IN A PERFECT world, every season would be summer – a time of seemingly endless promise. At least, that’s how I remember the summers of my youth: freedom from the confines of school or university, with nothing but lengthy, sun-filled days of play and pleasure. As pleasing as the nostalgic image is, I know it isn’t true. I kept diaries up until the age of twenty and my own words reflect the reality of those summers. I was frequently bored, unhappy and restless; the blazing heat caused frustrations to simmer and tempers to flare. In my late teens, play and pleasure became less important than the continuing demands of study and work: I was often overwrought, sweaty and utterly confused about who I was supposed to be.

Now, many years later, these youthful problems appear small and manageable, almost laughable. These days, I work by day and tend to my small child by night, all while plagued by the ever-present spectre of global fascism and extremism and the climate crisis and the housing crisis and the refugee crisis and any number of other societal ills. Is it any wonder, then, that millennials like me are retreating into The Summer I Turned Pretty (TSITP), where dewy-skinned teenagers laugh and fight and cry over their problems in a seemingly eternal summer?