After two decades of taking her readers on vacation to Nantucket, Elin Hilderbrand is ready for her own getaway.
The author of bestselling novels including “Barefoot” tells TODAY.com that her 30th book, "Swan Song," out June 11, will be her last Nantucket-based novel. She previously wrote on her website that she would retire after her 2024 book and “plans on becoming a book influencer.”
She first announced her plans in a 2021 interview with the Associated Press. “A lot of people will follow a writer for a long time and then inevitably they will turn out a book that is not as good as the others. I’ve always said to myself, ‘I will not do that. I will make each book better and better or different in some way.’ I feel myself coming to my natural end of my material," she said.
Hilderbrand, 54, published her first book, “Beach Club” in 2000 and since then, has come out with a new book every year — sometimes, even two.
Below, she opens up to TODAY.com about what retirement really looks like, and whether it involves writing.
Is Elin Hilderbrand really retiring? How she’s saying goodbye
Hilderbrand isn't retiring from writing altogether — but she says she is stepping back from Nantucket-centric books.
“I have achieved a certain standard. And so to keep up with that standard is really the challenge. The reason I’m retiring is because I know it’s not sustainable. And this is going to be it. There’s enormous satisfaction in saying, ‘OK, “Swan Song” is my last Nantucket-based novel,’” Hilderbrand says.
Many of her novels bring readers into the cobblestone streets of Nantucket, past weathered shingle homes and through annual fixtures like the Daffodil Festival and the Figawi Race Weekend.
Nicknamed “Billionaire’s Isle” by Boston.com, the island 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts welcomes wealthy vacationers each summer. About 14,000 year-round residents call it home year round. One of them is Hilderbrand.
After 24 years, Hildebrand says writing about the summer enclave has become increasingly challenging.
“I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and I’m like, ‘This book isn’t gonna work. I can’t make it work,’” Hilderbrand says.
Just as her imagination about The Grey Lady is waning, Hilderbrand wants to stay home more.
“My kids are getting older, and I realized I only have a certain number of months or years before they move out and get their own families. So I want to be home more,” Hilderbrand says. “The irony is that I spend a lot of time off Nantucket promoting my books, and I really just want to be home.”
She felt the pressure to “get it right” with “Swan Song,” a literary farewell to the island — and a swan song itself, so to speak.
The novel has all the hallmarks of a Hilderband book: A mystery-thriller element related to an exorbitantly wealthy couple and their personal concierge, multiple love triangles, scenes spent abroad glossy yachts and in the passenger’s seat of a Land Rover, and plenty of high-end brand name callouts.
A few of Hilderbrand’s most beloved characters return for the finale, including Nantucket’s fictional chief of police Ed Kapensash, Fast “Eddie” Pancik and the always gossipy Blonde Sharon.
“The ending is really, really poignant and bittersweet. And every time I read the ending, I cry. It really feels like an end to an era,” Hilderbrand says.
Elin’s prologue
Hilderbrand’s origin story is nearly as famous as Brant Point Lighthouse.
Raised in Pennsylvania, Hilderbrand spent most summers vacationing on Cape Cod with her father, stepmother and five siblings. Those “magical summers” came to an abrupt end when her father was killed in a two-person plane crash in 1986 when she was 16. Shortly thereafter, she found herself working 40 hours a week in a factory that made Halloween costumes.
“What I needed, really, at that point was an Elin Hilderbrand novel,” she says.
Hilderbrand went on to study creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. After graduation, she tried her hand in the publishing industry, and then spent a few years as a public school teacher in New York. She felt confident that she wanted to be a writer but she didn’t know what professional career track would allow her to become one.
“I went to my writing professor, Madison Smartt Bell, and I said, ‘What do I do? Like, I want to be a writer? Do I get a job? Write? Do I go to graduate school?’” Hilderbrand recalls. “He said, ‘To be a writer, Elin, you have to go out in the world and live.’”
Determined to get her summers back, Hilderbrand decided to spend one season on Nantucket in between teaching jobs. “I fell madly in love with the island. I just was like, ‘Oh my God, this is my home,’” she says.
In 1994, she moved to the island permanently. There, she met her now-ex husband Chip Cunningham, with whom she shares three children. (Hilderbrand now calls Cunningham “a very dear friend of mine”).
Together, Cunningham and Hilderbrand traveled throughout southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, South America, Latin America, the Galapagos Islands and Costa Rica.
“When I got back feeling like I had sufficiently gone out and lived,” she says, mimicking Bell’s advice, “I applied to graduate school at The University of Iowa — Writers’ Workshop.”
Hilderbrand was accepted to the prestigious graduate-level creative writing program, but it wasn’t the supportive environment she dreamed of. She recalls feeling “miserable” in the competitive environment. “I was writing things that had a lot more surface energy and I really did not feel appreciated,” Hilderbrand says. She started attending counseling, where she received one piece of advice that would change her life.
“The therapist said, ‘I think it’s pretty obvious what you need to do.’ And I thought she was going to tell me to quit, which I found strange. She said, ‘You need to start writing a book about Nantucket,’” Hilderbrand says.
On the final day of the program, a literary agent named Michael Carlisle visited Hilderbrand’s class. He had read a draft of Hilderbrand’s book, “The Beach Club,” and inquired as to which of the class’s students lived on Nantucket. She raised her hand, not yet knowing that doing so would be the start of a 25-year working relationship with Carlisle, who has represented her ever since.
Carlisle tells TODAY.com that what attracted him to Hilderbrand’s story was that it took place on the coastal island.
“The connection was a geographical one and a family one. I happen to know the place where she lived and where she set the first book and subsequent 29 books after,” Carlisle says. Together, they went on to sell “The Beach Club” to St. Martin’s Press for what Hilderbrand calls “a very small advance.”
“I got $5,000. And I remember saying to (Carlisle), ‘Is $5,000 a lot of money? Because like, I can’t quit my job.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, this is the only offer we got, we have to take it.’”
Hilderbrand’s first five books were published by St. Martin’s Press before she and her team decided to transition to a new publisher in 2006.
“I had this sort of Cinderella day where I visited all the publishers in New York and I ended up switching publishers. I moved to Little, Brown and they changed my life,” Hilderbrand says.
A beach read empire
“Barefoot,” a novel about three women who travel to Nantucket to escape the trials and tribulations of daily life, was the first of Hilderbrand’s books to be published by Little, Brown and Company.
And then came a wave of astronomical success. Twenty five of her 30 novels became New York Times best sellers and and seven debuted in the No. 1 position on the New York Times hardcover fiction list, starting with “Summer of ‘69” in June 2019. She has sold over 20 million books.
“The way that my career has gone has been so miraculous, honestly, and I’m so grateful to (Carlisle) for believing in me and then to Little, Brown for building me so thoughtfully,” Hilderbrand says.
She published two widely popular series — The Winter Street Series and The Paradise Series — and, along the way, redefined the meaning of a beach read.
“What Elin has done is she’s invented the elevated beach read. People now will think of a beach read as something that has a great plot and great characters and great dialogue. I think that the escape element is what makes it a great summer read,” says David Forrer, a literary agent who represents Hilderbrand alongside Carlisle.
Carlisle says the setting adds to the feeling of a beach read, but that the books’ plots are more sophisticated.
“I think the fact that it’s a summer place that sings about the joys of summer with whatever the family interaction or drama that takes place in the setup of the book, I think that’s what works. So is it a beach read? Sure. People read it on the beach. It’s set in a summer community. But it’s not always just about surf, sharks and families sitting on a picnic. They’re more complex novels,” Carlisle adds.
Hilderbrand doesn’t mind when people call her books beach reads. What she does mind are people who think what she does is easy, just because her end products are about as easy to consume as an icy lemonade on a hot New England day.
“On the one hand, it’s easy-breezy, but if you don’t care about the characters, you’re not going to turn the pages. So you have to have some skill in writing and have people care about your characters, which is hard,” she says.
Hilderbrand chooses to focus on how much her books have meant to her readers. She tells stories of readers who reached out to her and said her books were a welcome escape for them from troubles like a cancer diagnosis or caring for sick loved ones.
“When it’s their darkest hour, and people are turning to my books, what greater gift for me as a writer to be like? ‘It was my worst time ever and I read your book, and it made me feel better.’ That is a sense of purpose that I have now that I don’t think I had when I started,” Hilderbrand, who is a breast cancer survivor, says.
What’s next after ‘retirement’?
As summer on Nantucket heats up, thousands will descend on the sandy shores of Jetties Beach on Nantucket with a pint from Cisco Brewers in hand. You might find Hilderbrand there, but mentally, she’s getting ready to go back to school. That might sound strange coming from a woman who insists she’s retiring, but like her best novels, there’s a plot twist.
After finding that her Nantucket-based books became increasingly challenging to write, Hilderbrand found new inspiration by working on a two-part book series with her 17-year-old daughter, Shelby Cunningham.
The first book, which is expected to be released in September 2025, is inspired by her daughter’s experience attending boarding school at St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island.
“It’s like somebody plugged me into a socket — I’m so energized, so excited to be able to take my writing skills, which now at the age of 54, are pretty, pretty advanced, and be able to take them to a different topic. All of a sudden, writing has become new for me,” she says.
