Fiction as a Love Letter: The Lie that Tells a Truth

Many readers have asked me if my debut novel, The Summer Knows, is autobiographical. In a sense, it is, and in a sense, it isn’t. When discussing the craft of fiction with my students, I often use a saying I learned: “You take what you know, add some imagination, and you end up with what author John Dufresne calls, ‘a lie that tells a truth.’”

The profound truth behind The Summer Knows is a love letter to my childhood friendship with two boys, the Wardell brothers, Mike and Randy. They visited their grandparents, who lived down the street from me, every summer and winter break. We all seemed to hold our breath through the school year, waiting for the endless weeks of summer to arrive so we could be together. We met when we were six and seven years old, instantly bonding while riding our bikes around the neighborhood. From that day on, the four of us—my brother, Mike, Randy, and I—were inseparable from sunup until the deep, late evening when our parents would finally holler for us to come home.

My brother, my mother, and I lived with my grandparents in a community filled with retired people, leaving us with few kids our age to play with. My grandmother was the matriarch of the family, an undiagnosed bipolar, who ruled the house with an erratic, eccentric hand. I often felt the brunt of her verbal abuse, making those visits from Mike and Randy my lifeline. They were my lifeboat during the summers. I could escape the clutches of my grandmother and feel a pure freedom I had never experienced before. Mike and Randy shared a similar reality; their grandfather was a tyrant who ruled with a brutal hand. Because we all shared such chaotic, unspoken worlds, the four of us developed a deep and unwavering love that stood the test of time for many decades.

A Summer Bubble

Randy was my first love. The thrill raced through me the first time I saw him at the tender age of seven. It almost seems inevitable that when kids spend so much time together, a deeper attraction will develop. We were like magnets, and throughout the years, we were simply drawn to each other when the brothers came to visit. We fought fiercely at times and sometimes had other boyfriends and girlfriends, but we always found our way back to one another during the summer.

Those summers were a little bubble where other people in our lives simply melted away. Summers were like their own separate dimension. Though we rarely spoke of our troubled homes, it was healing just to be together. We lived on the Intercoastal Waterway in South Florida, spending most of our days at the beach or in the water. Some of my most treasured memories are summer nights spent lying with Mike and Randy, our heads touching, looking up at the stars, talking and laughing until we heard the inevitable call to come home.

The fearsome four, being silly in the summer.

A Streetlight

Our lives always seemed to work in parallel, even when we were many states apart. The year I turned sixteen, we both faced tragedy. Mike and my brother pulled away, leaving Randy and me all that remained on my lifeboat. We clung to each other out of grief and sorrow, mourning our lost childhood. Everything felt like it was changing, and I feared the future, knowing college and careers would soon tear us apart permanently. I decided I had to tell Randy that I loved him. It felt like my last chance to finally say the words I had wanted to say since we first met.

We made plans to meet under the streetlight at the end of my street, near my grandparents’ dock—our favorite spot. He was leaving the next morning, and my Florida school had started back earlier than his.

I waited there, under the spotlight of the streetlamp, waiting to see his familiar silhouette walking down the road towards me. It is still one of the most indelible images in my mind. I still have dreams about seeing him, always coming to meet me, me always waiting for him. But that night, he never showed up.

A Farewell

Our new world locked into place that night. Randy and I never again were more than just friends. We had a few more summers together, but things were never the same. As we sailed toward our twenties, the brothers stopped coming down for the whole summer. Randy faded into his new life, shaped by college and his career path, and we only spoke sporadically. It’s how life goes—we grow up and grow apart. I hated it.

The last time the four of us were all together was my wedding, where Mike was a groomsman. When Randy and I danced at the reception, all the wonderful memories came flooding back. For a moment, when we looked at each other in our familiar, unspoken way, we knew it was the real end of that part of our lives. Tears filled our eyes as we held on to one another tightly, trying to cling to the last few moments of something rare and precious we had shared for nearly two decades.

Our Last Photo Together

A Fictional Truth

My debut novel, The Summer Knows, is, in a way, a love letter to that childhood magic with Mike and Randy. Though the fictional version is a “lie”—both brothers are alive and well, I am not a chef, there is no real Christopher Crane—I tried to capture the profound bond the four of us shared. Childhood friendships can be a safe haven, a necessary lifeboat. That is what the Wardell brothers were to me, and I will love them for the healing and freedom they offered me until the day I die.