Brashares says that although she enjoyed seeing her imagined characters on-screen, she felt, when writing the fourth book, that she had to put the movie version out of her mind in order to inhabit her invented world. She’s currently working on a book about a group of middle-school age characters living in the same fictional Bethesda as the characters in the Traveling Pants series—a technique she admired in Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire series, where a minor character of one novel re-emerges as the protagonist of another.
According to Brashares, her stories are set in Bethesda because it’s what she sees when she thinks back to her own teenage years: “It’s the place I see without seeing.” The Bethesda of Traveling Pants is “sleepier and less citylike,” she says, than it is today. “When I picture [the neighborhood where the girls live] I picture someplace like Edgemoor,” she says. “Nice, but middle class.” Although a few local spots, such as the Tastee Diner, make cameo appearances, Brashares mostly avoids street and brand names that would limit the story too specifically to one time and place in her readers’ minds. But one overarching presence in these stories is the hot and humid Maryland summers.
Teenage angst
Jane Brashares describes her daughter as calm, affectionate and strongly maternal toward her brothers (she cried when younger brother Ben, 33, and a screenwriter based in Berkeley, Calif., lost his first tooth). Ann’s brothers universally describe her as wise, beautiful and funny—at times inadvertently. Justin, 37, an environmental scientist at UC Berkeley, recalls a shopping trip with their father before a winter ski vacation. “Ann was in that somewhat unsettled, hyper self-aware, pre-boyfriend stage of her early teens,” Justin says. “A hunky employee in his late teens approached Ann and asked if he could help her find anything and Ann, perhaps a bit nervous with the sudden attention, replied, ‘Um, yes, I’m looking for some heavy sex.’ All heads turned towards her as she quickly turned various shades of red and purple, mumbling, ‘socks…I mean socks…I meant heavy socks.’ ”
Teenage embarrassment exquisitely rendered is one of Brashares’ particular gifts as a writer. She also appears to have total recall for the magical power of favorite clothes, for adolescent self-doubt and for romantic confusion. But her main subject is loyal, unconditional, sisterly love. Despite contemporary themes such as divorce and premarital sex, the girls’ unselfish, unabashedly sentimental devotion to each other seems to owe more to Louisa May Alcott than to Gossip Girls.
Unlike the boys who populate some fiction aimed at teen girls, Brashares’ male characters are neither predators nor prey, but a strikingly sympathetic bunch. “When I start out writing the boy [characters], I don’t necessarily mean for them to be really sweet people, but that’s where they end up,” she says. “Growing up with brothers, I have a very high opinion of boys. I guess I don’t have the otherness required to make them heartless cads. I can see the world through their eyes.”
Whenever Ann and her brothers are together in Chevy Chase, their mother says, “They’ll put off calling their friends—the time they have seems so precious. They stay up late talking, reminiscing, laughing. The conversations go deep. They’re wonderfully united, the four of them.”
Ultimately, it seems, Brashares’ loyal and loving sisterhood has its roots in a troop of brothers. Writing about friends who are close as siblings was, Brashares says, “a fantasy. I think sisters are even more magical when you don’t have any, because [they’re] not colored by reality or the flaws that inevitably exist. That being said, I can’t imagine sisters who’d be better than the brothers I had.”
Writer Kathleen Wheaton is a frequent contributor to Bethesda Magazine.
