Nichole Bernier

Nichole has written for magazines including Elle, Self, Health, Men’s Journal, Child and Yankee, as well as Boston Magazine, where she was a senior editor. A 14-year contributing editor to Conde Nast Traveler magazine, she was previously on staff as a features writer, golf and ski editor and television spokesperson, until she met her future husband on a blind date, and gave up New York and her rent-controlled apartment for Boston. She is one of the founders of the literary blog Beyond the Margins, and a recipient of the literary journalism award from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

She is at work on her second novel, and lives outside of Boston with her husband, five children, and any number of rescue animals.

Before there were blogs, there were journals. And in them we’d write as we really were, not as we wanted to appear. But there comes a day when journals outlive us. And with them, our secrets.

Summer vacation on Great Rock Island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who’d lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth's journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate thought she knew. 

The complicated portrait of Elizabeth—her troubled upbringing, and her route to marriage and motherhood—makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her own deepest beliefs about loyalty and honesty at a period of uncertainty in her own marriage. 

Set in the anxious summer after the September 11th attacks, this story of two women—their friendship, their marriages, private ambitions and fears—considers the aspects of ourselves we show and those we conceal, and the repercussions of our choices.