Show notes
Quick reminder: We’re having a virtual live show with Moment House on Sunday, July 10! We’ll be recapping the premiere episode of Kaitlyn and Britt’s (briefly) two-Bachelorette season. Plus, there will be exclusive merch, and we’ll be using the tipping function on Moment House to raise money for The Brigid Alliance, a fantastic organization that provides people with the money and support they need to travel for abortion care. Get tickets here.
After “To All the Boys I Loved Before” stole our hearts (and about 50 full hours of each of our short lives on this Earth), it was a foregone conclusion that we would watch the next Jenny Han Y.A. romance adaptation — and the next, and the next. We watched the rest of the TATBILB trilogy (though with less rapture), and now we’re watching “The Summer I Turned Pretty” — the Prime series adaptation of Han’s Summer Trilogy, which came out before her “To All the Boys” books.
Like “To All the Boys,” the new series tells the story of a high school girl who has long nursed a crush on an unattainable childhood friend — but who suddenly blossoms and is soon pursued by not one, but several hot boys.
Isabella “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) has spent every summer of her life at the vacation home of her mother’s best friend Susannah Fisher. The two families’ fathers visit here and there, but mostly it’s the two moms and their four children: Belly and her brother Steven, and Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. Belly has always had a crush on Conrad, but he’s never seen her that way — until she showed up this summer with boobs. Yes, Belly is pretty now, and Conrad is taking notice.
However, so are other boys — like Cam, a sweet boy she met at a middle-school Latin convention and who dreams of being a marine biologist. Oh, and Jeremiah, who she’s always seen as more of a best friend. Meanwhile, Susannah has invited Belly to make her debut at the country club this summer, and so Belly spends her vacation learning the waltz, attending teas, and dealing with a love pyramid.
Though the love triangle is almost absurdly dramatic (what’s worse than dating the son of your closest family friend? Dating both of them within the space of a week, maybe), it’s perhaps the least compelling part of the show. Susannah and Belly’s mom, Laurel, are also working through their own problems — Susannah has a troubling secret, and Laurel, recently divorced from the kids’ dad, is struggling to write her next novel and get back out there — while trying to keep their tight friendship of many years on track. Conrad has become inexplicably withdrawn. Steven begins dating a gorgeous, wealthy rising fashion influencer, but his insecurities about his middle-class background present an obstacle. It’s truly an ensemble show, which may be what saves it from the relatively lackluster central romance.
In this episode, we discuss the tipping point between identifying with teenagers and their mothers, the soothing and yet infuriating coastal grandmother/Nancy Meyers aesthetic (with its lavish wealth; enviable, impossibly clean kitchens; and the hidden labor of making them so continually homey and luxuriant), the desire to both inhabit and critique these aspirational enclaves of white wealth, and the joys and perils of young love. Plus, Claire gets candid about life as a woman who never got boobs pretty. Mix up a big pitcher of pomegranate margaritas á la Marfa, lounge by your immense marble kitchen island, and enjoy! xo
ShareWe’ve been watching…
I binged my way through Amazon’s new bonkers reality dating show (also by producer Elan Gale who created FBoy Island and was an exec on The Bachelor), “The One That Got Away.” Singles are brought to a ~magical location~ to date people from their pasts. I didn’t find it quite as fun as “FBoy Island,” but it certainly scratched the itch for new mindless content, which frankly I needed this week. -Emma
Season 2 of Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” the increasingly meta murder-mystery comedy. I have to admit, my memory is so leaky that I might have to go back and rewatch season 1, because I have forgotten an embarrassing amount of plot, and it’s heavy on plot twists and callbacks. (It’s so into callbacks it will call out callbacks.) When season 2 opens, Mabel (Selena Gomez) — and, it begins to seem, all three of the amateur true crime podcasters, including Charles (Steve Martin) and Oliver (Martin Short) — is under suspicion of murdering the board president of the building, who admittedly was trying to get the three of them evicted. Plus: Amy Schumer moves in (playing a very broad version of herself) and a titillating plot emerges involving a stolen piece of erotic art that might reveal a secret part of Charles’s past. -Claire
We’ve been reading…
This excellent (and depressing and timely) essay in TIME by Taylor Harris (and edited by my friend Lori Fradkin!), aptly titled: “America Insists It Is Great. It Should Work on Being Decent.” -Emma
Elif Batuman’s “Either/Or,” which I’m now about half-way through. Our tortured heroine, Selin, is deep in mourning over the end of her first love — an unconsummated but in some sense romantic relationship with an older Hungarian student, Ivan. Now an English major, she’s reading and reading and reading, and much of the book consists of her emotional altercations with classic literature. Provoked by her reading, she wrestles with her relationship with her mother (who she both adores possessively and feels suffocated by the love of); with Ivan (who she sees in every rake, seducer, and male author who depicts a contemptible female love object in his work); and with herself and her own writerly ambitions (she is bored and infuriated by self-indulgent memoir-esque fiction like “In Search of Lost Time,” but she also recognizes that it’s the only kind of fiction she herself wants to write).
It makes me laugh, and, like Selin herself reading this kind of navel-gazing fiction, it sometimes makes me annoyed, but it really captures the process of coming of age in a way few novels do — the raw and somehow shameful emotion, the sea of internal contradictions, the struggle to reconcile the self you want to be with the one you’ve been given to work with, the many attempts to compare and contrast yourself against others to pin down what that self is and what makes it special. -Claire
We’ve been listening to…
“Smoke Screen: Puppy Kingpin,” a podcast from Neon Hum, and hosted by Alex Schuman, about the puppy mill industry, and the great — fraudulent! — lengths that invested parties will go to make money while covering up the origins of their product — in this case, PUPPIES — from buyers. The series specifically hones in on Jolyn Noethe, a puppy broker and businesswoman from Iowa who is accused of spearheading a nationwide puppy laundering (yes, like money laundering) scheme. It’s a fascinating deep dive into an industry I knew very little about. -Emma
Nothing new this week; daycare closures always cut into my podcast listening, and this past week we had two (2) Covid shutdowns in my son’s class — one from Saturday-Wednesday, and one from Friday afternoon-Tuesday. (That 1.5 days of daycare were really cherished, but I’m still behind on all my pods). -Claire
We’ve been buying…
So I first tried Neutrogena’s Hydro Boost water-based gel moisturizer because they sponsored our other pod, Love To See It. But I genuinely loved the product so much that I finished it and have now purchased a refill. It’s not oily! It soaks into the skin without leaving a weird film! And it’s affordable! Highly recommend. -Emma
This week I’ve mostly been making returns. I hate online shopping for its waste — all the shipping to my place and shipping back — but it’s been a long year and a half of trying to figure out what I like wearing now that I am in my mid-thirties and spend a LOT of time at the playground and almost none at happy hour, and it involves a lot of ordering stuff and then returning it so that I don’t drown in debt and unworn clothes. So this week, I shipped a bunch of my “not for me” purchases. I also saw a mom wearing her hair clipped up in an open gold claw clip, so I bought one, obviously. I found this Kitsch open shape gold claw clip, which seems sturdy and is definitely beautiful. -Claire
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