That Summer

The two Dianas who take turns narrating parts of the novel are both women who have been cheated, coincidentally by the same man, of the bonds of female friendship. After her assault, Diana cuts herself off from her mother, sisters, and friends, becoming instead a solitary figure. Similarly, Daisy’s marriage to Hal compels her to leave college and become cut off from other women her age; instead, she spends time only with other mothers who are mostly older and by whom she is made to feel out of place and inadequate. Daisy’s loneliness is evident in her eager responses to Diana’s emails, and when the two meet, they form an immediate bond which will eventually liberate both of them from Hal’s influence. It is no coincidence that at the end of their first meeting, Daisy remembers Hannah telling her that “making a new friend was the closest they could get to falling in love” (91). As Daisy realizes her romantic love for Hal is based on lies, her platonic love for Diana as a friend grows in its place and helps to liberate her from the unfulfilling confinement of her married life.

The novel’s partial inspiration by the #MeToo Movement means that it functions, like many other #MeToo novels, as a collective testimony against the damage caused by abusive men. The voices of the female characters are from time to time united in their rejection of misogyny and rape culture and in their insistent demand for individual identity. When Daisy struggles to sleep, she knows that she is not alone but is instead part of a “tribe” of “sleepless sisters” (21). Thus, she often hears Hannah’s voice in her head, standing up for her when she is not able to stand up for herself. At the dinner party Daisy hosts when Hal expresses his thoughts on what punishment male abusers ought to face, he speaks mostly to Diana, but before doing so he looks around the table, “his gaze touching on each woman’s face, first Judy’s, then Evelyn’s, then his daughter’s, then his wife’s” (330) as if realizing for the first time that it is not only Diana to whom he speaks but to every woman at the table. All of them are bound by their shared experience as women subject to the whims of men.

The very title That Summer might suggest that the novel will take place in the timeframe of one single summer. However, the novel is in fact expansive in its timescale, traversing more than 30 years into the future from the summer of Diana’s assault. In doing so, Jennifer Weiner implies that “that summer” has a lasting impact. The novel’s inconsistent and nonlinear narrative is reflective of the circuitous, difficult progress that Diana experiences toward healing from the trauma she suffered as a child. The novel is in fact less focused on the singular event than the vast scale of its impact on Diana, on the other women in Hal’s life as well as on the perpetrators themselves.

The novel allows us to see the immediate impact of the assault, for Diana afterward views the world as “gray and dingy, permanently corrupted” (102). The experience continues to have a significant impact on her subsequent life choices, transforming her life and worldview and undermining the expectations she once had for her future. Even after meeting Michael in Provincetown and spending years in therapy to achieve a semblance of healing, Diana remains haunted by the experience, sometimes rearing up in sleepless nights where she tastes again the sweet punch she drank that night and hears the sound of her hair rustling in the sand. Thus, Diana’s healing progresses in increments and yet she can never fully escape the knowledge of what was taken from her: “the sorrow of the road not taken” (240). The past dogs Diana relentlessly, and her pursuit of Brad, Hal, and Danny sets into motion a series of events—Brad’s death, the transformation of Daisy and Beatrice’s lives, Hal’s fall from grace—that make evident the scale of the impact that a single sexual assault can have.

Throughout the novel, she is obsessive and resolute in her search for retribution, lying to the librarian at Emlen, stalking Brad, and creating an elaborate deception to trick Daisy. Diana violates any number of conventions of normal and appropriate behavior in her attempt to hold to account the men who committed a far worse violation against her teenage self. Although she eventually decides that violent punishment is not the route to take, she nevertheless feels responsible for Brad’s death, and her pointed reminder to Daisy of the danger of the loose post in the novel’s final scene implies a morally flexible endorsement of any decision Daisy makes, even if it leads to Hal’s death. In this way, it becomes clear that the impact of sexual assault has led Diana to develop a unique and unconventional moral code in which she will go further than most in order to see justice done.

The novel’s conclusion, a coda from Beatrice’s point of view, is open-ended, and for the first time, the reader is left without the familiar intimacy of either Daisy or Diana’s perspective on events. It is unclear how the characters feel after the anguished events of the final chapter, and Weiner does not reveal their plans for the future. Nevertheless, Beatrice’s confirmation of her parents’ separation and her and her mother’s new life on the Cape with Diana demonstrates that the events Diana set in motion—all a result of her sexual assault—have, this summer too, changed their lives forever.