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Photo courtesy of Lance Shores/Hoover Public Library
Acclaimed novelist Elin Hilderbrand gives the keynote speech at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
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Photo courtesy of Lance Shores/Hoover Public Library
Acclaimed novelist Elin Hilderbrand gives the keynote speech at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Acclaimed author Elin Hilderbrand, left, autographs a book for Gail Stephens of the Green Valley community in Hoover, Alabama, at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Books by author Elin Hilderbrand sit ready for purchase at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Acclaimed author Elin Hilderbrand autographs a book for Roberta Atkinson of Hoover, Alabama, at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Del Wilson of Hoover, Alabama, left, browses books by author Elin Hilderbrand at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Alex Sobey of Houston,, Texas, samples some hors d'ouevres at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Hoover Library Board member Lori Martin samples some desserts at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Suzanne McQuiston of Vestavia Hills, Alabama, broowses books for sale at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
The irony didn’t slip past Elin Hilderbrand when she spoke Friday night as the keynote speaker for the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library.
“I’m literally from the Northeast,” the acclaimed novelist said with a laugh as she began her talk to about 250 people in the Hoover Library Theatre. “I just think it’s so much fun.”
Hilderbrand, who has sold more than 10 million copies of her 28 novels, lives on the tiny island of Nantucket just off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts and writes about life there in most of her novels.
Amanda Borden, the director of the Hoover Public Library, said she has never technically set foot on Nantucket, but she most definitely has been there — or at least feels like it — thanks to the writing of Hilderbrand.
Cracking open a Hilderbrand novel is like taking a well-deserved idyllic vacation to the beach without having to leave home, Borden said.
“The setting is lovely. The drinks are cold. The food is delicious, and it’s always summer,” Borden said.
But Hilderbrand, known as the “queen of the beach read,” didn’t get her success based on setting alone, Borden said.
“Her books are downright page turners, packed with compelling characters and plenty of conflict,” Borden said. “Sometimes, the drama is light, and sometimes it’s heartwrenching, but it’s always familiar and relatable, whether it’s love, friendship, infidelity, illness or family dynamics that she is writing about.”
Photo by Jon Anderson
Books by author Elin Hilderbrand sit ready for purchase at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
Borden said the staff at the Hoover Public Library knew they had to get Hilderbrand to come speak in Hoover when they heard she plans to retire next year.
Hilderbrand told the Friday night crowd she has been in Alabama only four times before but does have some Southern credence because her son attended the University of South Carolina.
She talked for about 50 minutes, spending half the time explaining how she got into writing and why “beach reads” matter, and the other half answering questions from the audience.
She developed a love for the beach as a child when her father and stepmother would take her and her siblings to Cape Cod every summer for the month of July. They stayed in a ramshackle cottage, would spend all day on the beach and watch sunsets on the beach like it was a Broadway show, she said. Her Dad sometimes would wake them up for midnight Uno card games by candlelight or for a walk down to the beach in their pajamas to look at the stars.
“It was an idyllic way to grow up by anyone’s standards,” she said.
But her trips to the beach came to an end after her 16th summer when her father was killed in a plane crash in November 1985, she said. The next summer, she found herself working in a factory that made Halloween costumes, she said.
She determined then she didn’t care what she did with her life as long as she could find a way to spend every summer at the beach, she said.
She went on to college at Johns Hopkins University and majored in creative writing. She then moved to New York City and worked for a publishing company for about nine months but was miserable, so she got a job teaching.
In between two years of teaching, she spent the summer of 1993 in Nantucket and fell madly in love with the island, she said. After her next year of teaching, she left New York permanently and moved to Nantucket in 1994.
Photo courtesy of Lance Shores/Hoover Public Library
Acclaimed novelist Elin Hilderbrand gives the keynote speech at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
She worked a variety of jobs, including substitute teaching and handling classified ads for a newspaper, and backpacked around the world in the winter off seasons. She then was accepted to the University of Iowa Writing Workshop for graduate school, where she found herself without a body of water in sight and miserable, she said.
The director of the program hated her work and told her she would never be published, she said. Her therapist, after listening to her cry for weeks and talk about how much she missed Nantucket, said it was clear what she needed to do — start writing about Nantucket. So she did.
Just before she graduated, an agent from New York who had grown up spending his summers in Nantucket spoke at her school and asked her to send him her book when she finished it.
She sent him “The Beach Club” in January 1999, and he, Michael Carlisle, became her agent and has remained her agent for 25 years. She got $5,000 for her first novel, but People magazine named it a “Beach Book of the Week,” which gave it an amazing boost and paved the way for contracts for more novels, she said.
She struggled to find success with some of her early novels, but in September 2006 went to New York City and hooked up with Little, Brown Publishing, which helped turn her next 23 books into New York Times bestsellers, she said. Then, her 23rd novel, “Summer of ’69,” made it to No. 1 on the New York Times list the week it came out in 2019, which was extremely gratifying, she said.
One of the best things about her journey is that she did indeed find a way to spend every summer at the beach, she said.
And what keeps her going is hearing stories from readers who tell her that her books give them a beach vacation they can’t otherwise take, for a variety of reasons, whether it be a lack of finances or because they’re struggling with health issues, she said.
“Beach books allow us to escape reality,” Hilderbrand said.
Photo by Jon Anderson
Acclaimed author Elin Hilderbrand, left, autographs a book for Gail Stephens of the Green Valley community in Hoover, Alabama, at the 2023 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023.
Christy Little and her 24-year-old daughter, Ashlyn Mitchell, drove four hours from Greenville, South Carolina, to hear Hildebrand speak Friday night. They’re obsessed with Hildebrand’s books and really enjoyed hearing her speak, they said.
“I loved the insight into her characters and how she writes,” Little said.
They also enjoyed her humor and personality. “I could have heard her talk for another hour,” Mitchell said.
They’re disappointed she is retiring but are excited to see some of her work is headed for Hollywood. Her 2018 novel, “The Perfect Couple,” has been optioned for a six-part limited series on Netflix, with shooting scheduled to start April 3 and a likely release date in the summer of 2024, Hilderbrand said.
She also has five other projects in development for potential video production, but those are not certain, she said.
Also in the audience Friday night were Bill Perkins and Bettye Forbus from Dothan, who have never read any of Hildebrand’s books but said she was an engaging speaker and that her books seem very appealing.
“I can understand why she’s so popular,” Forbus said. “She provides escape for a lot of people that do not live on Nantucket.”
Nantucket is a tourist resort with colonial homes, lighthouses, trendy restaurants, high-end boutiques and a median listing price for homes of $3.8 million in January, according to realtor.com.
“We think of going to the beach as going to Panama City. It’s a different world,” Forbus said.
One of the things they love about coming to the Southern Voices Festival is they get to hear such a wide variety of authors — some they know and some they don’t, they said.
“More than once I have left here with a list of books I want to read,” Forbus said.
The Southern Voices Festival, which is sold out, continues Saturday with seven other authors speaking in the Library Theatre. The lineup includes Alka Joshi, Will Leitch, Robin Peguero, Sarah Penner, Ben Raines, Vanessa Riley and Ashley Winstead.
The authors cover a variety of genres, from historical fiction to romance, mystery, legal fiction, thrillers, suspense and nonfiction. Read more about them here.
The festival kicked off Tuesday with a reception for visual artist Sarah Garden Armstrong, and musician Miko Marks, who sings a mix of country, blues, soul and roots music, performed Thursday night.
