Summer, sunshine and California: Put them together, and you’ve got an Amy Mason Doan novel. 

Raised in California and now living in Portland, Doan is a journalist-turned-novelist who has published four books: The Summer List, Summer Hours, Lady Sunshine, and The California Dreamers. She’ll sign copies of The California Dreamers, which came out in April, at a July 5 event in Tigard.   

The California Dreamers is a nod to 1980s surf culture, particularly the full-time surfers who camped along the coast, keeping their kids out of school and otherwise avoiding mainstream society. Doan tells the story of the Merrick family — Cap, Mama, and their four children — who live in a van they move every few days to a new place. 

Cap tells his kids he’s giving them freedom, a life untroubled by the folly of conventional society. But he also enforces strict rules about where the Merricks go, whom they talk to, and what they do. One of his top rules: The Merricks don’t do photographs. So when someone snaps an evocative picture of the whole family on the beach and it achieves the ‘80s equivalent of going viral, it’s a major plot point. 

The novel is told from the perspective of Cap’s daughter, Ronan, as a 14-year-old on the California coast in 1983 and as a 32-year-old mother living on an Oregon lavender farm in 2002. In between, she’s spent years away from her family, the only Merrick to go solo. They’ve left her alone — until the day she finds a coin stamped with the family’s mark, and knows one of her brothers has arrived. They meet that night after her family has gone to bed: 

I couldn’t stand it anymore. My big brother wouldn’t have come here after a decade and a half without a serious reason. “Griff. You have news, don’t you?”

He nodded.    

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Oregon ArtsWatch talked recently with Doan about The California Dreamers and her work in general. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

What is it about summer that calls to you as a writer?

Doan: I like the idea of endings and beginnings. It’s just the time when we can explore, we can try out a new version of ourselves. 

I didn’t set out to write four novels that were summery. My longtime editor, Melanie Fried, looked at a couple of my plots and realized that they were in the summer and that we could plumb that theme a little bit more, and I embraced it.

Your books also revolve around family secrets — the kind that, when they’re revealed, have the potential to reframe how people see one another. Can you talk about that?

Every one of my books is about a woman confronting her past, in one way or another, and a secret from the past. We all keep secrets, for whatever reason. As we grow older, we don’t always have the chance, as the characters do in my books, to confront them head on, or find the people that we haven’t seen in 30 years and confess to a secret, figure out why we kept it, or why they kept it from us. 

But it’s something that we all deal with, and I think that it makes a strong structure for a book, that feeling of being desperate to come clean with someone and then in the process, hopefully heal.

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There are endless variations on that theme. The Summer List is about friends. Summer Hours is more of a love story. Lady Sunshine is about music and parenting. The California Dreamers is my first big-family story, about struggling with our feelings about our parents and our siblings, and a secret that my main character, Ronan, keeps for a very good reason.

What is the origin story of The California Dreamers?

It was almost the very first book I wrote.

I happened to read an article about this surf school that the Paskowitz family was running in Southern California and it went into their history. [Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz and his family, which included nine children, lived off the grid in vans.] I had known about the father because he went to Stanford and I went to Stanford for [journalism] school, and I had read a book he wrote. I thought this would make a really good novel, especially told through the point of view of the only girl in that van. I found another plot that lured me away from this one, but this was always in the back of my mind. 

And, you know, I wrote it at the right time for me as a writer, when I was able to handle more characters. This is not the real family. I’ve taken a lot of liberties, but I just think the idea of figuring out who defines freedom for you is just endlessly fascinating. 

Who was your favorite character to write and why?  

Oh, I love Charlie. I mean, I love my main character, Ronan, but I know her so well that through her eyes, I love Charlie. 

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Charlie drops into my main character’s world, and it’s a taste of the outside and it just changes things for her irrevocably. And Charlie brings a little humor to it. 

Who was the most challenging character to write and why?

Cap. He’s the father, very loosely inspired by Doc.

When I first started writing, he was almost villainous and it was a little over the top, and I found that I grew a little fond of him and I didn’t want him to be some cartoon mustache-twirling villain. 

In some ways, he’s a bit of a cipher, so nailing the frequency with which he would appear on the page was difficult. And he speaks rarely, so every bit of dialogue from Cap had to do its work, and that took a lot of thought and versions.

You haven’t written any sequels, but it seems like all your books present the opportunity. I’d read a sequel to The California Dreamers that told Cap and Mama’s backstory. I’d read about what Ronan’s family did in the years between her departure and return. Have you ever considered doing a sequel?

I love that. It makes me happy that people like it enough or are interested enough or invested enough in the characters to want more. So definitely, that is in the mix. It won’t be book five, but I’m thinking about it. 

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One little secret about this book is that Mama, the mother, is sort of a character from the Lady Sunshine book that came out in 2021. There’s a character in Lady Sunshine who goes off to live in a surf band. So they’re intertwined.

What are you reading?

I just finished Ann Patchett’s — I always do this in between books — I read The Getaway Car. It’s about how she wrote The Patron Saint of Liars, her first novel, while waitressing at a TGI Friday’s. It kind of gets me in gear for a new book. 

There’s a wonderful book by an author in Portland called Christin Hancock. It’s nonfiction, and it’s called Unmentionable Madness, and it’s fabulous. It’s about treatment of women who had syphilis a long time ago. 

I love Rene Denfeld’s new book [Sleeping Giants].

Oh, this is something fun. This book by George Mackay Brown is called Greenvoe. I picked it up in Scotland, and it’s beautiful. It’s about the Orkney Islands.

Was there anything that I should have asked you about, or anything we didn’t get to that you’d like to talk about?

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I’m so grateful for Portland’s writing community and reading community and the booksellers. Broadway Books has been amazing to me, and Powell’s. 

I’m so lucky to live in Portland and we have such a great, thriving book scene here. So take advantage of it and support your indie booksellers.