Bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand has spent more than two decades transporting readers to the sandy shores of Nantucket. Now, after officially retiring her signature seaside novels with Swan Song (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), she’s shaking things up – and doing it with style. In her newest book, The Academy (Little, Brown and Company, 2025), scheduled for release September 16, Hilderbrand dives into the elite world of boarding school life, complete with scandal, drama, and, yes, sex – just don’t call it Young Adult literature. Co-written with her daughter, Shelby Cunningham, the novel marks both a genre pivot and a family affair.
Hilderbrand dished to Martha’s Vineyard Magazine about what it was like writing with her daughter, why Martha’s Vineyard might be more generous than Nantucket, and what it feels like to see her books (finally!) brought to life on screen. An edited transcript follows.
Martha’s Vineyard Magazine: Your newest novel, The Academy, marks a pivot from your Nantucket-inspired beach reads and romantic mysteries to contemporary fiction. What inspired you to create a fictional boarding school world?
Elin Hilderbrand: Two of my children went to boarding school. Shelby, my daughter, went to St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, just over the bridge from Newport. When she was there, she was calling me three to four times a day, telling me stories – and I mean, the stories she told me were jaw-dropping. I thought, “I must write about this.” I went to my publisher and I asked, “Are you interested in a boarding school novel?” and they said, “We aren’t interested in one – we want two.”
MVM: Last year you declared your retirement from Nantucket novels after Swan Song. When did you know you were ready to close that chapter?
EH: I had wanted to retire in 2021 with Golden Girl (Little, Brown and Company), but my publisher really pressed me and I thought, “Okay I can probably get three more books out of me.” And honestly, The Hotel Nantucket (Little, Brown and Company, 2022), The Five-Star Weekend (Little, Brown and Company, 2023), and Swan Song were some of my best books. I always knew I was going to come to a natural end with the Nantucket material; I ran out of things to write about. There’s twenty-seven books out here. Retirement was the best decision I ever made. I easily could have taken another deal, but I didn’t want the quality of the book to drop, so I thought I would go out gracefully or pivot and do something different.
MVM: Did this new genre feel like a creative risk?
EH: No, it was a dream. Talk about a rich environment. And for someone who has read a number of my novels, The Academy is very much an Elin Hilderbrand novel. It is my style and my voice, but set in a different universe.
MVM: Shelby helped with the character development and the voice of the students. Were there moments where you saw the story through her eyes instead of your own?
EH: Not really. I was driving the bus. Shelby was a passenger. Writing a novel is such a particular skill set. There were three main parts from her contribution. First, she gave me all the material. The second thing she did was write scenes from the kids’ point of view, especially Davi, the influencer character. Then she did an edit to check for my language. She would be like, “No one my age would ever say that, Mom, you’re such a boomer!” I mean, you think you know how these kids talk but you don’t (laughs).
MVM: What kind of reader do you envision for The Academy?
EH: It’s for everybody, but it is not a YA [Young Adult] novel. It’s more adult than my summer novels. A lot of sex, drugs, rock and roll, profanity, and it’s set in the real world. There’s hookups and so many inappropriate relationships and bad decisions. All the drama – I did not shy away from any of it. I do issue the warning that there is all of this in it.... The book is very young, very real, and filled with all the teenage drama.
MVM: Your novels often explore the complexity of family, especially between women. Has your own experience as a mother shaped how you write about these relationships?
EH: Of course. And I think Shelby found that too. Our main character and her mother have an issue that Shelby and I dealt with, so it was interesting and very easy for both of us to write about it because we both had gone through it and came out on the other side of it. Nothing teaches you more about the human condition than being a parent.
MVM: Most of your books include Nantucket landmarks and businesses. Has a local ever asked to be written into one of your stories – or out of one?
EH: Oh, God, every day. Not written out – people are constantly asking me to put them in a book.
MVM: Do you do it?
EH: I do it! Anytime a restaurant or something new opened, into the novel it goes. I was desperate at the end for the material.
MVM: You’re known for engaging with your fans directly – for example, in 2016 you crowdsourced ideas from the Martha’s Vineyard Facebook group Islanders Talk for your novel The Identicals (Little, Brown and Company, 2017), a book about twins, one living on Nantucket and the other on Martha’s Vineyard. What was it like to tap into such a passionate community for creative input?
EH: It was enormously helpful.... My first trip [to Martha’s Vineyard] was when I was a kid, but then when I was in college, a girlfriend from college had a house in Chilmark, and I stayed there for a number of weekends.
When I wrote into Islanders Talk in 2016, I was looking for present-day details about the Vineyard. Someone said, “You have to go to The Ritz!” So, I came and I stayed out at the Harbor View Hotel, and I ate at Sharky’s. I found everyone on the Vineyard to be so, so helpful. I came back [for more information when I was writing] Summer of ’69 (Little, Brown and Company, 2019).
In some ways, people on MV are more helpful than Nantucket. People on Nantucket are like, “Am I going to get paid?” Paid for what? Paid for giving me background information because I want the book to be correct? No! The Vineyard was very generous and kind.
MVM: How would you describe the personality of the Vineyard versus Nantucket, as real places and as literary landscapes?
EH: One of the things I love most about the Vineyard is it has a robust social consciousness in a way that I don’t think Nantucket does. There were a number of years where I went to Possible Dreams, [the Martha’s Vineyard Community Services fundraiser]. I heard all the stories about what that organization does and I’m like, “Wow, you guys really take care of each other.”
People from the Vineyard would probably say Nantucket is tiny and expensive and…it’s a little bit snobby.
MVM: The Perfect Couple (Little, Brown and Company, 2018) marked your first foray into the murder mystery genre and is now a successful Netflix series. Is it getting renewed for a second season?
EH: It’s in development for a second season. There isn’t a green light quite yet... even though we had 3.4 billion eyeballs on [the first season].
MVM: With The Five-Star Weekend set to premiere on Peacock in 2026, you’re adding another screen adaptation to your growing list. How does it feel to see another one of your novels make the leap from page to screen?
EH: The cast is obviously incredible: Jennifer Garner, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan, Chloë Sevigny, D’Arcy Carden, Timothy Olyphant. I met everyone when I went to LA in the beginning of the month, Gemma, Chloë, Regina…they were so amazing. The showrunner is so talented, and the head writer is so talented. They are filming a lot in LA, but they will also be filming on Nantucket. This one is going to be a little more faithful to the novel.
MVM: You studied writing at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and earned your MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and your first published work was a short story in Seventeen magazine. What would today’s Elin say to the young writer who first saw her writing in print?
EH: Honestly, there’s nothing I could say to that person that would change my career. I might say, “Be patient,” because I just had my first screen adaptation with The Perfect Couple and I started publishing in 2000. But there’s not a single thing about my career that I would change, so whatever I did, I did it right.
I did not hit number one on The New York Times Best Sellers list until my twenty-third book, and in a way that was more gratifying. Summer by summer I was building something. I wouldn’t change anything.
