The Last Summer of Us (27 page)

maggieharcourt

@maggieharcourt

What was your inspiration for writing
The Last Summer of Us?

I think I'd been carrying Limpet around in my head for a long time. I grew up in west Wales, in a fairly small town where there wasn't a lot to do when I was fifteen. I was visiting a place called Henllan, and I had an idea for a story about a group of friends on a road trip around places very like that one. I even went as far as writing something and typing it out on a typewriter I'd saved up for. It didn't get very far, but I never forgot Limpet – and when I was back in the area, I picked up the story again…and here we are. In fact, the river at Henllan ended up being a direct inspiration for the place where Limpet, Jared and Steffan meet after the funeral.

I wanted the story to be very specifically set in Wales and rooted in areas like Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire: I am Welsh, after all, and I had never really been able to find books about the places and characters I could see my friends in when I was growing up. More than anything, though, I wanted to talk about things like love and loss and friendship and hope, because we all go through them. We all feel them and the way we handle them helps make us who we are.

The novel explores grief and how it changes a family; what message were you intending to pass on to your reader?

Grief does change people, sometimes in big ways and sometimes in small ones. There are different kinds of grief, too: grief for a person or a relationship or a place (and there's even
hiraeth
, the infuriatingly untranslatable Welsh word for a kind of nostalgic longing for the place you come from. More than just homesickness, it's a sense of grief for what has been, and what could have been.) but it doesn't have to change us for the bad and it doesn't have to take away who we were before. We don't have to let it.

What was it like writing a character who is experiencing such emotional turmoil?

Limpet had to be written as honestly as possible, and sometimes that was hard. Not just because she needed to be someone you feel you know, but because she represents something that people really go through. We all lose people, in one way or another – so to hold back felt like it would be a massive disservice both to readers and to her.

I tried to be as emotionally open as I could – my own mother died a few years ago, and while I wasn't in the same position as Limpet, I felt that having gone through that grieving process meant I could understand her better and make her more real.

At the same time, it would have been a pretty bleak experience all round if it was all death, all grief, all the time – because that's not true either, is it? Trying to show that Limpet was more than that; that grief wasn't all she was and that it hadn't taken away who she was deep down, mattered just as much. Finding a balance between the two – both for her and for me – could be a bit of a challenge, and I definitely had a few days where I just wanted to sit under the table with a blanket over my head and pretend I wasn't there! But when it felt like I'd got her right, it was worth it.

If you could tell your teen self anything, what would it be?

I left home and went to university in London at seventeen, so I could easily fill a big, big book with advice I could have done with knowing then. Things like: “That haircut? No.” Or: “Stop refusing to change lines on the Tube. Seriously. It shouldn't take you a YEAR to get past this. That's ridiculous.”

But if there was only one thing, it would be this: live. There'll be things you're glad you did, and things you wish you hadn't…and both of those are okay, because you shouldn't let anything stop you from living (not even a different Tube line). Life is a gift: why would you want to give it back unopened?

songs inspired by
The Last Summer of Us
by The Bookshop Band

Ben Please and Beth Porter are The Bookshop Band. Based in Bath, in the UK, they have been writing songs inspired by books for over four years. Now they have written two gorgeous songs inspired by
The Last Summer of Us
.

Here in My Heart

Watch
Here in My Heart
now

Lyrics

Here, in this car

We are friends together

This is a start

And we'll go where ever

I'm not here to escape, but

Just to feel the breeze

Feel the wind on my face

And breathe

Here, in my heart

Should I be another

You, after all

Look at me like some other

Oh, whatever we forget now

There's nothing to forgive

Winding down

To let in air

Take the wheel, like you've shown

Take it real slow

Do you feel you're not alone, as you

Take a stage of your own

Here the wind has a flow

But also many streams

You can love who you lose

And everyone it keeps

We're not here to escape but

Just to catch a breeze

Feel the wind shape the tree inside of me

Here, in my heart

Should I be another

You, after all

Look at me like some other

The Lights

Watch
The Lights
now

Lyrics

It looks like me

But there's a face that you can't see

I'm young and I should be free

We're young so let's be

Take me away

From the scenes of today

Where I can be who I am

Not sure if I can

Though the lights are gone I must carry on

Though the lights are gone I must carry on

You know me well

I know you as well

There's a time to hide

And a time to cry

I'd suffocate

In this small space

For so long, so long

Get me out

So I can carry on

Though the lights are gone I must carry on

Though the lights are gone you must carry on

Unknown feeling

Left us living

We change as the world goes round

Who knows where we are bound

I'm pegged to the ground

And I can hear the best sounds

Though the lights are gone I must carry on

Though the lights are gone you must carry on

Though you are gone we must carry on

It's not the end

It's not the end

what inspired the songs…

Here in My Heart
by Ben

When I was fourteen years old I used to play a simple series of piano chords over and over again, and I had a few lines of a song to go with it.

Here in my heart

Should I be another

You, after all

Look at me like some other

The lines were very much written from my insecure fourteen-year-old self, about feeling as if I behaved differently with different people and therefore not really knowing who I really was. I always wanted it to be a full song, but after twenty years of playing it occasionally, I never got any further. After finishing
The Last Summer of Us
, I kept thinking how Limpet was saying that the way people were treating her, or looking at her after her mum's funeral defined her in a way she didn't like. She didn't want to be
that
person. Also, I remembered crazy little road trips to the beach I used to take with my friends. They were really wonderful times when I found that my personality, in a sense, was shaped by the group. We were all individuals, albeit trying to figure out who we were. But when we were together as friends, we were 100% that group. And that reminded me of Limpet, Steffan and Jared, and how confusing things can be when those dynamics change – people look at you in different ways, or you learn something new about that person and suddenly your relationship with that person changes, and in a little way, so do you. These were the same emotions as I was trying to get across in my song from all those years ago, so I felt that this was the perfect occasion to try and finish the song, using the similar themes from the book.

I also never learned to drive. I guess I've always lived in cities so there wasn't ever much need. But now I live in the middle of nowhere so I'm just starting to learn, so I empathised with Limpet when she was given the wheel of the car.

The Lights
by Beth

Like the other song, I was inspired by the theme of identity and who you feel like you have to be at certain stages in your life. This can also reflect on how you feel you have to be with other people. Your family, friends of your family, or teachers can make you feel very different to how close friends make you feel. You may feel more relaxed and like you can be yourself with certain people.

The chorus is inspired by the fact that Limpet has lost an important person in her life and is about to lose another in a different way. I built up the chorus in three lines from ‘I must carry on', ‘you must carry on' to ‘we must carry on', partly because there are these three friends, all who will feel a loss and a change in their lives.