Brooke Lea Foster on the Narratives We Create in Life and on the Page
"Giving voice to the concerns of women is paramount in my novels."
Dear friends,
With great pleasure I welcome to Writers at the Well beloved novelist Brooke Lea Foster. Brooke is an award-winning author and journalist who has worked as a writer and editor at The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, The Huffington Post and the Washingtonian magazine. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Parents, PARADE, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, Psychology Today, among others.
Brooke’s novels, Summer Darlings, On Gin Lane, and All the Summers in Between were featured as top summer reads in People Magazine, named a top summer pick by Entertainment Weekly and named one of PARADE’s best books of summer. She writes the popular Dear Fiction newsletter and she's the author of three nonfiction books. Her fourth novel, Our Last Vineyard Summer, is due out from Simon & Schuster on July 1, 2025.
In the interview below, Brooke generously shares her insights and experience.
Stay tuned for upcoming interviews with nonfiction writers Jody Day (Living the Life Unexpected), Carla Fernandez (Regenade Grief), Andrew Holecek (Reverse Meditation, Dream Yoga, and Preparing to Die), novelists Holly Kennedy (The Sideways Life of Denny Voss), Amanda Leduc (Wild Life), and poets Askold Melnyczuk (The Venus of Odessa) and Juan Pablo Mobili (Contraband).
Please comment, share, subscribe, and suggest writers you’d like to see interviewed!
Yours at the well,
Tess
What was the seed image that gave rise to your forthcoming novel, Our Last Vineyard Summer?
I was on vacation with my family in Martha’s Vineyard and we were renting a house in historic Edgartown. There are all these grand white clapboard colonials with tidy shutters and glossy painted front doors. Smelling the salt air, gazing at the contrast between the lush lawns rolling down to the sea, stepping into a home with wide planked pine floors, I started to envision a longtime Washington political family living there. I saw three daughters and an iconic feminist mother, and when I sat down in the living room of the rental house, I stared at an oversized antique map hanging there. The cartographer’s name listed was Charles Whiting. That’s it, I thought. This is the story of the Whiting family’s summers on the island. The story clicked into place. I could see the family, their troubles, and I began to hear them talking to me. That’s when I know an idea has taken off!
Like you, I am from Long Island. Your writing suggests your childhood memories of the Hamptons live deep inside your inner well. Is there a particular memory that has fueled your fascination with beach towns?
Yes! I grew up in a house on the north shore on the Long Island Sound. It was a group of summer cottages that had been winterized, and our house was 168 steps down a dune-covered cliff down to the beach. Often there was nobody on that beach and I have numerous memories of wandering along the water and puzzling out an issue of heartache, where I should go to college, how I was feeling distant from my parents. I think it’s why I’ve always believed in the transformational summer; in Long Island, we wait all year for the weather to get warm, and when it does, we’re all ready to shed the heavy layers and get to the heart of what it means to be happy. I spent so many hours at that beach. I would say I came of age there. Funny enough, my husband proposed to me on it as well!
You were a journalist before becoming a novelist. Journalism requires a broad understanding of what’s happening at the surface of the well—societally, culturally, politically. Fiction requires these, plus an intuitive understanding of the underground sources that fuel the well—emotionally, psychically, interpersonally. What has fiction writing called forth in you that journalism did not?
Wow. That’s such a fascinating question, and you’re so right. I would say that the type of journalism that I produced required both. I wrote narrative nonfiction—more akin to a 4,000 word story you’d see in Rolling Stone or a newspaper’s Sunday magazine—than a front page story. Many of my stories relied on deep emotional interviews with people that talked not just about what happened but why and how it impacted them. For example, I once wrote about what it was like to be a low-income scholarship student at Ivy League schools for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. I asked about the details of these students’ lives, but then I would mine their hearts for how the experience shaped them, how it sharpened their view of the world, what hurt the most. I’ve always been guided by my intuition as a reporter, and I felt like that’s what made me good at my job.
I would listen to what a person was saying, but then I could hear what they were really saying. It’s very similar with fiction. I can usually see the surface of what my character is doing, but as a writer, I have to mine their heart and mind to discover what’s really going on.
Your work often focuses on friendships between women, and in the case of your forthcoming novel, sisters. At times these relationships are impacted by the society that contains them, including men. What moves you to explore this terrain?
There are so many forces that shape our view of ourselves and the people around us. I’m one of three sisters, and I love getting together with both of my sisters to reminisce and laugh about our childhood. But there have been many times when talking about our parents where we feel like we’re from entirely different families. My younger sister is always telling me that my parents treat me differently; they’re always willing to listen to me and not her. Maybe it’s true, but to me, this type of assertion always feels like folklore or some kind of myth. We create these narratives about our relationships to understand our pain, and we spend a lot of time reaffirming our beliefs, if that makes sense.
I liked the idea of exploring how politics, parental expectations and family dynamics can impact a woman’s view of herself and how that might change later in life when we’re forced to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. In this political situation we’re currently in, it’s particularly relatable. If your politics differ from the beliefs of your family, can you remain close?
This is a question young people have been grappling with for generations, and the youngest daughter is wondering something similar. If I’m different from my mother, will she still accept me?
As demonstrated in your fiction, motherhood has a way of adding to and subtracting from our sense of who we are. What dimensions of yourself have you reclaimed through your own writing and through featuring fellow writers on your Substack, ‘Dear Fiction’?
Being a mother is the hardest and most rewarding job I’ve ever had. When my son was three months old, I remember returning to work with a pit in my stomach. I didn’t want to leave him with a nanny, but I also didn’t want to leave my job. I’ve found this such a challenging part of motherhood: the desire to be there for my kids in every way but still chase after my own dreams. My husband never worried about these things, and it bothered me. Why didn’t he sit at work and wonder if he’d texted the nanny too many times about whether the baby got his nap? Why didn’t he change the way he did his job to accommodate the baby? We were an equitable marriage. He’s a feminist, and still, there are just parts of a woman’s life that is burdened in a way that a man’s isn’t. So I coped with the changes (because I felt it the most when my first child was born) by returning to work. By telling my story and telling the stories of others. Writing has been the way that I hold on to myself. I can hear my voice when I write, and even though my books aren’t about me, they include many of my own personal conflicts.
Giving voice to the concerns of women is paramount in my novels, and many of my characters are coming to terms with how to fit themselves into a life that feels defined by everyone around them.
I love a character that stands up for herself and says: This is what I want. Probably because it’s so hard for us to do, at least it has been for me.
A throughline of your work is the theme of women finding the courage to ask for what they need. Even in the modern age, societal norms often imply the expectation for women to seek permission. How did this theme come to be so vital for you?
Yasss. I’m not sure why I’m so taken with this idea, but I suppose it’s because I’m always trying to find the courage to ask for what I want or what I need. When I became a mother, I had a tendency to put the needs of my husband and my kids first, as many women do. At some point, I realized that I was the only one who could change that. Still, it’s so hard to tell someone you love that you need more, that something about your lives together isn’t working, and even last year, when I went on book tour, I remember it feeling like a really big deal. I wasn’t asking: Can I go? I was asking my husband: Can you figure this out without me? The answer was a resounding yes, but I was still so stressed by the ask, by leaving and giving him detailed instructions.
I think many women struggle with asking for what we need, whether it’s asking a boss for more money or telling your husband you want to go back to work. It can be incredibly hard to put yourself first.
Your recent novel All the Summers In Between explores a friendship between a wealthy girl, Margot, and a hardworking local, Thea. How has tension between the haves and the have-nots played out in your life, and where are you aware of it now?
When I was little, my parents would pile us in the car to drive out to my aunt and uncle’s house in Montauk. We’d drive through the Hamptons and I’d press my nose to the glass gawking at the mansions and pretty strips of stores and wonder: Who gets to live this way? Then I became a journalist in my twenties, and I interviewed people from all different socioeconomic backgrounds and realized: We all put our pants on the same way. In other words, we all have problems. For some of us those storylines just play out in much nicer houses. Ha!
From being a local in a beach town, I’ve picked up on so much tension that plays out between the haves and have nots. There are so many misunderstandings and assumptions, and I love watching that play out on the page. But I also love stories where people from opposite economic realities grow close and learn something from each other. That happened to me many times in my years as a nanny in the Hamptons, and then later, as a summer resident on the North Fork of Long Island. We’re all just people trying to get closer to our authentic selves and the people we love.
Your work often features cameos from iconic figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol. What energy do these figures bring into your fiction and what happens to you as a writer when you let them in the door?
There’s an electricity in my fingers when they pop up in the story. I get so excited trying to capture their voices, and to show who they really were. That is particularly true with Marilyn Monroe when she arrived on the page. I got to portray her as so much smarter than people give her credit for. What’s always fun is giving these famous people a line or two that pushes the plot forward for the main character. In All the Summers in Between, Thea thinks she’s interviewing to be Andy Warhol’s assistant but when she arrives, she discovers the job is to be a house cleaner. She says something like: I’ve been cleaning up after people my whole life. The conversation with Warhol becomes a catalyst for big changes in her life. I loved giving him that role in my story!
What would you like readers to know about Our Last Vineyard Summer that might not be obvious from the jacket copy?
That it’s the perfect novel for sisters to read together. There are so many elements that are relatable to anyone who is close to their sister and longs to be closer. I’m eager for my own sisters to read the book. They may notice that they’re nothing like the characters, but there are so many themes that we’ve grappled with together. The foremost: How in the world did we grow up with the same parents when we would describe them so differently?
Find out more about Brooke’s work at her website: https://www.brookeleafoster.com/. Follow her on her Substack Dear Fiction, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Explore previous Writers at the Well interviews with novelist Douglas Bauer, essayist Sven Birkerts, novelist Karen Dukess, poet/sculptor Don Freas, novelist JoeAnn Hart, poet/essayist Kelle Groom, novelist Jill McCorkle, author Laura Munson, author Dr. Samra Zafar, a poem by Caprice Garvin, and podcast interviews with novelist Mar’ce Merrell, novelist Manda Scott and screenwriter Alan Watt.
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Enjoy my novels Dawnland and April & Oliver.
Great interview. You ask the best questions, Tess!