Nearly every Wednesday in season—that is to say, from June through October—Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author, Queen of the Beach Read, mother of three adult children, and longtime year-round Nantucketer, finishes her morning barre class at Forme Barre and heads to Mitchell’s Book Corner, her friend Wendy Hudson’s downtown bookstore, to sign books from 11 to noon. By the time she arrives, wearing shorts and jeweled flip-flops, her bright blond hair pulled back, sporting the unmistakable tan of a woman who loves a sunny day, the line is already snaking down Main Street toward Orange, most of the women in it far less casually dressed and significantly less bronzed.

Hilderbrand’s sister, Heather Thorpe, is in charge of taking photos and helping manage the crowd at the weekly signings. “You can spot an Elin Hilderbrand fan from a mile away,” Thorpe says. “They’re very curated; they’re trying to look ‘Nantucket.’” They are women, mostly, white and middle-aged; “older than we are,” says Hilderbrand, who will be 57 in July, “from St. Louis and this is their anniversary trip, and they made their husband come because they’ve read my books.” She is sitting in early spring at the dining room table at her mid-island Nantucket home, drinking from a can of diet root beer, the book The Wedding People open and upside down on the table beside her. She reads constantly, and always a physical copy. “Just okay” is how she describes this particular one, though she will never pan a book on social media, where she has begun to post micro-reviews of those she’s read and enjoyed. “And he’s like, Okay, honey, not realizing how incredibly expensive it is.” At Mitchell’s, Hilderbrand will sign books and pose for photos with the first 100 readers. One hundred is how many books she can sign in an hour without feeling overwhelmed.

Hudson says the signings started out as a way for Hilderbrand to manage all the attention—not generate more. “It was a little self-serving,” Hudson says, “because she’d get messages from readers saying they’d be coming to the island and ‘Can I meet you?’” Hilderbrand fields DMs constantly from readers asking for signed copies, or for her to make an appearance at their book club, or to text their best friend to say happy birthday. She obliges many of them. “I have a real hard time with boundaries,” she says. “I’m afraid people are gonna be like, Oh, she’s so standoffish. But if you saw my DMs, you would be astonished.”

Hudson and Hilderbrand were first introduced on the beach back when their kids were young. Hudson owned Nantucket Bookworks then—she still does—and Hilderbrand’s then-husband, Chip Cunningham, told Wendy’s husband, Randy, that his wife had written a book—which, of course, Hudson knew because the store carried it. “I love her humor, her dialogue, the pacing,” Hudson says. “Her attention to details that make things come to life. She’s in touch with emotional truths, like what people are really thinking. And she’s really captured 25 years of Nantucket.” There’s perhaps no other contemporary writer so connected to one place, Hilderbrand herself admits, “and certainly not one that is a fishbowl like Nantucket is.” Of Hilderbrand’s 32 novels, which have sold a collective 20 million copies, 27 are set on island. All of them name-drop island locations, businesses, and traditions; some are maybe, possibly, lightly based on people she knows. The Blue Bistro (2005), about a woman who takes a job at an island restaurant and falls for its owner, was inspired by the Galley at the Cliffside Beach Club, where Cunningham has worked for more than 40 years. Though not even the woman she most closely based a character on recognized herself, or, at least, dared to ask for confirmation. (“And I know she read the book,” Hilderbrand says.) Others are set on St. John, where Hilderbrand spends several weeks each spring.

Nantucket has long been a popular summer destination, but the tourists in line at Mitchell’s are here for her, and for the Nantucket she’s created in their minds: an idyllic, cobblestoned, endless-summer town. Many have come over just for the day, taking the 9:30 ferry with Thorpe, who lives on the Cape, because Nantucket in the summer is not cheap. Hotels start at $600 or $700 a night, and an overnight usually means two or three.

So instead, they day-trip to take a selfie with Hilderbrand, eat lunch and down a $38 glass of rosé with some friends at a Hilderbrand-favorited spot like Cru Oyster Bar, then head back to the mainland on the afternoon boat. Many return year after year. Hilderbrand remembers them all. Sometimes, she will suggest a color theme—orange and pink, or yellows—for a chance to be featured on her social media, which she manages herself. It’s less gimmick than intentional community-building, with a heavy dose of not taking life so seriously. She loves bright colors, and female friendship and connection—along with romance, fun, and also tragedy—are a throughline of many of her stories.

One of the biggest appeals of Hilderbrand as an author is that one could very easily see her being a character in one of her own books. She is vibrant and blunt; she wears colorful dresses that show off her legs and her tan; she’s approachable without ever seeming performative; she’s confident and imperfect; and she is no stranger to grief. That she has so thoroughly and indelibly worked her whole identity into her books and the community built around them—writing with the sort of frankness and authenticity she offers in real life, reliably delivering what her readers want, year after year, because they are who she writes for—is precisely why this current chapter of her life has proven so very difficult. The woman in her with nothing more to prove wants to retire; the workhorse in her who has built a life based on just keeping going doesn’t know how. It’s not that she no longer wants to write. It’s just that writing is making it impossible to live, even as she worries she can’t live without it.

In 2024, Hilderbrand published her final Nantucket-based novel, which she aptly titled Swan Song. Swan Song came three years (and three books) after she first announced her retirement, in 2021. That was the year she published Golden Girl, a book loosely inspired by her own near-death experience following a breast cancer diagnosis. Turns out Swan Song wasn’t quite curtains, either; in 2025, she released The Academy, a novel set at a fictional New England boarding school coauthored with her daughter, Shelby Cunningham, who was a junior at St. George’s in Middletown, Rhode Island, when the pair signed a two-book deal. This fall, they’ll release the sequel, titled The Thoroughbreds. Nine of Hilderbrand’s books, meanwhile, are in some form of development for TV or film, including The Academy as well as The Five Star Weekend, which will air next month on Peacock as an eight-episode series starring Jennifer Garner, Chloë Sevigny, and Regina Hall.

Hilderbrand is not Nantucket’s richest resident, nor is she even its most famous. But she is the island’s best-known year-round resident, with as many “fancy” friends—including Linda Holliday—as “regular” ones, like the group of local moms she’s called her closest circle since their children were small. Her approachability has been an asset, a key to her popularity. For a while now, though, it’s become a liability. Three or four years ago, she realized she couldn’t get where she wanted to go anymore without having to be Elin Hilderbrand, Queen of the Beach Read. She’d head to town to meet girlfriends for lunch, or to pick up bread at the bakery. She’d park wherever she could find parking, just like everybody else, and it would take her 20 minutes just to make a three-minute walk.

“And then everybody wants a picture, and I feel like I must accommodate because the second you say, ‘I’m not taking my picture with you,’ it’s hurtful to them,” she says. “So now I wear my sunglasses; I look down. I do not make eye contact. And it’s mostly fine. It’s mostly fine if I do it that way.” Once a summer, she and her daughter go shopping. Shelby has never gotten used to the idea of her mom as a celebrity. “I’d bring the little girl that I nanny downtown in her stroller,” Shelby says. “It would be a Wednesday, and there would be a line down the block, and I’d be like, OMG, that’s for my mom.”

Hilderbrand understands the bind she’s put herself in by making Nantucket as much of a character as any of her human ones, and by making herself as accessible to her readers as any one of those characters (and possibly even more so, given she’s an actual person). She understands the synchronicity moment when a reader visits the Nantucket they’ve been introduced to through one—or 27—of her books and then spots her, right there in the cobblestoned wild. “They see me, and it’s like seeing Santa at the North Pole,” she says. “You’re like, Oh my God, I came to the North Pole because I love Santa, and I’m touring his workshop, and there he is!”

It’s not just the tourists who want something from her, either. Having lived in a small place for so long, she knows everyone, and everyone knows her. There are more than 100 nonprofits on Nantucket, and she’s friendly with many of the people who run them. She’s given away countless signed books, often mailing them out herself. She’s shown up at bachelorette parties and book clubs. She obliges when her financial adviser asks if she’d be willing to be in a promo video featuring artists and athletes. She estimates she’s donated a cocktail party by her own backyard pool some 25 times, at a house she’s owned for only 10 years. “It raises a lot of money for the nonprofits, and I’m happy about that,” she says. “But if I have a night [free], I want to be with my friends. It’s just so much that I find myself, like, backing away, backing away, backing away.”

Instantly, she backtracks, worried this makes her sound ungrateful. “I just try and live my life and deal as gracefully as I can with people who know that I’m there,” she says. “I can’t describe the number of requests. But I’m not going to be like, ‘No, Jill, I can’t get you the book.’ I’m obviously going to do it.” Of having her sister at the weekly book signings, Hilderbrand says, “She’s such a saint, and I’m just sitting there, like, When is this gonna be over?” As if the question isn’t one she herself has the power to answer.

Hilderbrand would not have gotten to where she is without saying no sometimes. Many autumns, she’d spend weeks at a time away from her kids to write and revise at a rental in Beacon Hill. There were plenty of holidays she worked through, cocktail parties she declined. But she also wouldn’t have gotten to where she is without writing—and that’s not just about the houses, the designer clothes, and the trips to St. John. Since she was small, she’s used writing, and working, to survive some of the most difficult times in her life. Not avoidance, exactly. It was the process. So is it any wonder that slowing down is terrifying at best, truly impossible at worst? Hilderbrand may have built her life and career—and an entire literary genre—around the dream of having “real summers,” but, facing the promise and threat of retirement, she may be forced to acknowledge those only exist in fiction. Which just may be the most relatable thing about her yet.

Hilderbrand grew up in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her father remarried when Hilderbrand was seven and Thorpe was four. The girls—each of whom had long wanted a sister—became stepsisters and, as Thorpe puts it, “instant best friends.” Every summer, he and his second wife, Judy, would take their five combined children to Brewster, on the Cape, for the month of July. Those summers, Hilderbrand says, were magical: walks on the beach, sand in the sheets, everyone together. During the school year, the sisters lived together only every third weekend, when Hilderbrand and her two brothers stayed with their father. (“Back in the days of divorced parents in the ’70s, when you only got to see your respective other parent, like, once a month,” Thorpe explains.)

When Hilderbrand was 16, her father died in a plane crash coming home from a business trip, and the trips to the Cape ended. She spent the months between her junior and senior years in high school working at a costume factory and regretting the summers at the beach she’d taken for granted. She set a goal for her life: Always have a real summer.

Thorpe moved to Cape Cod two years ago to be closer to Hilderbrand and help with the business side of things. Last May, she launched the Blue Book Tour, a two-hour tour named after Hilderbrand’s The Blue Book, a nonfiction guide to visiting Nantucket “like a character in an Elin Hilderbrand novel.” Three times a week, Thorpe takes 25 readers around the island by bus, pointing out places that have shown up in her sister’s novels, including the Proprietors Bar & Table, where Lizbet and JJ meet up in The Hotel Nantucket. At the end, they make a surprise stop at the Chicken Box for a champagne toast, which anyone who’s been to the Chicken Box knows is not something you’d do at the Chicken Box. “We stop at Sankaty Head Lighthouse for a photo, get back on the bus, and then I tell them we’re going to the Chicken Box, and the bus erupts with tears,” Thorpe says.

Last year’s tours sold out for the entire summer almost instantly. “Her fans are enthusiastic,” Thorpe says. “They can’t get enough of anything Elin. I had a woman last year who came from Australia specifically to take this tour. She’d read all of Elin’s novels and really wanted to see Nantucket through Elin’s eyes.” Another guest was 94 years old. The women may choose the tour to satisfy a curiosity about Hilderbrand’s Nantucket, but they leave with the camaraderie that has been the backbone of Hilderbrand’s success. As Thorpe puts it, “We all love Elin Hilderbrand. We love her books and her characters. It’s not just me talking. It’s us all having this shared experience as we drive around Nantucket.” One of Thorpe’s favorite stories to share with the bus is how Hilderbrand would write and illustrate stories between her visits to her father’s and then read them to Thorpe before bed. Before her sister launched the bus tour, Hilderbrand says she was told that “Where does Elin Hilderbrand live?” was the number-one question on the regular tours around town.

Ten years ago, Thorpe helped Hilderbrand start the so-called Bucket List Weekend, held every November at the Nantucket Hotel, where the author wrote several of her earlier books and which inspired her 2022 novel The Hotel Nantucket. The “Hilderbabes” in attendance adhere to an assigned color dress code and wear name tags that specify their favorite Elin Hilderbrand book. They shop downtown, have a big dinner, and dance at the Chicken Box. Until this year, when she’d finally had enough and decided it would have to be the last, Hilderbrand was right there, dancing in the middle of them.

After college at Johns Hopkins, Hilderbrand moved to New York to work in publishing, then taught seventh- and eighth-grade English at a public school in Queens and in Westchester County. She dreamed, still, of a life with proper summers. In 1993, after one of those school years, she decided to summer on an island. She zeroed in on Nantucket and found some roommates through a classified ad. That first summer, she fell madly in love with the island and with a boy who worked at the Cliffside Beach Club: Chip Cunningham. She brought him back to New York, where she lasted one more school year before the two moved back to Nantucket for good. They married in 1995.

The next year, Hilderbrand enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earning her MFA in 1998. She hated Iowa, but it taught her how to work. “Before getting to Iowa, I did not think writing was important, or a job,” she says. “And I got there, and I watched these really, really smart people trying to do what I was doing.” A teacher told her that if she composed for three hours a day, she could write a book in a year. So that’s what she did. Again and again.

That is how Hilderbrand has managed to keep up what is, by any standard, an epic pace for a novelist, averaging a book a year. She thrives on routine, and her mornings have remained largely unchanged for 30 years: up early to read, exercise, and write, by hand, in a notebook. Later, she revises by candlelight. (“Very Emily Dickinson,” she says.) She never set out to become a beach-read writer; she just wrote what she liked to write about and worked her ass off so that her readers never felt disappointed. In the meatiest part of her career, from 2010 to 2020, she would take four-book deals. She had contracts; she turned books in; she promoted them; she started again. “I didn’t realize that I was building a brand,” she says now. “I was just trying to pay the bills.” Along the way, she gave birth to three children. In addition to Shelby, she has two sons now in their twenties—Max and Dawson—plus Max’s best friend, Alex, whom she calls her fourth child.

Hilderbrand describes her books as being for people who do not like to read, “either because growing up they just weren’t given the right books or they have little kids, and they can’t focus,” she says. “Those are my people.” Reagan Arthur, Hilderbrand’s longtime editor at Little, Brown, describes the author’s steady, measured rise as “a more old-fashioned buildup at a time when everybody expects instant discovery.” (She also wonders if many readers didn’t realize just how good the books were until they actually read one.) Arthur and Hilderbrand first met when they both worked as editorial assistants at St. Martin’s Press. “She was like this blaze of light that streaked through the Flatiron Building and the rest of us were glowering black-clad misanthropes,” Arthur recalls. “She just sort of stood out.” Arthur eventually wooed her over to Little, Brown; their first book together was 2007’s Barefoot, about three friends who escape to Nantucket to deal with various life crises. “One of her 10 million strengths is that she’s not at all precious about feedback,” Arthur says. “She just wants the book to be the best it can be.”

In May 2014, Hilderbrand was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 44. She and Chip had separated by then. The Matchmaker, which by eerie coincidence had a cancer storyline, was coming out the following month. Life was a lot. But then, it always was. The day before her double mastectomy, Hilderbrand flew to New York to talk to Gayle King on CBS This Morning about her diagnosis and imminent surgery. Friends and professional colleagues wondered why she wouldn’t rather keep it private. But the demographic for breast cancer and the demographic for her novels was the same, and she thought her readers would want to know. The outpouring of support and love she received following that decision, she says, was “truly amazing”: gifts, messages, prayers upon prayers. “They realized I was a person,” she says, and she leaned on them right back, canceling tour dates without guilt, because she knew they would understand. It was the moment her readers stopped being readers and became something closer to a congregation.

Dealing with breast cancer consumed a year of her life. But since recovery for Hilderbrand has always been on the page, it didn’t slow her progress. Her readers had come to expect a summer book, and a summer book they got. During treatment and the months that followed, she wrote The Rumor, a story about a novelist who uses her best friend’s affair as inspiration for her new book. Around the same time, when she got a staph infection and almost died, she told her readers about that, too. She’d had to have one breast implant removed, right before Christmas, while for weeks the other remained, on its own. She took the kids to Atlantis for Christmas that year, she recalls. “And I’m like, I am deformed,” she says. “I had this fake rubbery implant that I put in my suit. And every time we went on one of the water slides, it would pop out, and the kids would throw it at each other.” She sighs. “It was challenging.”

Around the same time, she was processing her divorce. Back then, no one was talking about “unpaid labor,” she says, or about the fact that she was never alone—“that expectations will always fall to the mother. I was never still. The kids were taking up 80 percent of my time, and then in the other 20 percent, I was trying to write the books. And I was the main breadwinner. Chip worked outside of the house. So he was always taking priority. It was hard.” She handled the divorce as she handled the rest of life’s obstacles: She wrote. A lot. Now alone half the time while the kids were with their father, she found that life, and work, got easier “just on a pragmatic level,” she says. “I could get a lot of writing done. There was no chance I would have written all those books if we’d stayed married.”

That’s not to say she didn’t grieve its ending. She just used the page to help process it. Her next book, 2016’s Here’s to Us, was about a famous chef’s three wives—two ex, one current—who meet to say goodbye to their shared love after his sudden death. These days, she and Chip speak every day. “We get along better than most married couples,” she says, pulling up a family photo taken at a yacht club (“he got the yacht club membership,” she inserts) the night before Shelby went back to college. “I just don’t want to parent by myself, and I don’t think he does either.”

The pattern of writing-as-survival, by then, was set. So was the relationship with the readers who survived alongside her. What she needed next was someone to help run the operation.

In 2012, Hilderbrand met the man who would become her “work husband,” a Wisconsin native named Tim Ehrenberg, a “song and dance man” before moving to Nantucket with his husband. They met during a Nantucket Book Festival event at Cisco Brewery, which is owned by Hudson. Ehrenberg now keeps time according to Hilderbrand novel releases; the year, he says, was Summerland. By the following year, Ehrenberg and his husband had moved to the island full time, Ehrenberg had launched a marketing business, and Hudson had become a client.

During the pandemic, Ehrenberg was tasked with figuring out how Hudson’s bookstores would get Hilderbrand’s 2020 release, 28 Summers, into readers’ hands. Books, he recalls, weren’t “essential items,” but they were to him. And they were to Hudson’s and Hilderbrand’s livelihoods. The answer turned out to be as simple as signed copies. They marketed the books through Hilderbrand’s and the stores’ Instagram accounts. Orders poured in. Hilderbrand and Ehrenberg holed up in the basement of Mitchell’s as she signed—personalizing each and every one—and he packaged, throwing in a “little something special extra” that readers couldn’t get anywhere else. Even Ehrenberg, a voracious reader, was floored. “We just couldn’t believe how much people wanted that connection to their favorite author—and how much people’s summers are an Elin book,” he says. Hudson says it not only kept her stores afloat but changed her business permanently. Hilderbrand, meanwhile, found purpose in the darkness of the pandemic, helping her readers carry on at least one of their “real summer” traditions.

After that, Ehrenberg focused all of his marketing efforts on the bookstores—and, really, on Hilderbrand. For Swan Song, he worked with Little, Brown to create for the store a special Nantucket edition, with endpapers that featured a replica of the custom wallcovering Hilderbrand has in her powder room, complete with illustrations of the Chicken Box, Galley Beach, and The Five Star Weekend. They sold 10,000 copies during preorder. Somewhere along the way, the two decided to start a podcast together; Books, Beach, & Beyond is now in its fourth season. Guests have included Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Ann Patchett.

Ten years ago, on a flight to her annual five weeks on St. John, Hilderbrand met a man in the airport: a general contractor named Tim Field. They quickly fell into an easy rhythm, seeing each other every two to three weeks, and traveling together in the winters. “Tim was really great,” she says. “He owned his own business. He fit into my life and was happy and grateful to do it.” They maintained a long-distance romance for nearly 10 years before he died of a heart attack in August 2024, two weeks before The Perfect Couple debuted on Netflix. “I didn’t really have time to process or mourn him,” she says. “Two weeks later, I’m flying to L.A. for the premiere. Nobody wants to see somebody cry. So I just sort of powered through.”

When she reflects on Field’s death, Hilderbrand compares herself to Mallory Blessing, a character in her 2020 novel 28 Summers. 28 Summers is a story about two lovers who promise to meet on Nantucket at the same time each year, no matter what. Mallory has other relationships with men here and there, but she never marries. Instead, she builds a life of her own. “Some readers reacted badly to that,” Hilderbrand says. “Why isn’t she allowed to get married and have a life? And one answer is the book wouldn’t have worked if that was the case.” The other is that Hilderbrand wanted Mallory to have a life of her own creation, in which she is 100 percent solid, happy, and fulfilled without having a partner.

“I am fine,” Hilderbrand says, sitting on the floor of her Nantucket home in front of a wall-length built-in bookshelf that displays the contents of a life very well lived: hundreds of books, photos with family and friends, mementos and treasures whose origins she can’t always recall. “I am super sturdy. My interior architecture is strong. That is something I’ve worked on my entire life. And if I go the rest of my life and never have another boyfriend, I will be fine.”

It’s a work in progress, though. It takes a long time, she admits, to be able to say, I have everything I need and really believe it. “I can make my own money. I have a wonderful relationship with my children,” she says. “Eventually, I’ll be a grandmother. My ex-husband and I are best friends. I’ve got these great girlfriends. When I’m thinking about entering a relationship, my question is, And when will you be doing the dating?”

With next month’s release of The Five Star Weekend, Hilderbrand is officially a two-time Hollywood producer, following The Perfect Couple, the smash-hit Netflix murder mystery starring Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber that was recently optioned for a second season. She’s got another seven projects in development, including The Hotel Nantucket for Amazon and the Paradise series, set in St. John, for Apple. 28 Summers has been optioned for a feature-length film but has yet to announce a cast or release date.

Hollywood has been a long time coming, and now it’s coming all at once. Hilderbrand downplays her hard work and consistent deliverables and instead credits the success of Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel, Big Little Lies, and its subsequent popular HBO series, for making her phone ring. From the start, she decided she was going to deal with Hollywood by being easy. She watches a lot of TV and understands that, as a medium, it’s just different from a novel. As a producer, she advises, she offers feedback, but she doesn’t write—nor does she want to. “I have said to everybody, ‘I don’t care what you do with [the book],’” she says. “‘Just make good TV.’” For The Perfect Couple, for example, Netflix wanted a murder mystery. Hilderbrand didn’t argue. “They didn’t want the love story,” she says. “A lot of the readers were upset. But I was explicit with Nicole [Kidman]. I was like, do what you want. Make good TV. I do not care. I am not precious about the book.”

The Five Star Weekend stars Jennifer Garner as Hollis Shaw, a food influencer who worked as an editor at this very magazine and whose husband has recently died. Grieving, Hollis invites four women from four different stages of her life to the island for a weekend of food and togetherness. They dance at the Chicken Box and eat at Nautilus. There’s a dramatic hook, but there’s no murder. It’s a show about female friendship, and a show about Nantucket, and it is enjoyable to watch and beautiful to look at. “It feels very escapist in the best way,” Hilderbrand says. “It’s a binge.”

Unlike The Perfect Couple, which was filmed in Chatham and in L.A. during the writers’ strikes (with only b-roll filmed on the island), The Five Star Weekend was shot on Nantucket over four weeks last September. The first episode includes a scene of Garner riding in a taxi down Broad Street past the familiar storefronts of Young’s Bicycle Shop and Nantucket Bookworks. The cast, meanwhile, dove into island life. There was Chloë Sevigny at American Seasons, Regina Hall outside Town Pool, Garner practicing hot yoga at 1111 Nantucket, attending lectures at the Historical Association, and buying several hundred dish towels from Nantucket Looms to send as Christmas gifts. The Nantucket Current posted a video of the female cast members singing “Dancing Queen” during Tuesday-night karaoke at the Gaslight alongside a local who had no idea his stage mates were famous. Garner kept texting Hilderbrand: “I am in heaven.”

Predictably, not everyone saw it that way. Despite the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce naming Hilderbrand Tourism Advocate of the Year in 2022, the Select Board barely passed The Five Star Weekend filming permits. The Inquirer and Mirror is not always kind in how it writes about her or her projects, and neither, she says, are the commenters. “It’s the people who’ve been there forever,” Hilderbrand says. “The little old ladies out in Sconset. They do not like me, because they do not want more people coming. My rebuttal to that is my readers are coming for the day. My readers are not coming to buy up the land next to your house.” Sure, crews filmed downtown, and things got disrupted, “but I think when it comes out, everyone’s going to be really excited, because it’s the first time that Nantucket is authentically represented in film or on TV.”

Hilderbrand, for her part, would be thrilled if the island were a bit busier, as popular in April and November as it is May through October, “so that people can actually have a livelihood,” she says. In December, the Inquirer and Mirror reported that the town of Nantucket had taken in more than $2 million in revenue through fees and cast and crew accommodations. That doesn’t include the local businesses that also saw a boost. “Her impact on the island, both for for-profit and nonprofit businesses, has been just remarkable and so generous,” says Bess Clarke, who owns Nantucket Looms, which gained new followers after Garner Instagrammed herself there, learning how to weave. Whenever Clarke gets an order from a place like North Dakota, she knows it’s a beach reader. “I call it the Elin effect,” she says.

In October, Hilderbrand purchased a townhouse in Beacon Hill—the first home she’s owned outside of Nantucket—where she’ll spend time aside from the weeks she’s on St. John. Dawson, her middle son, is living there after having spent the fall working on The Five Star Weekend set, even though his mother says he’s read “zero” of her books, compared with Shelby, who has read 19. It’s in this townhouse that Hilderbrand revised, by candlelight, The Thoroughbreds, the sequel to 2025’s “dark academia” drama The Academy, both of which she wrote with Shelby after hearing her daughter’s boarding school dispatches during their daily—sometimes three times daily—calls. St. George’s, says Shelby, was similar to Nantucket in the sense that “everyone knows everything about everyone,” but amplified, “because it’s teenagers. There is supervision. But not all the time.” By junior year of high school, recalls Shelby, her mother insisted they turn the stories into a novel. They mapped out the plot in one of Hilderbrand’s notepads over dinner one night during school break. A TV adaptation is in the works.

Which brings Hilderbrand back to the original dilemma: how to actually, finally stop. What happens when she does is a story whose ending she’s still working out. Hollywood, she says, is reactive; “you have one hit, and then everybody wants to make [your project].” This is not a bad thing. Options are profitable, and Hilderbrand gets paid even if the projects never get made. But dealing with them is still a step away from, not toward, retirement. Her summer is already booked, from coast to coast. To help promote The Five Star Weekend, Hilderbrand will commute to L.A. and New York to host a companion podcast. She’ll likely do interview after interview, many requiring travel. Back home, the Nantucket Dreamland will host a premiere, timed to Peacock’s. The Nantucket Book Foundation will throw a fundraising fashion show themed “The Academy.” In late July, she’s hosting a private dinner—for strangers. “Her planner is definitely already full for the summer,” Shelby says.

And how is she dealing? By writing, of course: like it’s her job, even if it’s not, for an hour in the morning, every morning. Sitting on the couch in her Nantucket living room, the pool out back in view but not yet uncovered for the season—summer, just out of reach—she shows me the notebook into which she’s been pouring her newest novel. This one’s not set on Nantucket. And it doesn’t come with a deadline, either.

The Novelist follows four women who meet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The week before the women are set to graduate, one of them gets a big book deal, sells the rights, and becomes an incredible success. Fast-forward 30 years, and they’re all doing a podcast together, and the woman who had all that success is now out of money. She’s living with her mother. It’s a commentary on instant fame—that lightning-in-a-bottle effect Hilderbrand says she is so grateful to have avoided. “You can almost never get it back. You can almost never exceed it,” she says. “The way my career has gone has been completely the opposite.”

Little, Brown offered her a contract for the book—any book, really. “And for a lot of money,” she says. “I said, no thank you. And they said, well, name your price. And I’m like, the more money you give me, the more I’m gonna say no, because I don’t want the pressure that comes with having to deliver a book, then revise the book, then tour with the book. I’m not doing any of that anymore—like, I am done.”

Her readers will read it whenever she turns it in, she says. “And if I don’t write today, it’s totally fine,” she says. “If I don’t write tomorrow, it’s fine! It’s so freeing.” And if it doesn’t work, she can throw it away, and it won’t matter. But she knows she’ll keep it. Because she knows it does.