For the past 10 weeks, The Summer I Turned Pretty has had me, like so many others, in a chokehold. I watch it alone, I host viewing parties, and I’ve even synced episodes with a friend in London—her midnight, my evening—our texts ricocheting in real time. By Thursday, I’m doomscrolling fan edits set to Taylor Swift. By Friday, I’ve pulled the sun-bleached paperbacks off my shelf, revisiting their dog-eared pages. By the weekend, the show has infiltrated my conversations and Spotify algorithm.
At 26, the show has gripped me with the same intensity that Harry Potter, One Direction, and The Vampire Diaries once did. But it’s different now. The obsession isn’t about escape; it’s about return—remembering who I was when I first read Jenny Han’s trilogy, and who I became after.
I was 15 the first time I read those books, sprawled on a sunbed by the pool during a family trip to the coast, half-believing I was in Cousins Beach too. I tore through them in days. When the story ended, I wasn’t ready to let it go; I scrolled through fanfiction on Wattpad late at night, rented Bye Bye Birdie on iTunes, and played “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs on repeat. Like Belly, I longed for the summer that would make the boy I’d been pining for finally turn his head—a golden season that would tilt my life into place.
But growing up rarely follows a neat narrative arc. My coming-of-age started two years later, on a rainy summer day in Mexico City, when my mother received her diagnosis. I was no Belly. There was no volleyball tournament, no debutante ball, no glittering first kiss. Instead, I was sitting in a doctor’s office with my mother and one of my sisters when the word cancer took root in our lives. Soon, I’d learn how to drain the plastic tubes that dangled from her chest after surgery. I’d help her shower, clean her wounds.
At 17, you’re not supposed to see your mother like that—stitched, bruised, and needing you. The roles always reverse eventually, but this was too soon. I wasn’t ready to be anything but her daughter.
Eight years later, in 2022, I pressed play on the books’ TV adaptation, expecting nostalgia, love triangles, and salt-sticky hair. What I didn’t expect was for it to feel more like an elegy. From the first scene, I saw it: Susannah, the Fisher brothers’ mother, gliding past in a silk scarf, “Mr. Blue Sky” playing while the children run through the kitchen. If you hadn’t read the books, you might have missed it—but I couldn’t. My mother had died four months earlier, after her cancer returned, and suddenly the show’s real plot had become the one I knew too well: the quiet dread of knowing something precious was slipping away. The love story faded, and what remained was what felt like a mirror of my own story—with better lighting and a high-budget soundtrack.
