55 pages • 1 hour read
Annabel MonaghanSame Time Next Summer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Challenge of Navigating Past and Present Relationships
Sam Holloway’s trip back to Long Island catalyzes her need to grapple with her past and present relationships. Her return to her family’s beach house at the start of novel serves as the inciting incident of the narrative. Sam hasn’t spent a summer with her family and Long Island community in 14 years. Therefore, “[c]oming home feels like tiptoeing through a minefield” (28), as Sam isn’t sure how to reconcile who she’s become with who she used to be. She’s convinced herself that her life in Manhattan with Jack is her true life and her relationships with the Oak Shore townspeople, her sister Grace, her brother Travis, and her parents are tangential. However, once she spends the week in Long Island, she finds herself comparing these familial and communal relationships with her relationships in the city, grappling with her choices and happiness in ways she hasn’t before. The narrative’s attention to Sam’s internal state throughout the novel illustrates the ways in which encountering one’s past as an adult compels the individual into self-reflection.
Annabel Monaghan emphasizes the tension Sam feels between her relationships with Jack and Wyatt as the central conflict of the novel, complicating how she sees herself and her future. Wyatt’s presence on Long Island reminds Sam of the love they once shared and forces her to compare her teenage love for Wyatt with her love for Jack in the present. In Chapter 18, for example, Sam remarks, “The two loves of my life, so different from one another” (81). While everything “about Jack is by design,” Wyatt moves through the world “in a more functional, [easy] way” (81). Because Jack is more calculated and controlled, Sam feels that she must mirror his behaviors. Because Wyatt is free-spirited and adaptable—just as Sam was in her youth—it allows her the freedom to be more impulsive and energetic in his presence.
The contrast between these past and present romances challenge Sam to notice the differences between her past and present selves. Monaghan uses these dynamics to convey the ways in which one’s childhood relationships evidence raw parts of the self, unfettered by the learned insecurities, self-protective behaviors, and limitations of adulthood. When Sam returns to Long Island without Jack, she’s able to interact with her parents, siblings, and neighbors in a more authentic manner. In contrast, when Sam is with Jack—whether in Manhattan or on Long Island, she’s more careful about how she expresses herself. Wyatt links her to her youthful, liberated self, while being with Jack reinforces the measured and reasonable adult persona she’s carefully constructed. Over the course of Sam’s arc, she must learn which of these relationships she values the most and which brings out the best parts of her character.
The Enduring Impact of First Love
In Same Time Next Summer, Monaghan uses the trope of first love to explore the ways in which an individual’s adult choices, self-protective behaviors, and sociocultural expectations can distance them from their most authentic self. In framing Sam and Wyatt’s childhood romance as their anchor to their most honest selves, Monaghan structures Sam and Wyatt’s journey back to each other as a journey back to themselves. Sam and Wyatt have known each other since they were kids and fell in love when they were teenagers. After their breakup, Sam learns to view their heated attraction to one another as an addiction, dismissing it as an unhealthy obsession to protect herself from hurt. Monaghan suggests that Wyatt’s abrupt disappearance from Sam’s life over a decade prior to the novel’s present provokes the choices Sam makes as an adult—a safe and stable career and relationship—both free of the passion that defined her childhood self and relationship with Wyatt, whom she believed would “love [her] forever” (91).
Monaghan emphasizes Sam’s physiological and emotional response to being around Wyatt again, highlighting the enduring impact of first love and its importance to Sam’s personal arc. Sam’s initial resistance to these feelings builds narrative tension by foregrounding her fear of “walk[ing] through that space with Wyatt” again (91). To get over and forget Wyatt, she’s had to tell herself that their love for each other wasn’t real and thus has no bearing on her life in the present. She wants “to be a person who has moved on so completely” (97) that she’s incapable of feeling anything in Wyatt’s presence. By framing her reactions to Wyatt as instinctual, Monaghan aligns Sam’s connection to him with her heart rather than her carefully laid plans. Hiding from her feelings for Wyatt complicates her relationship with Jack and the way she understands love in the present. Discounting their connection only traps Sam in a lie of her own making, setting the trajectory of the narrative toward their eventual happy ending together.
The context of the romance genre suggests that Sam and Wyatt’s ability to be themselves when they’re together proves the validity and authenticity of their love for each other. When they’re spending time together in the narrative present, Sam and Wyatt return to a more unbridled, uncalculated way of being. They talk openly and easily and they’re able to laugh and make light of difficult situations. At the same time, they’re able to talk about challenges, sorrows, and disappointments honestly too, which brings them closer together. Their conversations outside the diner, in Bill’s car, on the beach, and in the treehouse particularly capture the singular nature of their connection, which Monaghan contrasts with the growing tension between Sam and Jack. The emotional intimacy of the scenes between Sam and Wyatt convey the formative power of first love to define closeness and connection. These scenes also bring the characters back together and help them to reestablish their relationship as adults.
The motif of Wyatt’s songs symbolizes his love for Sam and his desire to make amends for abandoning her, reinforcing the enduring impact of first love as a central theme in the narrative. The reveal that all of his songs are about Sam and express the complexity and depth of his feelings for her represents a turning point in their romantic arc, laying the groundwork for their romance as adults. The songs also act as narrative devices that lead Sam back to Wyatt, emphasizing the instinctual nature of her feelings him. When the characters reunite again in Chapter 61, Wyatt tells Sam that he’s “done writing songs about how much [he] loved [her] when [they] were kids” (279) and now wants to write songs about his love for her in the present and in the future. In this way, his songs follow the same trajectory that the lovers themselves travel—they move from mementos of a youthful love to a deep, sustained care and passion for each other. Hearing these songs helps Sam reopen her heart and believe not only that Wyatt loves her but that her love for him is real too. Sam and Wyatt’s relationship captures the ways in which first love changes the individual, opening them to intimacy in distinct and powerful ways.
Journeys of Self-Discovery and Personal Growth
Sam’s decision to return to Long Island at the novel’s start incites her character arc over the course of the narrative—leading her on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth. In the narrative present, Monaghan establishes Sam’s emotional status quo: feeling reluctant to return to the setting where she spent her childhood summers and where she fell in love with Wyatt, protecting herself from the heartbreak of the past. Monaghan makes explicit the ways in which Sam has reinvented herself since she and Wyatt broke up—putting herself back together by “reassembl[ing] [her]self in a totally different, better way,” turning “carefree into careful” and replacing her impulsive tendencies “with deliberate decisions and plans” (4). Sam believes that “being buttoned up” (4) represents a safer way to move through the world because it protects her from the unpredictable and the unknown. However, traveling back to Long Island reveals this tidy, closed-off version of Sam as a self-constructed façade hiding her authentic self. In this context, the narrative setting of her childhood home becomes symbolic of authenticity, freedom and ease, challenging her to reconnect with the girl she used to be.
Monaghan emphasizes the ways that Sam’s time spent with family and friends on Long Island reintroduce her to the truest version of herself. The author utilizes Sam’s sensory memories—the smell of the sea air and the sound of ocean waves—to introduce Sam’s gradual reawakening, disrupting the controlled version of herself she’s constructed in her life in Manhattan and relationship with Jack. In Chapter 11, for example, when she and Gracie are floating on their backs, Sam feels “unselfconscious in that naïve way where you still think nothing will ever change” (58). Later in Chapter 27, being in the water helps Sam “see things from a different perspective” (109). Time in the ocean helps her to rediscover “the braver, lighter perspective of a younger” version of herself (109). Suddenly the what-ifs about her job, her relationships, and the wedding “have lost their heaviness” (109), and Sam feels free and uninhibited. The warm sand under her feet, the night ocean breezes, the sound of the waves on the shore, and the gulls diving over the water provide atmospheric details that aid Sam on her journey. Monaghan uses Sam’s experiences on Long Island to capture the ways in which the settings of one’s childhood can reacquaint them with a freer, purer version of self.
The more Sam grows as a character over the course of her arc, the more she feels the pull to return to Long Island, aligning the novel’s setting with both her love for Wyatt and her sense of self. Her conversations with her grandparents, parents, siblings, and friends on Long Island challenge her to examine who she has become in the present and why. Once she owns the way she’s manipulated her identity to protect her heart and please others, Sam finds herself able to shed her façade and get back in touch with her authentic self. Monaghan connects Sam’s internal work with her external action—breaking up with Jack, quitting her HR job, moving back to Long Island, starting her job at the library, and rekindling her artistic pursuits are all steps that Sam takes in her journey back to herself. By the novel’s end, she has become a more balanced version of her adult self, embraced her passions, and rekindled her romance with her first love.
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