Elin Hilderbrand isn’t exactly retiring, though “retirement” is her word of choice. She’s repeated it frequently in interviews and Instagram posts and essays, especially in the past few weeks, as a wave of press accompanies her latest book, Swan Song—a newly anointed No. 1 New York Times bestseller. When a hair appointment mix-up conflicts with our original scheduled meeting in May, the author behind more than 30 beloved beach reads sends me a frantic text: “Yes, all of my days are scheduled down to five minute increments which is one of the reasons I’m retiring!”
When we do eventually intersect in a hotel lobby off Central Park, Hilderbrand resembles the sort of ritzy retiree for whom she’d invent a scandal. Dressed in a fuzzy baby-pink cardigan and striped black-and-white minidress, she swaps out her heels for jeweled flip flops without a teaspoon of irony (she has 37 pairs of Mystique sandals, she informs me with pride) and prepares to race off to DryBar. Perpetually tanned and blonde, the 54-year-old author is a fascinating sort of semi-celebrity. Her Nantucket-set novels have made her a true publishing icon, the kind whose books even non-readers recognize splayed across beach towels and filling airport lounges. When I relay my plans to meet Hilderbrand to my husband, a sports writer whose preferred reading material often deals in athletics, urban planning, or heists, even he perks up at the familiarity of her name.
Such is the ubiquity of Hilderbrand, a writer with a wildly un-relatable life on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, where she’s lived for three decades, and where she’s now working on a new two-book series with her daughter, Shelby. So “retirement,” perhaps, is a misnomer. Yes, Hilderbrand has made it clear she’s cutting off the supply line of her annual Nantucket summer books, which she’s published reliably year after year since the aughts. But she is not done writing, nor is she necessarily done writing beach reads.
“I want to manage people’s expectations,” she says a few weeks later, over Zoom, after I ask about her word choice of “retirement.” Sitting on her porch in a pair of aviator sunglasses and a light cardigan, she says, “There is not going to be a summer book in 2025. There is not going to be a summer book in 2026. I would be shocked, shocked, if there was a summer book in 2027. 2028, who’s to say? That’s four years from now. I don’t want expectations to be like, ‘Oh, she’s just taking a break, and then she’s going to come back and pick up where she left off.’”
Swan Song by Elin Hilderbrand
But is she leaving the door open to that possibility? Sure. If Hilderbrand has proven anything over the course of her books, it’s that anything can happen on Nantucket. (Including ghosts.) She continues, “If I do write another Nantucket summer novel, and I might, it’s going to be on my own time frame, and I want to be free to do other things, and write about other things, and so I very consciously use the word ‘retirement.’ My intentions are pure, in that I am retiring for the sake of my career. Could I take a four-book deal and make millions of dollars? Yes. I am choosing not to do that, because I am not entirely confident that the work would live up to what I have done so far.”
Back in 2020, she was offered one such four-book deal, but had already decided she could no longer handle her “bananas” workload. She was putting out at least a book a year (sometimes two, back when she was still publishing her Winter Street books and Paradise series); hosting fan gatherings; traveling for dozens of speaking events; fielding film and television options; and juggling promotion and giveaways on Instagram, a platform she refers to her affectionately as her “fifth child.” She was also starting to run out of ideas for the Nantucket novels, having milked the expected hotels and restaurants and weddings to produce numerous dramas, romances, and the occasional murder mystery. “I didn’t want to repeat myself,” she says. “I wanted to have fresh takes, and it just got harder and harder to create new material out of this island.”
She told her publisher, Little, Brown, and Company, that she’d sign a two-book deal instead. “They were not happy with that, and so then we settled on three books,” Hilderbrand says. Those books would eventually become The Hotel Nantucket, The Five-Star Weekend, and, finally, Swan Song. Now, having sent off the “last” of her Nantucket novels—and recorded the last chapter of the audiobook version of Swan Song herself, during which she “cried through the whole thing”—Hilderbrand is doing what some might consider the opposite of retirement. She’s working on her book podcast, co-hosted with Tim Ehrenberg, marketing director for Nantucket’s indie bookstores and president of the Nantucket Book Foundation; brainstorming her next, reportedly more “literary” novel; and turning her attention to The Academy, the first in the two-book series she’s writing with Shelby, the youngest of her three children.
The series is drawn, at least in part, from Shelby’s own experience at St. George’s School in Rhode Island, which Hilderbrand describes as “the kind of boarding school you think about when you think, ‘New England boarding school.’” She claims Shelby would call her mother “four or five times a day her first year, and every phone call is—” Hilderbrand pauses. “She’s having a wonderful time, but the stuff she’s telling me is completely...” She shakes her head, leaving the rich-kid antics her daughter would witness implied rather than expressed. “I went to public school,” she continues. “I didn’t have this background. I’m like, ‘We’re writing a book.’”
Once Shelby was on board for the project, mother and daughter signed a two-book deal—their publisher “could not get a contract done up fast enough,” Hilderbrand gushes—and spun their intel into story: Hilderbrand providing the writing and publishing know-how, Shelby the machinations and unimpeachable lingo of New England Gen-Z boarding school students. Hilderbrand knows her fans might fret she’s steered the next phase of her career toward YA fiction, but she assures them that The Academy, out in September 2025, is “extremely adult. Lots of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”
During the course of our two conversations, Hilderbrand makes remarkably little mention of any leisure that might otherwise designate “retirement.” It’s true she doesn’t envision The Academy lasting beyond two novels, but that doesn’t mean she’ll burn all her notebooks (Hilderbrand writes her drafts in longhand) once Shelby’s off to the University of Miami. There are film and TV rights to think about, and Hilderbrand teases “people have expressed interest [in adapting The Academy] already.”
Hollywood seems poised to beckon the next era of Hilderbrand. For the first time since she started publishing, one of her books is getting a screen adaptation, with The Perfect Couple—starring Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber—hitting Netflix later this year. Hilderbrand practically floats out of her chair when she describes meeting Kidman for dinner (the “loveliest human being”) and watching as the limited series took form. “The pedigree on it is so immaculate,” she says, “and if you had said to me 15 years ago, ‘You’re going to have to wait 15 years [for one of your books to get adapted], but it’s going to be totally perfect, I would have said, ‘Okay. Fine.’”
Nor is The Perfect Couple the only Nantucket novel in development. The Five-Star Weekend is with Peacock. MRC Film has 28 Summers. Indie studio Wiip got the Winter Street books. Summer of ’69 has a potential limited-series home under the Sony-owned 3000 Pictures. “And Swan Song has been optioned,” Hilderbrand adds, “but I can’t tell you by whom, so there are a bunch of things in development, and I think, hopefully, once Perfect Couple comes out—a lot of times, you just need to see one great show, then you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh. What else does this person have?’”
Boston-born and Philadelphia-raised, Hilderbrand claims she’s wanted to be an author since at least the second grade. (She received the “top author” award in class.) Since then, she’s sought differing forms of literary legitimacy. She first worked in publishing in New York for a mere nine months (“hated it”) before changing careers to teach in New York Public Schools. Summer break would lead her to Nantucket, where she moved full-time in June 1994. Then, in the fall of 1996, she headed midwest to attend the lauded Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was similarly “miserable.”
“People did not appreciate my brand of fiction [at Iowa],” she says. “I was a very savvy entertainer, though. I threw parties all the time. I had people for dinner.” Her therapist in Iowa told her to write about Nantucket, and in the ensuing years Hilderbrand fused her savvy party skills and her literary acumen—however unacknowledged—to build the sort of bookish brand most authors would salivate over today.
“I’ve been called everything, like ‘easy-breezy,’ ‘fluffy,’ and my favorite, ‘trashy,’ and I don’t think any of my books are any of those things,” she says. “I think some people think they are beneath them. Maybe some people think they’re for old people. But my hope is that younger readers will discover Elin Hilderbrand, and be like, ‘You know what? These are really relevant, and really juicy,’ and I don’t think there’s a loser among them.”
Despite her many post-“retirement” ambitions, Hilderbrand admits she is, in actuality, seeking a slowdown. She worked relentlessly for decades, including around the time of her breast cancer diagnosis and double mastectomy in 2014, and during book tours she’s spent weeks at a time on the road. She’s at last ready to spend more of her hours at home, relishing time with her children before they leave the house. She isn’t sure if or when her writing will turn back to Nantucket. But as for Hilderbrand herself, she’ll never leave the island that made her. “My philosophy is this: I am going to be alive a certain number of days,” she says. “I want as many of those days as possible to be spent here.”
