For her latest novel, Sunny Hostin got a little erotic help from her friends.
On the Tuesday, May 28, episode of The View, cohost Joy Behar asked Hostin, 55, whether the sex scenes in her new book, Summer on Highland Beach, were written out of “personal experience.”
“No, I didn’t,” Hostin said definitively. “I have a writers room of men and women. We write them together because I’m a repressed Catholic. I just can’t write them.”
Hostin continued, “Who knew my friends were this sexy? We get together, men and women. We’re looking at it from a female gaze, but they help me write the book.”
Summer on Highland Beach — the third entry in Hostin’s New York Times best-selling Summer Beach series — takes place on the shores of the oldest Black resort community, which was founded in the late 1800s by Frederick Douglass.
In an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, Hostin explained why the historic location was chosen.
“It’s really important to me. I feel like we don’t know a lot of our history,” Hostin explained earlier this month. “American history is so young, we haven’t been a country for that long. It’s a shame that a lot of young people just don’t know our history. Older people too. There’s been this erasure of truly what American history is, which covers so many people, places and things.”
After all, Sunny knows a thing or two about the current mindsets of young people. She and husband Emmanuel “Manny” Hostin share son Gabriel, 21, a junior at Harvard University, and daughter Paloma, 17, who will begin her freshman year at Cornell University in the fall.
During the writing process for her new book, Sunny said both Gabriel and Paloma afforded their mother the necessary freedom to get the job done.
“They’re so understanding,” she told Us. “When Mom has to lock her home office because I’m writing — I write at night, it’s part of my process — I generally try to write when I’m done helping them. We always eat as a family together, so after dinner I go into my little room and close the door and I’m working and I’m writing.”
Sunny continued, “They sometimes come in and say ‘Good night, don’t forget to get some sleep.’ They check on me, which is pretty spectacular.”
Summer on Highland Beach is available now.
