Hilderbabes Take Nantucket

Wendy Hudson, the owner of Nantucket Book Partners, said that, over the course of the final two Bucket List Weekends, customers purchased around 350 copies of Hilderbrand’s novels. An impressive amount, but it won’t add up to a fortune for the author.

For the record: “I do not get paid a penny,” Hilderbrand said of the Bucket List Weekend. “This is just something I do for a) Nantucket b) the readers. I get the book sales but it’s not a big book-selling thing because everybody’s already read everything.”

Many Hilderbabes said that the pinnacle of the extravaganza was the Saturday night dance party at the Chicken Box, a dive bar that appears in the Hilderbrand oeuvre. (P.S. They don’t sell chicken.) It was understood among Bucket List attendees that Nantucket men have been known to show up especially for “Cougar Weekend”; indeed, there were a number of male spectators at the bar when a strobe-lit crowd of women, including Hilderbrand, rocked out to “Jessie’s Girl.”

But there was an alternate strain of Hilderbabe, one who knew that the introverted streak making her ears burn with mortification on the dance floor was also what made her a reader. She hopped the first shuttle back to town, and the pinnacle of her Bucket List experience was a late-night stroll between Nantucket Bookworks and Mitchell’s Book Corner, only three blocks apart. The streets were dark and the cobblestones were treacherous but both shop windows had warm spotlights on the real stars of the weekend: Hilderbrand’s novels.

Seeing them there — so many of them, facing the island where they were born — it was impossible not to wonder what Hilderbrand will do after “The Five-Star Weekend” comes out on June 13th, followed by “Swan Song” in 2024.

First, she plans to write two novels, set at boarding school, with her daughter who is 16.

Then, like Taylor Swift between “1989” and “Reputation,” Hilderbrand plans to lie low for a while. “I really would like one entire year when I’m not touring, not writing,” she said. “Just one year.”

As for the Hilderbabes, they have their books — and each other.