Weiner’s efforts to elevate any and every book snidely discounted as chick-lit are important to recognize as part of the movement to hold women’s fiction in equal regard to other books. 

In an era where once-called “guilty pleasure” books continue to dominate bestseller lists, Weiner’s career-long effort to legitimize women’s stories feels both vindicated and more necessary than ever. Particularly during the summertime, Weiner’s writing reminds readers that our candy-colored summer paperbacks are more than just a beach read.

This story was originally published in Keke Magazine.