Welcome, friend! Yesterday, I shared about The Girls of Summer, the story of a woman working through her past and the glorious memories she has of a fateful summer. I am very excited to bring you this interview with the author, Katie Bishop. Check out what The Girls of Summer is about below and then read on for the interview.
The Girls of Summer
By Katie Bishop
“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.”
Rachel has been in love with Alistair for fifteen years. Even though she’s now married to someone else. Even though she was a teenager when they met. Even though he is twenty years older than her.
Rachel and Alistair’s summer love affair on a remote, sun-trapped Greek island has consumed her since she was seventeen, 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 acted in ways they never would at home. And as she does so, dark and deeply suppressed secrets about her first love affair begin to rise to the surface, as well as the truth about her time working for an enigmatic and wealthy man, who controlled so much more than she could have ever realized.
Joining a post #MeToo discourse, The Girls of Summer grapples with themes of power, sex, and consent, as it explores the complicated nature of memory and trauma––and what it takes to reframe, and reclaim, your own story.
Content notes include rape, sexual assault, adult/minor relationship, suicide, abortion and infidelity.
Hi Katie! Welcome to Armed with A Book. Please tell me and my readers a bit about yourself.
My name’s Katie Bishop, and I’m the author of The Girls of Summer. I spent my early twenties studying, working in a supermarket and taking backpacking trips before going on to work in academic publishing. I started writing professionally a few years later, fitting freelance journalism around my day job, before writing The Girls of Summer at the start of the first UK COVID lockdown. I now live in Birmingham, UK, with my partner, and I’m a full-time writer.
Congratulations on your debut novel! What are your first memories of writing?
I don’t really remember not writing! When I was very young I used to fill entire notebooks with stories. They were mostly quite obvious rip-offs of books that I was reading at the time, like Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers series or Goosebumps books.
How did the idea of The Girls of Summer come to be?
I’d been thinking about writing a “one that got away” style story about an all-consuming summer romance for a while. At the same time, it has been a couple of years after the #MeToo movement really took hold, and it felt like there had been a huge cultural reckoning where many women were realising that their early romantic and sexual experiences had an uncomfortable power dynamic or elements of pressure or abuse that they hadn’t been attuned to at the time.
I started to think about how it would feel for those two ideas to come together – what if that reckoning called into question a long and deeply-held belief about a relationship that you still viewed as your “one that got away”? The kind of relationship that had changed the way that you lived your life, even now? That was really the beginning of the idea behind The Girls of Summer.
Rachel spent some time travelling before she finished her education. Did you travel during your late teens/early twenties? Did any of your travels influence this book?
I travelled a lot in my early twenties. My best friend and I backpacked around parts of South and East Asia, the Middle East, and Australia, and I also went on a girl’s holiday to a Greek party island, which also partially inspired the book. The thing that really sticks in my memory from that time is the huge sense of possibility – both in terms of the world feeling like it was opening up, and also the sense that your entire life was ahead of you. I really wanted to capture that feeling in the book, and show how easily it is to idealise that feeling – and how dangerous over-idealising it can be.
In the early stages of The Girls of Summer, did you always plan for it to be a story touching on the #MeToo movement or was this a detail that evolved over time?
It was definitely an idea that I knew from the very start was going to be central to the book, but I wasn’t sure exactly how. I got about a quarter of the way through my first draft before I actually sat and mapped out exactly what Rachel was going to go through. Before then, I was very drawn to the idea of how trauma and memory interact, and the grey areas of consent, but I think I was putting off working out the details because I knew that it would involve putting a character I loved through some potentially pretty terrible things!
The Girls of Summer has a number of female characters who share their stories with Rachel and were present on the island around the same time as her. Between Jules, Priya, Helena, Kiera and Agnes, was there a character you wanted to write more about or would have liked to explore more in depth? Having Agnes in the cast was powerful as she was the oldest in the crew and her reasons to come back to the island again and again spoke volumes about the reasons people can get stuck in these cycles.
It’s interesting that you’ve picked that out, because Agnes was definitely a character that I was drawn to! Without giving too much away, I think that Agnes poses an important question about complicity. When abuse is happening on a wide scale, sometimes people get drawn in to a point where their involvement becomes a grey area. Agnes is clearly a victim, but she also chooses to come back to the island year after year, and sometimes brings other young women in, knowing what will happen to them. I’m always drawn to complex characters who aren’t wholly good or bad. I wanted to write women who sometimes make bad choices, for whom victimhood isn’t straightforward. I think that Agnes is a good example of that.
If there was one thing you hope readers could take away from your book, what would it be?
A more nuanced understanding of victimhood and consent. If people were able to see their own experiences in a different light, or perhaps understand other people’s experiences in a different way that would be fantastic. As dialogue around sex and power and consent evolve, I think that it’s important to open up these conversations and to consider more complicated issues and the grey areas that exist within the #MeToo movement. If The Girls of Summer got readers thinking about those contradictions and nuances then that would be amazing.
What’s something you have learned on your journey as a debut author? Is there anything you would change about your writing process for your next book?
I think that I’ve learned to back myself and trust my gut instinct. I’ve always struggled with anxiety and imposter syndrome, which makes it hard for me to distinguish between rational thoughts and anxiety-driven thoughts, but putting something incredibly vulnerable and personal out into the world has meant that I’ve really had to trust myself and put negativity to one side.
A writing-related thing that I’ve learned is that it’s better to plan, even though I’ve never viewed myself as much of a planner. It just saves you so much pain further down the line sorting out all of the knots you’ve tied yourself into!
What are some of your favorite books? Are there any authors on your auto-buy list?
Some of my favourite books I’ve read over the last couple of years were Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors and The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller. So those are two authors that are definitely going on my auto-buy list in the future!
Is there anything else you would like to share?
That’s everything! Thank you for sending such thoughtful questions.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and sharing with my readers.
Thank you so much for joining us for the interview! Connect with Katie on Instagram (@katiebishopwrites), Twitter (@WhatKatieBWrote) and her website.
Also big thanks to the wonderful folks at St Martin’s Press for the opportunity to review an advanced copy of The Girls of Summer and to interview Katie.
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