Remember “Josie and the Pussycats?” There was a 2001 movie based on the comic book. I loved that movie. Alan Cumming's character was mind controlling the fans through subliminal messages in Josie’s music. Spoiler! But it's been out for 24 years.

Anyway, there’s a teen drama that’s currently releasing a similar high pitched tone for women ages 28-50. A LOT of us, inexplicably, are being mind-controlled by The Summer I Turned Pretty.

If you haven’t heard of it: it’s an adaptation of Jenny Han’s YA trilogy from the 2010’s about a love triangle between a girl named Belly and two brothers. It’s set at a dreamy beach house in a kind of Cape Cod-adjacent beach town.

It’s soapy and fun and romantic. The acting and writing is excellent. I’m sure teenagers are enjoying it. But there’s something in the water at Cousins Beach that’s making it especially perfect for us women of a certain age.

I think it has to do with memory, community and nostalgia. And it’s helping me in my own memoir writing in unexpected ways.

We’re All Lit Majors Now

I’m not the only one treating this show with seriousness. My social media is all TSITP: fan edits of the leads, yes, LOVE those, and interviews with the actors, great.

But also, and (to me) more importantly: I get people doing deep dive analysis into the episodes, looking for easter eggs, arguing for one framing or another of the way these characters’ lives are going/should go. I was telling a friend about this part of the social media universe and he said immediately: “Oh! It’s like a book club of the world.”

It totally is. I follow creators who might as well be my Lit 201 TA’s: @meghan, @parmtalksplots, @bookswiftie. They have brilliant takes on the acting and production and writing choices, the relationship dynamics, the ways grief can manifest for young people. They do close readings of scenes, episodes, arcs. There’s a feeling that everyone gets to be story nerds together. I miss school! So I love it.

Then of course, besides the analysis: we are all INVESTED in the fates of the characters. I am, of course, Team Connie Baby.

I think part of the passion & community is because this show can’t be binged. It’s releasing weekly, like television USED to do. I saw someone talking about how there's so much TV available now, it's rare that everyone is watching the same thing at the same time. So we’re waiting together, wondering together, sighing together over the episode we all just saw and predicting things for the next one.

It feels like the 90's. In particular with a teen drama. I still remember senior year of high school, watching Melrose Place with a bunch of girls, and everyone screaming when Dr. Kimberly Shaw was back from the dead.

And I just saw a video of a sorority house watching TSITP, screaming together at the screen when Conrad wiped peach juice off Belly’s face (it’s way sexier than it sounds, trust me). It looked just like 1994.

We Don’t Remember Being Interesting

Nostalgia and memory is a huge piece of The Summer I Turned Pretty. In the story itself, it's about how Belly remembers things, and how she remembers them WRONG; she's an unreliable narrator of her own memories.

This show is adapted from a first-person, multi-POV book, and each episode is voiceover-narrated by a character. It’s usually Belly, but sometimes it’s one of the boys she's involved with. Which means that we're seeing what they remember, NOT what "actually happened."

Some people feel like Belly as a character is kinda meh. But of course she is! She's not remembering how lovable and interesting SHE was, she's remembering everyone else. We don't remember who we were to other people. We are often invisible in our own memories.

I’m thinking about that a lot, as I’m writing my own young self in my memoir. How do I make sure I’m seeing myself clearly, and not just the world I watched and lived in?

Leo DiCaprio, But He Books His Own Flights

So that’s memory in the story itself. But this show is also hitting powerful notes of nostalgia for us millenial and Gen X women:

The world of this show is sunlit and nostalgic. Design-wise it feels like the 90's/2000's, even if everyone can text. Maybe it’s because the 90’s are back, but the costumes and haircuts feel like our own. It feels like someone's memory even as it's ostensibly set in current day.

I last experienced something like this when I was a nanny on Fire Island in my twenties. I’d never spent a childhood at a beach, but that summer felt like someone’s memory, even if it wasn’t mine: I bumped down golden-lit roads with the girls on step-through, rusty bicycles. The little one caught a butterfly and I overheard her whisper to it: "You're my best friend." Our phones stayed home. It felt like the 70's.

There's definitely a German word for this.

The Force Field Between Car Seats

Finally: I've been watching this show and consuming all the fan edits and analysis while rereading my own journals for my memoir. I have 217 journals, dated from 1989 to 2025. It’s a LOT.

And it’s been powerful to reread my younger self while I’m deep in this teenage drama. There are scenes in TSITP that I can viscerally FEEL.

Like in Season Two, watching Belly climb into Conrad’s car, so excited, I was thrown completely back to that moment of my own. The excitement of climbing into the passenger seat of a boy's car. It feels so grown up and romantic! That moment when you're buckling your seatbelt and you can feel the force field between the two of you. This is real and almost painful in its pleasure. My first one of these was John Sellick’s baby blue pickup truck with leftist bumper stickers, when I was 15, and I will never forget it.

It reminds me how much those moments mattered, how the smallest gestures could sustain me for weeks.

I'm finding all these entries in my journals about moments like that. The drama of it all! Everything felt so enormous. I wrote a lot of poetry about the boys of my youth. Like—a lot.

It's helping me write about my younger self with more detail, specificity, AND tenderness.

Finale Predictions

If you DO watch The Summer I Turned Pretty and you’re waiting for tomorrow’s finale: here are my predictions.