Same Time Next Summer

Sam Holloway is the main character of the novel. The majority of the chapters set in the narrative present are written from Sam’s first-person point of view; in the past-tense chapters titled with her name, the third-person narrator inhabits her childhood consciousness. In the present, Sam is 30 years old. She lives in Manhattan and works for a company called Human Corps, where she “take[s] a fact-based approach to human capital and create[s] measurable outcomes” (21). She met her boss Eleanor Schultz “during [her] senior year at NYU at a recruiting event” and was taken by how Eleanor “seemed completely in control of herself and her surroundings” (22). Because Sam was still reeling from her breakup with Wyatt Pope, she was drawn to Eleanor’s calculated way of being and her religious “approach to human resources consulting” (22). The job thus became Sam’s way of fabricating a new version of herself. In her youth, Sam was unbridled, energetic, and impulsive. She acted with her heart and engaged with the world and others in a free-spirited, empathetic manner. In the present, she has quashed these facets of herself and donned an alternative, orderly way of being. These facets of her new identity are particularly important to Sam in the