In her poignant new novel, “Our Last Vineyard Summer,” Brooke Lea Foster takes us back in time — twice, in fact. The first is 1978, where we meet Betsy Whiting, a young graduate school student in psychology at Columbia University. Despite the sticky heat of New York City in June, she is happy, anxiously awaiting a call from her lover (and hopefully soon-to-be fiancé) — a supposedly unhappily married professor who happens also to be her advisor.
But when the phone rings, it’s Virgie Whiting — “a hero of the feminist movement, the voice of her generation — and to Betsy, just Mom.” Despite her strong resilience, Virgie is not doing well. It turns out she is struggling after her husband, Betsy’s father, Charlie, a New York senator, recently died in a plane crash. He left behind a large debt, which will require selling the family’s cherished Vineyard home. Betsy, who had worked hard to distance herself from her mother and two older sisters, reluctantly agrees to come to the Island so they all can see what might be done.
Once in Edgartown, Foster skillfully chronicles the rough waters of sibling and parental relationships. The three sisters — Betsy, the youngest, Lousia, a struggling new lawyer, and Aggie, a new mother — couldn’t be more unlike one another, nor in their relationships to their mom. Much to the girls’ horror, Virgie is resigned to losing the house, but they are determined to try and save it.
We dip back even further, to 1965, as Virgie faces tough decisions about her passionate commitment to feminism and journalism, against Charlie’s desire to keep her acquiescent and quiet for the sake of his political ambitions. Foster, however, excels at creating complex characters and relationships. Charlie, who has secrets to hide, is not a villain, even if his actions aren’t always right.
Likewise, Virgie’s dedication to empowering and creating lasting political change for women generates a complex tension when it comes to her daughters. Sometimes she prioritizes her career over all else, in the hopes of building a stronger next generation. Likewise, from childhood on, she relentlessly pushes them to reach their potential, which, on the outside, seems like a good thing; yet the expectations reverberate, and not always beneficially, into the girls’ adulthood.
Foster interweaves the two coming-of-age narratives and the unraveling of family secrets to create an engrossing narrative that explores the complex relationships between married partners, the complicated love between mothers and daughters, the impact of sibling birth order, and the pull of our childhood homes.
Foster recently wrote in Substack about “Our Last Vineyard Summer”: “I keep saying that this is the book I was meant to write. I think because it combines so many pieces of who I am: my years covering Washington, D.C., as a journalist, my love of Martha’s Vineyard, my obsession in understanding family dynamics, and the culmination of years of research and life experience about what it means to be a woman.”
She continues, “The questions on my mind when I was writing this book: Is it possible to be a feminist and a mother, a woman who chooses to follow her career, without feeling resentment from her husband and children? Can you be a loving sister while still asking tough questions of your siblings? Mostly, if you had to spend a summer with your grown sisters and mother in adulthood, what would you discover about your memories, those shared and those experienced entirely differently? A family’s shared memory is often splintered by our individual interpretation of the same events.”
A beautiful summer on the Vineyard is the perfect backdrop for Foster’s poignant story that examines the challenges women faced in what feels like the not-so-distant past.
“Our Last Vineyard Summer,” by Brooke Lea Foster, is available at Edgartown Books and Bunch of Grapes.