Then, feeling like I had sufficiently “lived,” I applied to graduate school. I traveled the globe in the off season, backpacking through Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South and Central America. That happened the following summer, 1994. I fell madly in love with Nantucket and I decided that I wanted to go back to live permanently. Despite this, that summer was revelatory. Now, when I drive my kids past it, they don’t believe I used to live there. The house I lived in was a complete hovel. The summer between the two school years, I sublet my apartment and rented a room in a house on Nantucket. I taught English, first in the NYC public schools, and then in Dobbs Ferry (suburbs). He said, “Go out in the world and live.” I moved to New York City, worked in publishing for nine months, hated it, then realized what I needed was a job that would give me blocks of time to write. When I graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1991, I went to my writing professor, Madison Smartt Bell, and asked him what to do next if I wanted to be a writer. And I fell so in love with it that as soon as that second school year was over, I moved to Nantucket permanently. I had the summer between those two years off so I headed back up to the Cape and Islands, specifically Nantucket, where I had rented a room in a house for the summer. I taught 8th grade English - first in the NYC public schools, and then I got a better job teaching in Westchester county (fun fact: the actor Max Greenfield of NEW GIRL was my student that year!). When I graduated from college (Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore) I moved to New York City. I made a promise to myself that somehow I would find a way back to the beach. It was 1986 and I spent 8 hours a day folding Rambo headbands. I spent my seventeenth summer working in a factory that made Halloween costumes. Then, when I was sixteen, my father was killed in a plane crash and those summers came to an end. We rented a cottage on a sandy lane that led to the sound and we had all of these summer traditions - outdoor showers, beach days, grilling out, miniature golf, soft-serve ice cream, falling asleep with sand in the sheets. It was my father, my stepmother and their blended family of five children.
Those summers were the happiest times of my life. I grew up outside of Philadelphia but my family would spend the month of July in Brewster, Mass on the Cape.
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