For the past 10 weeks, The Summer I Turned Pretty has had me, like so many others, in a chokehold. I watch it alone, I host viewing parties, and I’ve even synced episodes with a friend in London—her midnight, my evening—our texts ricocheting in real time. By Thursday, I’m doomscrolling fan edits set to Taylor Swift. By Friday, I’ve pulled the sun-bleached paperbacks off my shelf, revisiting their dog-eared pages. By the weekend, the show has infiltrated my conversations and Spotify algorithm.
At 26, the show has gripped me with the same intensity that Harry Potter, One Direction, and The Vampire Diaries once did. But it’s different now. The obsession isn’t about escape; it’s about return—remembering who I was when I first read Jenny Han’s trilogy, and who I became after.
I was 15 the first time I read those books, sprawled on a sunbed by the pool during a family trip to the coast, half-believing I was in Cousins Beach too. I tore through them in days. When the story ended, I wasn’t ready to let it go; I scrolled through fanfiction on Wattpad late at night, rented Bye Bye Birdie on iTunes, and played “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs on repeat. Like Belly, I longed for the summer that would make the boy I’d been pining for finally turn his head—a golden season that would tilt my life into place.
But growing up rarely follows a neat narrative arc. My coming-of-age started two years later, on a rainy summer day in Mexico City, when my mother received her diagnosis. I was no Belly. There was no volleyball tournament, no debutante ball, no glittering first kiss. Instead, I was sitting in a doctor’s office with my mother and one of my sisters when the word cancer took root in our lives. Soon, I’d learn how to drain the plastic tubes that dangled from her chest after surgery. I’d help her shower, clean her wounds.
At 17, you’re not supposed to see your mother like that—stitched, bruised, and needing you. The roles always reverse eventually, but this was too soon. I wasn’t ready to be anything but her daughter.
Eight years later, in 2022, I pressed play on the books’ TV adaptation, expecting nostalgia, love triangles, and salt-sticky hair. What I didn’t expect was for it to feel more like an elegy. From the first scene, I saw it: Susannah, the Fisher brothers’ mother, gliding past in a silk scarf, “Mr. Blue Sky” playing while the children run through the kitchen. If you hadn’t read the books, you might have missed it—but I couldn’t. My mother had died four months earlier, after her cancer returned, and suddenly the show’s real plot had become the one I knew too well: the quiet dread of knowing something precious was slipping away. The love story faded, and what remained was what felt like a mirror of my own story—with better lighting and a high-budget soundtrack.
At 15, I’d picked sides without hesitation: I was (and remain) Team Conrad. The older-brother archetype—brooding, unreadable, impossibly cool—pulled me in. But watching him at 23, I saw the fractures: the abrupt decision to quit football, the late-night drinking and smoking, the withdrawing and biting remarks. All of this wasn’t just him being coolly mysterious—Conrad was bearing the weight of a secret too heavy for him to carry.
And then there was the tenderness: the way he covered Susannah with a blanket while she slept on the couch, and steadied her on the stairs after a night of too many cocktails and weed gummies, indulging her fantasy of one “last perfect summer.” This was the choreography of a young boy trying to keep both his family and himself from falling apart.
I recognized that dance because it had been mine too. The entire year between my mother’s first diagnosis and her remission, I made myself an airtight container; no leaks. I aced exams, showed up at parties, gossiped in hallways. Except for two friends, I told almost no one about what was happening at home. I wanted the safety of the unremarkable—of first kisses and parties and deadlines. And I needed a place where the world hadn’t changed, where there were no IVs or hair loss. A refuge where I was in control.
In Season 1 of TSITP, Conrad is boating with Cleveland Castillo, a writer spending the summer doing research for a new book, when he has a panic attack. After keeping the stress and sadness of Susannah’s illness bottled up all summer, he finally comes undone, musing, “Maybe if I just keep it inside… maybe that’s what keeps her alive.” For weeks, the adults in his life had just thought he was being moody or reeling from a recent breakup. But that line exposed the logic behind his behavior: the belief that by making himself small and staying silent, he could somehow keep his world intact. I believed something similar: that if I didn’t feel, I couldn’t break.
I used to call my mother on her chemo days between P.E. and English class, my voice steady and cheerful as if composure could keep her alive. In reality, I was a girl wedged between lockers that smelled of sweat and body spray, pretending I wasn’t afraid. I thought stoicism was strength. I thought collapsing would make me a burden.
Conrad’s panic attack is triggered by the condition of the wooden boat. He lashes out, insisting the vessel is moldy—“infected.” The outburst, of course, was really about Susannah. You can see it strike him in real time: the fury and the guilt that he hadn’t noticed how rotten everything had become under the surface—for not catching it sooner. I blamed myself, too. Not for the illness, but for all the things I missed while I was so busy hiding behind school. The hospital visits I skipped. The symptoms I ignored. The intimacy of sitting beside my mother when she was having a bad day. Would cracking open sooner have brought us closer? Or would it have broken me entirely? I’ll never know.
Years later, just like Conrad, therapy helped me understand that my silence had been a survival skill—a teenager’s blunt, clumsy guess at how to live through the impossible. In the end, it had bought me time, but at a cost. Watching the series as an adult—and remembering the ways I’d punished myself for things I didn’t know how to do differently—I could finally offer that girl what I hadn’t before: compassion.
By Season 2, Susannah was gone. The glossy world remained—arcade days, midnight swims, perfectly timed pop songs—but now it was threaded with something heavier: the ache of remembering while trying to move forward. Season 3 had a bigger time jump, giving its characters the room to grow inside that absence. We’ve seen Belly choose herself and go to Paris. Conrad, at last, begins to speak, allowing his feelings to spill out instead of swallowing them. For once, he stops arranging himself around everyone else’s needs and begins to stake a claim for his own.
What the show gets right, beneath its sunlit surface, is that grief doesn’t cancel adolescence; it coexists with it. The parties still happen. The love triangles still form. The pop hits still play at the club. But everything is shadowed. Sometimes I wonder how many of us were doing the same thing—moving through hallways with burdens no one could name, carrying them like our backpacks.
Eleven years after I first encountered it, the story of The Summer I Turned Pretty hasn’t changed much, but I have. Once, I read the books imagining what love would feel like. Now, I watch the show to remember the girl who once shut everyone out—and to hold her a little closer.