Annabel Monaghan Hates the Office. The Good News is, She Belongs at the Beach.

And so do her characters.

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Chart a course through all four of Annabel Monaghan’s novels, and a pattern emerges, like a sandbar at low tide. When she writes about early thirties career women, she immediately spirits them away to the coast, putting as much distance between her heroines and work as possible. (Funnily enough, it's the same beach in both books.)

I don't blame her. I, too, prefer the beach to the office.

In both Same Time Next Summer and It’s a Love Story, Monaghan’s lead characters drift through their days free from deadlines, free from deliverables—while paychecks drop into their accounts like overripe peaches. And maybe that’s the fun of these books. But I think if you’re going to write about ambitious women at the height of their professional lives, we should probably see them work, or at least reckon with what work demands.

Same Time Next Summer makes a stronger attempt than It’s a Love Story to explore a woman’s relationship to work. Sam understands that her career forms part of her identity, even as she questions whether it fits like a well-worn glove or an awkward mitten. She didn’t choose HR consulting so much as wash up on its shore, drawn to the promise of predictable outcomes after the storm that was her breakup with Wyatt. And when Sam later pivots to teaching art, the impulse arrives out of nowhere—particularly when teenaged Sam was depicted not as an artist, but a reader.

The irony is that Sam’s feelings for Wyatt reveal just how deeply she values drive, even if it’s absent from her own arc. The novel first presents Wyatt as a gas station mechanic and part-time songwriter, and Sam bristles at his lack of success:

It tugs on me a little bit to think he’s so far away from where he wanted to be.

The reveal is almost cinematic—Wyatt is actually a wildly successful songwriter who owns not just the Shell station, but also a house in Malibu. Success is the thing that unlocks Sam’s heart.

And yet, when Sam compares their goals, she says:

...my dream was to be at the beach, with Wyatt, forever

—and the book lets that stand. Monaghan clearly believes ambition matters, but she rarely threads it convincingly through her female leads.

Despite the missing piece, Monaghan still makes you positively ache for Sam as she wrestles with Wyatt’s place in her life. Their reconnection pulses with history and unresolved longing, the rendering of first love, rekindled, acutely affecting. Even when the frame wobbles, the emotions stay in focus. Monaghan doesn’t need the perfect angle to make you feel everything.

If Sam’s arc flirts with professional self-discovery before ultimately eschewing it, Jane’s career arc in It’s a Love Story feels more like a missed connection.  Introduced as an aspiring development exec, Jane mostly seems to hide under her desk—or in her closet—furtively eating candy to cope with stress. Jane’s supposedly found a career-making script, but we never learn exactly what it’s about or why it matters to her.

In one of the rare office scenes in Monaghan’s oeuvre, we get a high-stakes meeting where Jane is meant to defend the all-important script. But rather than make her case, Jane spends the meeting bantering with the cinematographer, Dan, about The Notebook. It’s a winning moment, to be sure, but one that shifts the focus away from Jane’s professional aspirations, making it harder to believe that her work is of any real importance. What emerges from the meeting is a loosely sketched plan to track down Jane’s teenage crush, now a famed musician, with the hope that he’ll rescue the film with a hit song. The scheme stretches credulity and largely seems designed to propel Jane and Dan to the beach, where Monaghan can leave the office behind and Jane can do what she’s really here to do: fall in love (and put some skeletons to rest).

And the love story is unquestionably beautiful to behold, with Jane and Dan stretching to reach each other across the chasm of their wildly divergent temperaments. But, even more, it’s the familial scenes that positively light the whole book from within: Jane is at her most fully drawn when folding herself into the bosom of Dan’s boisterously loving clan. This is where the story pulses—vivid and fully alive. The scenes with Ruby and with Dan’s father, in particular, add structural depth to Jane’s character, giving necessary shape to the rest of her. 

Even this depth isn’t quite enough to make us fully believe in Jane though, who admits:

My mission to get this movie made at all costs has changed to a mission to get as close as humanly possible to Dan.

Jane’s identity as a career woman was never the engine of the story, but rather a kind of gentle scaffolding, something to hang the plot on while the real work of the book unfolded elsewhere. Monaghan doesn’t seem especially interested in heroines whose ambition shapes their self-conception or threatens love’s way. And that’s okay.

In contrast, Monaghan’s mom heroines don’t merely gesture toward the things that matter to them. They never misplace their children and pick them up again as a plot device. Monaghan writes drop-off and pick-up into the bones of every day—not as beats of conflict, but as ambient fact. She thoroughly understands how parenting hums beneath even the most intimate moments. Work, by contrast, never quite achieves that same quiet continuity.

Monaghan’s career women are subjected to frantic, week-long romantic sprints—narratively pressured into insta-love, because they can’t be kept from their supposedly demanding jobs any longer. But her mothers face no such constraint. They get whole summers. Entire seasons to fall in love. Their romances bloom inside the natural rhythms of motherhood.

But don’t just take my word for it—Goodreads tells its own love story. Nora Goes Off Script remains Monaghan’s highest rated novel, with Summer Romance close behind. Again and again, readers return to the same refrain: her mother protagonists feel lived-in, layered. Real.

That authenticity is so strong it softens the seams when a story stretches. In Nora Goes Off Script, Monaghan uses a slightly implausible set of events to drive her characters into tension: Nora’s son, Arthur, texts her love interest, Leo, a lie—and Leo never interrogates the message before breaking Nora’s heart. When the ends are snipped at the close of the novel, the reader is left with the sense that there should have been a bigger reckoning between Leo and Arthur.

But in Nora Goes Off Script, this matters almost not at all. Monaghan’s voice is so sure, Nora’s interiority so rich, so true, that we trust her. We leap any plot holes willingly, landing in a happy ending that feels, if not airtight, emotionally earned.

In Summer Romance, the story is simpler, but the narrator is, once again, deeply reliable. Here we get a grieving mom with a wry wit and a gift for spotting the absurd in her ex-husband’s self-important pompousness, where a lesser woman might find only meanness. Love comes for Ali at the dog park, of all places, and in the form of her best friend’s older brother. Ali’s life is familiar and unremarkable, but rendered so convincingly we find ourselves absolutely delighted to be along for the ride, cheering all the way for this mother whose summer romance is unexpectedly redrawing her entire life.  

This is clearly Monaghan’s natural register: women moving through the windows between school pickup and dinner prep, where falling in love doesn’t require an escape hatch from their everyday reality.

And this was all fine when Monaghan was merely a good writer, one amidst many of her genre peers. But with It’s a Love Story, she’s become—quietly, uniquely—excellent. Her characterization is lucid and precise, often revealed in the tiniest gestures between people: a glance held, a smile mirrored, a sense of being seen. Some scenes, so sharply drawn, were highlighted in last week's piece, though there were plenty more worth naming.

Monaghan does some of her best work describing a beach barbecue with Dan’s high school friends, capturing the strange alchemy of new love, the way a single glance can reorder your sense of self. One moment in particular:

There's something about the way he's looking at me that makes me think an impossible thing. I am interesting and true and beautiful. I like this thought so much that I have to look away.

And Monaghan’s prose just…sings. It stops you mid-sentence and demands a moment of applause. I wore out two highlighters before I was even halfway through the book. This was a particular favorite, both evocative and rhythmic, also from the beach party scene:

People are standing around the pit in the last of the evening light and I have the sense that I am watching a commercial for something that I want to buy.

Monaghan’s writing has leveled up: line by line, book by book. It’s a Love Story sent me back to her earlier novels, hunting for signs of this newfound gift: the ability to bend a sentence toward beauty. I found only glimpses, scattered through earlier work like promises of what was coming—what has now fully arrived.

And if she’s going to write like this, Monaghan’s prose deserves characters who aren't fleeing their urban offices for the beach, but rooted there, fully at home in the sun. Ready to hold up the weight of her prose.

So let Monaghan do what she does best: write women whose lives are already in motion, rather than striving for liftoff.

Monaghan has already proven she can write these women. Here are two I’d love to see next:

One: a widow in a small town, publicly drowning in grief, but privately, just waiting out the “appropriate” interval before she can start dating again. There’s real sorrow: her children are grieving, but also a quiet thrum of freedom, dark humor, and emotional recalibration. The town thinks she’s healing; she’s plotting. Monaghan could thread a love story through the ache and the absurdity, letting this woman fall for someone who sees the truth of her, not the version everyone keeps projecting onto her.

Two: a marriage story. A couple hits the empty-nest speed bump—suddenly alone together in a too-quiet house, wondering who they are without the noise of parenting. We’d get dual timelines: the early falling-in-love years and the present-day standoff, where small grievances calcify and silence stretches too long. No one’s cheated. No one’s leaving. They’re just a little lost. And then, slowly, sharply, honestly, they start to find their way back.

Give Monaghan these kinds of stories—and watch what she can do.

Because when the writer she’s become meets something real, something lived-in, something true?

It’s going to fucking glow.

Got a favorite Monaghan heroine? Or a story idea you’re dying for her to write? Drop it in the comments—I want to hear it!

Image Credit: beachreadsbysteph