Out East
Memoir of a Montauk Summer
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4.3 • 107 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An "extraordinary" debut memoir of first love, identity, and self-discovery among a group of friends who became family in a Montauk summer house (Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner).
They call Montauk the end of the world, a spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. The house was a ramshackle split-level set on a hill, and each summer thirty-one people would sleep between its thin walls and shag carpets. Against the moonlight the house's octagonal roof resembled a bee's nest. It was dubbed The Hive.
In 2013, John Glynn joined the share house. Packing his duffel for that first Memorial Day Weekend, he prayed for clarity. At twenty-seven, he was crippled by an all-encompassing loneliness, a feeling he had carried in his heart for as long as he could remember. John didn't understand the loneliness. He just knew it was there. Like the moon gone dark.
Out East is the portrait of a summer, of The Hive and the people who lived in it, and John's own reckoning with a half-formed sense of self. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, The Hive was a center of gravity, a port of call, a home. Friendships, conflicts, secrets and epiphanies blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their twenties and beyond.
Blending the sand-strewn milieu of George Howe Colt's The Big House with the radiant aching of Olivia Liang's The Lonely City, Out East is a keenly wrought story of love and transformation, longing and escape in our own contemporary moment.
"An unforgettable story told with feeling and humor and above all with the razor-sharp skill of a delicate and highly gifted writer." -- André Aciman, New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name
"Out East is full of intimacy and hope and frustration and joy, an extraordinary tale of emotional awakening and lacerating ambivalence, a confession of self-doubt that becomes self-knowledge." -- Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner
An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of May 2019A Time magazine Best Book of May 2019Cosmopolitan Best Book of May 2019An O, the Oprah Magazine Best LGBTQ Book of 2019
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sun-dazed debut memoir about loss, identity, and partying with the preppy set, book editor Glynn turns the magnifying glass on his inner turmoil but never manages to inspire much sympathy for his plight. Raised by happy and loving parents and now working in publishing (currently at Hanover Square), living in TriBeCa, and surrounded by friends, Glynn seems to have it all. Yet, he writes, "I was compulsively afraid of dying alone." Attempting to escape that torment, Glynn plunked down $2,000 for a summer share in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island in 2013. The weekends of beachy boozing with "the girls, the finance guys, and the gays" are described in detail that will make many readers want to head for Montauk themselves ("the beaches were sweeping and majestic, and the town had a surfery charm"). As a microcosmic rendition of a lost summer's drunken rhythms and Glynn's slowly unfolding realization about his own sexuality, the writing resonates with a shimmery tingle (falling for a man, he felt "a kind of giddy, queasy, terrifying downrush"). Glynn's point of view, however, remains so swaddled in privilege that his emotional distress registers as mere entitlement ("Not everyone had money, but everyone had access"). Ultimately this is a neatly observed but light story about coming out.
Customer Reviews
A Good Read
I’m not a North Easterner, but I was fortunate to have working experience there over a few years; the author paints very vivid, believable possibilities. Thanks for depicting a “where did you summer scenario”, so many of us only read about in stories.
Out East
What an outstanding reveal by a very young savoy writer. It was a captivating read full of emotion, especially at the end. Brilliant..