The Saddest Girl on the Beach (Blair 2024) begins on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on a “dimly bruised January day.” What a perfect description for a wintery day near the beach; you can just imagine the gray-green water, swirling gray clouds with the sun trying to peek through, the chilling damp. Grab your sweater and a hot toddy and read on.
Charlotte left her first semester of college just short of finishing, to come be with her childhood friend, Evie, at her family’s inn near Hatteras. Evie, her parents, and her brother, Nate, all live at the inn. It is a perfect refuge for Charlotte who is deeply grieving the death of her beloved father the summer before: “Still, what once was can haunt a person, can make them run away from home, and this is where I ran, where I landed, this great gray seashell of an inn tumbled onto the shore.”
As a child, Charlotte and her family came to the Outer Banks to vacation. Charlotte and Evie met at the campground where they were staying during the summer when they were nine. Charlotte was there with her family, and Evie was there with Nate and her Aunt Faye. Now, instead of being a summer tourist, Charlotte has come to nestle in and experiences the area as a resident would. Having left her mother and brother in Ohio to find her new self, she wants to be like a sister for Evie, who needs a touchstone.
Aunt Faye is one of the most colorful characters in the book: “She liked to walk around naked in her house, and sometimes she forgot to put on clothes before she answered the door.” One day the girls went to her house and found this:
“Aunt Faye stood in front of a tall easel wearing an apron, humming, and sweeping blue paint on a canvas in wide strokes, keeping time with the music. As we got closer, I realized she was wearing only an apron.”
Aunt Faye has lived life on her own terms. Despite her bevy of eccentricities, she is always spot on and wise, with a fine mist of clairvoyancy settling around her she provides the voice of reason.
Charlotte is a child of the beach, one of those people who is much better suited to sand and sea, the freedoms, wildness, and whims of weather on barrier islands, than she would be confined in the Midwest. She isn’t afraid of storms, rather, she is somewhat fascinated by them. Her timid side is internal and her battles are waged in her head and her gut. She finds solace in wind and waves and has an understanding of the mercurial nature of the sea. When asked for advice on what to see on Hatteras, Charlotte said, “I mean, the lighthouse is a must-see, right?” But upon further consideration, she added, “But here’s what I would do. I’d sit on the beach and listen to the waves, … I’d try to wind myself into that pause between curl and crash, to suspend time in a silver thread before the movement coalesced onto itself, splashing and frothing to shore.”
Evie has lived her life at the seashore; like anything, or any place so familiar, she tends not to pay as much attention to the dynamics of the area as someone who is less familiar and unaccustomed to the constant shifting of all the competing forces. Evie has other things on her mind and life changing decisions to make.
The beach, particularly on a barrier island, is the perfect metaphor for this story. Charlotte’s grief, over time, begins to ebb like the receding tide, only to occasionally resurface when another breaking wave races back to shore. The shifting sands on a barrier island, whose purpose is to move in order to protect the mainland, symbolize Charlotte’s uncertain ground of how to navigate her position as she wades through her grief while still seeking and finding the higher ground on a fragile dune. And wade she does, through the waters of friendships, relationships, family, to find her footing, however solid and still shifting it may be.
But there’s a quandry. We are led to believe that because Charlotte is grieving something tangible, that she is the saddest girl on the beach, but that just may be the wrong assumption. What about Evie, who is no longer the carefree and fun-loving girl she once was, now facing her own future of uncertainty?
Read this compelling story, form your opinion, and cast your vote for who is actually the saddest girl on the beach.
Heather Frese
Heather Frese’s fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Front Porch, The Barely South Review, Switchback, and elsewhere, earning notable mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Essays. She received her master’s degree from Ohio University and her M.F.A. from West Virginia University. Coastal North Carolina is her longtime love and source of inspiration, her writing deeply influenced by the wild magic and history of the Outer Banks. She currently writes, edits, and wrangles three small children in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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