This book wrecks me every time I read it, but in a good way?
That Summer Feeling
Written by Bridget Morrissey
Published in 2023
This is a heartfelt romance, and also a comedy (and it is funny!), and also so full of clever quips and meet cutes and adorableness and fist pumping moments and agency and… it’s all good. I can’t recommend it enough.
After five pages, the first time I read it, I was immediately looking up the author to find what else she has written. The writing is funny, clever, full of character, and you get an immediate sense of the narrator, Garland. So many pithy comebacks! Such witty dialogue! Noel Coward would be jealous. I loved it. And while Morrissey has several books, and they apparently have queer rep in them, this is the only one with a wlw relationship. I want her to write another Sapphic book so much. So, so much. (I looked, and she has at least one, a YA Sapphic book coming out in 2025.)
Then, there’s Garland herself. And the other characters! Besides the obvious ones you’re not supposed to like, everyone is charming in their own way. But Garland is great, as is her love interest. There’s not much of a plot, adults go to summer camp to reinvent themselves, there are lovely meet cutes and people fall in love and family is found, and… you get the idea. It’s a little over the top in the best way, much like Garland herself.
Go read it. Go now.
Now the angsty part. You are welcome to stop reading. Go enjoy the book.
Still here? You should go, really.
Okay. I’ve now read this book twice. The first time was six or seven months ago. The most recent time was… well, I finished it today. Both times were incredibly hard for me. But they won’t be for you! I’m sure. Unless you resonate with some of these passages from the book. Like I did. Like I do.
When I drafted this post, I pulled a bunch of quotes from the book. But as I started really thinking about them, I couldn’t figure out how to talk about them without hurting people I love. At one point, Garland realizes that she wasn’t happy, before:
I had a part-time job in a part-time life.
A lot of my own journey has been around realizing that I had been drifting through my life, deeply unhappy. When I realized I was trans, it was amazing and also terrifying, because I was 49 and discovering that I’d lived an entire life not as me. It is possible that I panicked, and made sweeping changes in order to save myself from some imagined wasting away. In doing that, I hurt a lot of people I love. But I am beginning to understand now, with a lot of therapy, that what needed to change the most was me.
I can’t take back much of what I did, and I actually don’t want to. I am queer and trans. I was not piloting my life, I was taking advantage of others to stay even keeled. I don’t want to go back to that. But it is very hard for me to accept that I could have done it better, with more love, with more attention to others.
I am trying, but I’m not where Garland gets in the book. She sees that in herself, but she is also able to find a great deal of self-compassion, something I have yet to discover.
I could finally see how I had never actually been comfortable in the old molds I used to live inside. They’d been shattered long before I arrived at camp, but with my new perspective, the wreckage no longer hurt to look at.
I felt so much compassion for those old, jagged pieces of me. I had been so fearful of inflicting pain on others, I ended up hurting myself. I had fallen over myself to fix things that couldn’t be repaired.
and
“I’ve cobbled together a life… always waiting for the big event to arrive.” I threw my arms up. “There is no big event! And I’m finally learning how to put myself out into the world without being so worried about how I’ll be received.”
and from a friend to Garland,
“You’re not a friendless hack. Or any of the unkind things you think about yourself. All of that passes. It always does. The best gift you can give yourself is permission to keep figuring shit out, no matter how messy it is. You can be a different you tomorrow. You can also own the person you are today. You don’t have to hide away because you might one day change.”
I don’t identify completely with all of Garland’s journey, but enough that reading about a woman who struggles with the same things I do, and then has an amazing, storybook romantic experience… even though I know, I understand, that this is fiction, this is made up, this is fantasy… well, it wrecks me because I don’t see that happy ending.
This past year, I’ve been fighting and clawing for my own happiness, but it has felt like I haven’t gotten any closer.
The first time I read this book, I didn’t have many supports in place, and it was hard. I had nowhere to turn, nobody to process with. I read it at the start of the summer of 2023, and that summer turned out to be a grim time for me.
This time, I do have friends (they know who they are, and I love them), and even with them it was still hard, but in talking to them I’m seeing some perspective that maybe I didn’t appreciate before?
Garland is in a place in her life where she is ready to make the decisions that are good for her. Even though she’s a mess, she knows, when faced with those decisions, what she needs to do. That’s the next step for me, figuring out what decisions are good for me, not just safe.
Maybe the third time I read this book I will have taken that next step. I’ll let you know.
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