By now, it’s clear that the Chaos of Cousins Beach goes back to one thing, or rather one person — Susannah Fisher.
The woman was the harbinger of chaos and the architect of all that was messy in the lives of these characters on The Summer I Turned Pretty. And this season in particular truly highlights this.
As promised to one of our commenters, Edie, and others, let’s dispel the Saint Susannah propaganda.
The Ghost of Cousins
I’ve never seen someone haunt the narrative to the degree that Susannah has, to the point where everyone she left in her wake of well-meaning but delusional destruction needs to spend literal years in extensive therapy to work through why she’s had such a hold on all of them.
Her fingerprints are on every aspect of not only the characters but also so many of their dynamics.
But what’s fascinating about the series is that when she was alive, everyone spent so much time idolizing her, and in her death, they spent the rest of their time deifying her.
Susannah was lovely in many ways. She’s as flawed as the rest of them, but there has always been a fantasy element that she represents, which is both alarming and, in some ways, downright tragic.
One of the pitfalls of this series being an adaptation that mostly opts to stay close to the books and focus exclusively on the love triangle is that, after the first season, we shifted significantly from a well-rounded, balanced story that also included compelling arcs for the adults.
It wasn’t necessarily the romance that hooked me to this summer show. Ironically, it was the dynamic between Laurel and Susannah that intrigued me, and I loved how it countered the teen story arcs.
It Begins with Susannah and Laurel
Laurel and Susannah have such a storied history that if this were the type of series to get the spinoff treatment, they could easily take the prequel route and explore an origin story for them.
Because there’s so much we don’t know about Susannah, but plenty to infer based on what we do. Her friendship with Laurel, and its longstanding nature, always carried a deeper meaning, often making me wonder if there was an undercurrent of something else beneath it.
Were they best friends like sisters, as a bitter but understandably hurt cast-off sister, Julia, implied in The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 2?
Or was there always an unrequited or even unprocessed love there that subsequently manifests itself in their offspring — the central trio carrying on something that preceded them in ways they’ll never really know?
But while that’s speculative, it is something that extends into the larger point of Susannah having so much power over everyone in her life. Even Adam, the man who cheated on her, wouldn’t have ended up where he was or achieved half as much success without Susannah and her wealth.
The Dichotomy of Susannah Fisher
What’s fascinating about Susannah is this illusion of happiness. There are two sides to her — the one that puts on airs and tries to uphold a fantasy world that’s perfect at Cousins — the one that’s happy-go-lucky enough to draw comparisons to Jeremiah.
And then there’s the layered person who seemed to have darker things lurking, suggesting that she could have easily been just as internally troubled at times as Conrad.
Both of her boys reflect different aspects of her. However, it’s the world she tries to cultivate that’s dreamy, sunny, and perfect, which completely disrupts everyone’s lives, whether she intends it or not.
There are so many unspoken layers to this seemingly earnest and well-intended wealthy white woman who often treats half of the Conklin family and her own kids like life-size dolls that she gets to orchestrate stories for.
She loves them, no doubt, but she also uses them to fulfill some bizarre fantasy, as if Cousins, her kids, Laurel, and Belly are fixtures of her perfect life that she can manipulate at will.
Architect of Fantasy and Chaos
It’s not even mean-spirited so much as tragic, enough to make you wonder what was at the source of this woman, who seemed more concerned with appearance and the illusion of happiness than she was with controlling every aspect of it for those around her.
Why was she so wrapped up in pretty, romanticized fantasy that she ignored reality as much as she could? It’s exactly what was at the root of her issues with Julia — she didn’t respect Julia’s trauma, because in Susannah’s world, there’s no space for that.
And let’s be real, there is nothing healthy or normal about Susannah spending a lifetime telling a young Belly that she was destined to marry one of her sons.
You don’t instill that type of messaging into a child during their most impressionable years. Why exactly did she cling to the idea of Belly serving as her pseudo-daughter to the point of unwittingly narrowing Belly’s possibilities?
Belly’s entire identity revolves around Susannah and her influence. We’ve even seen, at times, earlier in the series, where it results in Laurel feeling inadequate as a maternal figure.
Adopt-a-Belly
It was like Laurel birthed Belly, but Belly was Susannah’s the whole time. Hell, maybe that speaks to the entire ownership issue that crops up in the love triangle regarding Belly in the first place.
Because Susannah was the lighthearted, airy, easy-breezy, fantastical version of the perfect woman — the height of traditional femininity as it is revered, and Laurel was the opposite of that.
Belly gravitated to that, too. She’s as obsessed with Susannah as she is Conrad, and she may very well be partly obsessed with Conrad because of Susannah.
We see how she idolizes this woman and allows so much of Susannah’s thoughts to shape her own, her words to influence how she feels or carries herself.
They’ve put this woman on such a pedestal that everyone still spends a large portion of their lives trying to honor her wishes and cater to the whimsy of a lovely and sweet but tragically damaged woman who created her own fantasy world to cope.
Seriously, if this were any other series, there would be so much more to explore with Susannah, but alas, we’ll never get any of that.
The Cult of Susannah Fisher — Lifetime Membership
So much of The Summer I Turned Pretty revolves around what “Susannah would’ve wanted” to the degree that Christians ask, “What would Jesus do?”
It’s actually odd to see grown adults at this point still structure their lives around this woman. Did Belly always dream of going to Paris, or is this just one of those things that appeals to her because of Susannah?
Did Conrad always want to be a doctor, or did he pursue this career path because of Susannah?
And would Belly have spent her entire life pining after one Fisher brother and then shifting to the other without Susannah’s “prophecy” that feels more like a shackle that she would marry one of her sons?
“First love” is fine, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but we essentially had Belly with a crush in which Susannah fanned the flames, using all of these kids that she loved like props in a telenovela for her own entertainment because SHE’s a romantic at heart.
Ma’am, Leave Those Children ALONE!
When you consider that Susannah has been whispering in Belly’s ear about this since she was a child, one can see where Belly never really had a choice, right?
It’s precisely the reason why she needs to go to Paris and figure out who she is and her identity. Because everything she has ever known has been unusually intertwined with the Fishers, and she hasn’t had room to experience anything else.
Her codependency? It existed long before her dynamic with Jeremiah, and the fact that they leaned on each other so much after Susannah’s death only highlights the fact that neither of them knew who they were or what they were supposed to be after Susannah died.
Why? Because Susannah wrote the script for their lives, and suddenly, they’re like characters with no author trying to figure out how they’re supposed to finish their story.
Dolls not knowing what’s next when their owner stops playing with them.
It’s not just Belly, either, that Susannah had this hold on. It’s also not lost on me that because she DIDN’T have this level of presence over Steven, he seems the most well-adjusted out of the brood.
Susannah Instigates the Heir/Spare Narrative Too
But Susannah’s effect on her sons? Equally as diabolical!
I already discussed how uncomfortable it was when she finally got to share a moment with Conrad on her deathbed, and she essentially saddled him with the notion of brotherhood as only duty and obligation, but not love.
And she still managed to push the Bonrad agenda to the very end, even in her dying breath, by telling an impressionable and susceptible Belly to look after Conrad. Not both of her sons, just Conrad.
Thus putting a lot of responsibility on a young woman to take care of a young man who hasn’t always treated HER mental and emotional health with care.
It also further enables Conrad to continue being the person who struggles to properly regulate his own emotions, as he’ll have someone like Belly there to “put up” with it.
Jeremiah, too, puts his mother on a pedestal, feeling that Susannah was the only one who “saw” him outside of Belly.
Even in the earlier seasons, we saw that she placed him in the role of “performer,” always tasking him with entertaining her and conditioning him to make her and others feel good, even as she acknowledged that he buried his own feelings in the process.
Play Cousins at Cousins? Nah, Romantic Wish Fulfillment ONLY!
To meddle so much in the love triangle she orchestrated and even take a side (not his) only makes it wilder, as she observed how he pretends to be happy for other people’s sake.
She even posthumously chains him to that fate when he has to pretend to be happy and not let anything come between him and his brother.
Susannah simultaneously disregards his feelings in the same way she knows everyone else does, and relegates her “Sunshine Boy” to second choice, particularly when it comes to Belly.
It even seems like the extent of her “favoring” Jeremiah isn’t really about Jeremiah at all, but instead chasing balance (to counterbalance Adam’s favoring of Conrad) for the sake of upholding and maintaining her fantasy.
With the letter mix-up, finally dispelling the hold Susannah may have had on Jeremiah, it breaks him in the process. Perhaps his mother only saw him as second-best, too.
She loved him, but still reinforced the Heir and the Spare dynamic that hangs over the Fisher brothers.
It’s a gut punch to have that realization after her death, and in such a devastating manner.
Susannah Says
Speaking of those letters, even in death, it’s just Susannah impeding on lives and wielding influence. No, she doesn’t outright mention Belly in that letter to Conrad, but we can read between the lines.
She chains everyone to nostalgia and the past, to the sunny, fantasy world that she produced every summer. Because of all the things she could write about to her son on his wedding day, why exactly would it be that?
Can you imagine if he were healthy enough to actually find a new person and be on his way to marrying her, only to have the mother he cherished conjure up Belly Conklin like she was activating the Winter Soldier?
Conrad isn’t the only menace; he’s just infinitely messier.
Susannah’s Flex? Being the OG Menace to Society
Susannah? She’s a real menace to society, but the sneakier, scarier type who does it with a smile and uses neural linguistics programming like a pro.
There’s just no way of fully capturing the extent of the damage she’s inflicted, but it remains fascinating because no one, outside of maybe John Conklin, can ever come close to addressing it.
Instead, TSITP worships at the altar of its very own Madonna, romanticizing all that she stands for.
Meanwhile, we’re left to deal with the fallout while wondering why on earth they let this woman pull the strings like a puppet master, even from beyond the grave.
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