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THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES by Jessica Anya Blau
On Sale: May 27^th
Paperback
320 pages
ISBN-10: 0061452025
ISBN-13: 9780061452024

Jamie Green will remember "the summer of naked swim parties" for the rest of her life. It's the summer in which she has her first serious boyfriend, Flip, who is three years older and comes with friends for Jamie's friends; it's the summer in which Jamie's older sister is away at Outward Bound, leaving Jamie with her parents (and very often the house) to herself; it's the summer in which Jamie's parents throw, yes, naked swim parties, leaving Jamie cringing with embarrassment. And it's the summer in which Jamie will be forced to confront love, loss, family, and heartbreak for the very first time.

Jessica Anya Blau is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University, where she received her masters in fiction and where she currently lectures and teaches Creative Writing. In 2005, she was chosen the Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writer's Conference. Her stories have appeared in The Sun Magazine, The First Line, Washington Square Magazine, Santa Barbara Independent and many more notable publications. THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES is based loosely on her childhood in Santa Barbara.

At the age of 14, most young girls start to break away from the shackles of their families, mature, and perhaps even experience their first taste of love. But what if your parents impose no shackles, adore your friends and encourage experimentation? What if it's the summer of 1976 in Santa Barbara and they are known throughout the neighborhood as the "cool ones" who throw naked swim parties on a regular basis? How does one rebel against all that?

Young Jamie must contend with this and more as she struggles to find herself in a swirling sea of incense, pot smoke and lip gloss. Living with her free-spirited and enlightened parents --- Betty and Allen, who frequently doff their clothing when entertaining around their pool --- makes it hard for her to rebel. One way to do so is to turn prudishly the other way, as Jamie's 16-year-old sister Renee has chosen to do. Embarrassed by her parents' forthrightness about everything from politics to sex, she opts to spend six weeks attending Outward Bound retreats. Jamie struggles to find her own way and keep up with her two best friends, Debbie and Tammy, who spend most of their time talking about boys and working on their tans.

When the most popular boy at their school, surfer Flip Jenkins, asks her out, she's amazed at how quickly her seemingly adult life is falling into place. Flip likes her and loves spending time at her house, smoking pot with her parents and admiring the adults at their clothing-optional parties. With Flip comes ready-made boyfriends for Tammy and Debbie, as they start to enjoy the laid-back California lifestyle that all the teen magazines promote. Jamie soon learns that part of dating a 17-year-old is that sex is expected, and she soon decides to lose her virginity, something her friends have already done, no matter how indifferent she may feel about it: "Jamie smiled because she read once that if you smile even when you don't feel it, the feeling will come. And it wasn't that she was particularly unhappy just then. She was just uncomfortable and afraid of the finality of the act. Once her virginity was gone, it would be gone forever. A death of a sort."

But with adult behavior comes adult responsibility. Even with this first flush of teenage love, Jamie sees herself growing away from her family while at the same time trying to hang on to her childhood for dear life. When her mother comes under the spell of Dog Feather, a Native American "shaman" who they met on a camping trip and who quickly moves into their house, helping Betty with her aura readings, Jamie resents his usurping her position in the family and is only too happy to discover that Dog Feather is an Italian-American conman (a fact that Jamie's father doesn't see fit to share with his wife. He lets her think Dog Feather moved on down the spiritual highway.) But when a tragedy strikes, Jamie scrambles to hold on to what's true, and what she really loves. Her family may be wacky, but it’s the only one she has.

Breathing new life into the coming-of-age genre is no easy feat, but Jessica Anya Blau makes it seem effortless as she recounts Jamie's adolescent angst. She tells of life in southern California in the summer of 1976 so vividly, you can almost smell the eucalyptus. When Blau describes Jamie's first sexual fumblings with Flip, one cringes with recognition and empathy. Everyone can recall (if they are honest) that time when they were anxious and scared to spread their wings and were mortified by their parents. Although Jamie had to deal with the opposite of most teenagers, who fear their parents are "square," the misery is the same.

THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES is a marvelous and somewhat aching reminder of growing up --- a terrific adult follow-up to the popular Judy Blume novels of that era. It's a bittersweet reminder of a simpler time --- although it didn't feel so “simple” at the time.

    --- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller

"Just rat one good sentence": The Story behind The Summer of Naked Swim Parties

Four summers ago I was in a writers' workshop with Lynn Freed at Bread Loaf. She is a gorgeous woman with a beautiful South African accent and when she says the word write it comes out sounding like rat. So she said to the group, "Just rat one good sentence. Bring it in tomorrow. One good sentence." I went to my computer and wrote a memory from my childhood of a single moment at a swim party with my parents. It turned out to be two sentences that went something like this: "Leon jumps naked on the diving board. His hairy grown-up body looks slightly melted as he goes up and down, up and down, his penis and balls flying in unison like a long bird attached to its eggs." When I read the sentence to the group the next day, Lynn laughed. She liked it. I walked out of that workshop wondering why I had rarely written about my family in that period of time: the seventies, Southern California. My parents had a marijuana orchard hidden between the fruit trees in the backyard. My father made homemade yogurt with exotic fruits like loquat and guava. My mother didn't shave her armpits, never wore a bra and always swam naked. My father swam naked, too. My older sister was angry and embarrassed by the family and my younger brother, when we could find him, seemed feral.

Later that week, I was chatting with an editor from a major publishing house. She said that I needed a novel, not short stories, for a first book. Then she asked, "Have you started a novel?"

I told her I had the idea for a novel, it was the family story I'd been thinking about since Lynn's workshop. She asked what the title was and I made it up as I spoke: THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES.

So there it was: A title. And an idea even. All I had to do was rat the thing. About a year later, after writing everything BUT the novel, I sat down and started with the sentence about naked Leon. It wasn't hard to find the material --- I culled chapters from the experiences that had most deeply entered my bloodstream, the stories that were embedded in my bones. I compressed time, juggled sequence, and took the most tender bits of my adolescent experiences in love, sex, heartbreak, death, and family life and put them all into one fictional summer: the summer of 1976.

The surfers, surf culture, and girls in the book probably exist in more or less the same way today. I was, like the characters in the book, concerned more with my tan, my boyfriend and my friends than just about anything else. When I was in college, my father told me he had never expected anything of me other than that I'd be a "beach bunny" and eventually a mother and wife. Perhaps my lack of direction was a good thing --- it certainly allowed me the time to sit, space out and commit to memory all the details of my life.

I think this book is ultimately about people searching for connections. Jamie wants desperately to connect to her sister, her friends, her boyfriend, and even her parents. Her parents want to connect to something greater than themselves, but something new, updated, for their generation. Betty also wants to connect to Jamie on the most intimate level --- the workings of her body, who Jamie is physically. In writing this book, in processing the memories, I have felt a nice connection with the past, with my parents, with my sister, and even my friends with whom I spent most of my summer days and nights. I can see now that although I often felt untethered, alone (and heartbroken), as Jamie does in the book, I really did have a family to back me up. I hope that in the last scene of THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES the reader sees that Jamie isn't as alone as she had thought --- even her sister is there, like a net, ready to catch her.

After all, it was the seventies, so Allen and Betty thought nothing of leaving their younger daughter, Jamie, home alone for three nights while they went camping in Death Valley. And although most girls who had just turned fourteen would love a rambling Spanish-style house (with a rock formation pool, of course) to themselves for four days, Jamie, who erupted with bouts of fear with the here-now/gone-now pattern of a recurring nightmare, found the idea of her parents spending three nights in Death Valley terrifying. Jamie was not afraid for Allen and Betty --- she did not fear their death by heat stroke, or scorpion sting, or dehydration (although each of these occurred to her in the days preceding their departure). She feared her own death --- being murdered by one of the homeless men who slept between the roots of the giant fig tree near the train station or being trapped on the first floor of the house, the second floor sitting on her like a fat giant, after having fallen in an earthquake.

Jamie's older sister, Renee, was also away that weekend, at a lake with the family of her best and only friend. But even if she had been home, Renee would have provided little comfort for Jamie, as her tolerance for the whims of her younger sister seemed to have vanished around the time Jamie began menstruating while Renee still hadn't grown hips.

"I invited Debbie and Tammy to stay with me while you're gone," Jamie told her mother.

They were in the kitchen. Betty wore only cutoff shorts and an apron (no shoes, no shirt, no bra); it was her standard uniform while cooking. Betty's large, buoyant breasts sat on either side of the bib --- her long, gummy nipples matched the polka dots on the apron.

"I know," Betty said. "Their mothers called."

Jamie's stomach thumped. Of course their mothers called. They each had a mother who considered her daughter the central showpiece of her life. "So what'd you say?" Jamie prayed that her mother had said nothing that would cause Tammy's and Debbie's mothers to keep them home.

"I told them that I had left about a hundred dollars' worth of TV dinners in the freezer, that there was spending money in the cookie jar, and that there was nothing to worry about."

"What'd they say?"

"Tammy's mother wanted to know what the house rules were."

"What'd you say?"

"I told her there were no rules. We trust you."

Jamie knew her parents trusted her, and she knew they were right to do so --- she couldn't imagine herself doing something they would disapprove of. The problem, as she saw it, was that she didn't trust them not to do something that she disapproved of. She had already prepared herself for the possibility that her parents would not return at the time they had promised, for anything --- an artichoke festival, a nudists' rights parade --- could detain them for hours or even days. There was nothing internal in either of her parents, no alarms or bells or buzzing, that alerted them to the panic their younger daughter felt periodically, like she was an astronaut untethered from the mother ship --- floating without any boundaries against which she could bounce back to home.

Allen walked into the kitchen. He'd been going in and out of the house, loading the Volvo with sleeping bags, a tent, lanterns, flashlights, food.

"You know Debbie and Tammy are staying here with Jamie," Betty said, and she flipped an omelet over --- it was a perfect halfmoon, and she, for a second, was like a perfect mother.

"Why do all your friend's names end in y?" Allen asked.

"Tammy," Jamie recited, "Debbie . . . Debbie's i e."

"But it sounds like a y."

"So does my name."

"You're i e," Betty said, "You've been i e since you were born."

"Yeah, but Jamie sounds like Jamey with a y."

"There's no such thing as Jamie with a y," Allen said. "But there is Debby with a y."

"Well Mom's a y --- Betty!"

"I'm a different generation," Betty said, "I don't count."

"And she's not your friend, she's your mother," Allen said.

"Oh, there's also Kathy and Suzy and Pammy," Betty said.

"No one calls her Pammy except you," Jamie said.

"Too many y's," Allen said. "You need friends with more solid names. Carol or Ann."

"No way I'm hanging out with Carol or Ann."

"They've got good names." Allen sat on a stool at the counter, picked up his fork and knife, and held each in a fist on either side of his plate.

"They're dorks," Jamie said.

Betty slid the omelet off the pan and onto Allen's plate just as their neighbor, Leon, walked in.

"Betty," he said, and he kissed Jamie's mother on the cheek. His right hand grazed one breast as they pulled away from the kiss.

"Allen," Leon stuck out the hand that had just touched Betty's breast toward Allen, who was hovered over his omelet, oblivious.

"Did you find some?" Allen asked.

"I stuck it in your trunk," Leon said.

"What?" Jamie asked.

"Nothing," Allen said, although he must have known that Jamie knew they were talking about marijuana. They rolled it in front of their daughters, they smoked it in front of them, they left abalone ashtrays full of Chiclet-sized butts all over the house. Yet the actual purchasing of it was treated like a secret --- as if the girls were supposed to think that although their parents would smoke an illegal substance, they'd never be so profligate as to buy one.

"So what are you going to do in Death Valley?" Leon asked.

Allen lifted his left hand and made an O. He stuck the extended middle finger of his right hand in and out of the O. The three of them laughed. Jamie turned her head so she could pretend to not have seen. Unlike her sister, Jamie was successfully able to block herself from her parents' overwhelming sexuality, which often filled the room they were in, in the same way that air fills whatever space contains it.

"And what are you doing home alone?" Leon winked at Jamie.

"Debbie and Tammy are staying with me," she said. "I guess we'll watch TV and eat TV dinners."

"You want an omelet?" Betty asked Leon, and her voice was so cheerful, her cheeks so rouged and smooth, that it just didn't seem right that she should walk around halfnaked all the time.

"Sure," Leon said, and he slid onto the stool next to Allen as Betty prepared another omelet.

Jamie looked back at the three of them as she left the kitchen. Allen and Leon were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, being served food by chatty, cheerful Betty. Wide bands of light shafted into the room and highlighted them as if they were on a stage. It was a scene from a sitcom gone wrong. There was the friendly neighbor guy, the slightly grumpy father, the mother with perfectly coiffed short brown hair that sat on her head like a wig. But when the mother bent down to pick up an eggshell that had dropped, the friendly neighbor leaned forward on his stool so he could catch a glimpse of the smooth orbs of his friend's wife's ass peeking out from the fringe of her too-short shorts.

Jamie wished her life were as simple as playing Colorforms; she would love to stick a plastic dress over her shiny cardboard mother. If it didn't stick, she'd lick the dress and hold it down with her thumb until it stayed.