Port Anna by Libby Buck | Simon and Schuster; July 1, 2025
“All of a sudden,” Libby Buck says, “I had this image of a woman.”
Buck, a Hillsborough writer with a long red bob and impish Windsor glasses, is describing the moment that she envisioned Gwen, the main character in her debut novel, Port Anna, which was released by Simon & Schuster earlier this month.
Port Anna‘s Gwen is a woman unmoored, as she leaves behind the boyfriend who dumped her and the Chapel Hill teaching job she was unjustly let go from, and heads toward her childhood home of Port Anna, Maine. There, the past awaits, embodied by a slew of old high school friends (mostly men), the ramshackle cottage she grew up in, the cottage’s pair of kindly ghosts, and memories of the sister she lost in childhood—a memory brought to the fore by posters of a missing girl, Shania, that pop up around Port Anna.
When that image of Gwen first came to her, Buck says, it was of the character crossing Maine’s real Piscataqua Bridge at one a.m.
“I was like, “What has happened to her?” That was where it started,” Buck recalls. “Then I started following the story of this woman and why she was in such terrible shape at the age of 40, and her life, and how everything’s been taken from her except for this little, tiny, unwinterized cottage.”
Buck may live in Hillsborough, but Port Anna, as she says, is a “love story” to her childhood home of Maine, with a love of the state’s lush landscape, in all of its quietly dramatic seasons, evident on every page. Gwen’s journey and the prose that matches it are introspective and wise—a gentle summer read, with a hometown romance unfolding across the pages as Gwen navigates grief, returning to both her home and herself, and figuring out how to pick up the pieces.
On the heels of the book’s publication, the INDY spoke with Buck about Maine, ghosts, and how the book came to life.
What’s your relationship to Maine like?
That’s a question that pretty much everyone asks, and it’s a very common one to ask if you’re in Maine, right? Everybody wants to know, “How long have you had a relationship with this? How many generations does it go back?” And seriously, if you’re not like, 18 generations in, you’re just not a Maine-r.
My first summer in Maine, I was two. My parents were living in New York City, and it was very hot, and my mother was miserable. She had a six-month-old, and her sister had married into a family that lived a little bit further south of here, closer to Portland, and she called my mom, who was complaining about New York, and her sister said, “Just stick the kids in the back of the station wagon and come on up.” And so she did, and the way she tells it, she got out of the car and fell in love.
When I was seven, [my parents] bought a little cottage, very light Periwinkle, built by two women. We did call them “The Misses.” They were professors at Bryn Mawr, and the house was sold to us, lock, stock, and barrel, so we sort of adopted them as members of our family. I have a number of photographs that I show during my talks, of these women.
They’re very tender. There’s a lot of touching; it’s very clear how much they loved each other. In their pictures, their friends came up, and they were all women. There are pictures of them swimming. They adopted kittens and would carry the kittens around. They’re having tea on the outside porch. And anyway, it’s very sweet; we grew to love them.
There were also ghosts in the house—I never heard them, I think I was probably too young or unaware or oblivious. Evidently, my brother was the first one to hear them. He was a toddler, and one day during dinner, he looked to my mother and said, “Who’s upstairs?” And my mother was like, “Oh my god, there are footsteps up there, and nobody’s here but us.”
Ghosts usually have a negative connotation. But the ghosts in your book seem benevolent.
My experience of Maine in general is, I think of it as this magical, deeply spiritual space. It is a place where people talk about ghosts like they’re just next door, you know—“Oh yeah, that house is haunted.” Like everybody knows that.
I had an experience not so long ago of having dinner with some friends at a very old cottage that’s right around the corner. It’s this ramshackle place, and people know work has been done on it for quite some time. I looked at the hostess, and I said, “Is there a ghost here?” And she goes, “Oh yeah, it’s Uncle George.” And at that very moment, the dog got up and went and stood at the bottom of the stairs and was looking up. Everybody just kind of accepts that they’re here and they’re not going to hurt anybody.
Would you consider this a ghost novel?
No. I mean, they’re very present, but I was more interested in thinking about the things that haunt us, both to help us and to help guide us. My main character, Gwen, is metaphorically haunted as well by the loss of her sister. As painful as that is for her, it’s trauma that marks a life in indelible ways. I wanted to think about how you can heal from that kind of trauma and move forward. Sometimes those really difficult and painful things are teachers, too, and if we can embrace the lessons that they bring, there’s hope on the other side.
What was the nucleus of the story?
I wanted to write a love story to Maine, because I wanted to write about how much this place has meant to me over the years. My family had moved a great deal when I was growing up, and that little cottage was our touchstone. When we sold that house, it was heartbreaking—it was the middle of my parents’ divorce, and they couldn’t keep it.
I wanted to write this love story, and my agent said, “That sounds like a great idea.” I was so excited about writing this that I came back from my meeting and just started writing. Didn’t have an outline, I didn’t have a plan—which is a very bad idea, right? But once I started writing, I couldn’t stop.
I was thinking about how much it meant to me to get here and the Herculean effort over the years, sometimes, to make it up I-95, and all of a sudden, I had this image of a woman. Her hair is prematurely white at the temples, and she’s got bags under her eyes, and she’s exhausted, and her life has fallen apart.
Are you working on a new project?
I am. I’m working on a book about Shania. I finished Port Anna and had so many questions about her. She’s somebody who has suffered a great deal, and I wanted to understand how someone who has been through what she has been through can make sense of that, as an adult.
The lineage continues! Well, coming back to here, what is your writing life like? Have you been able to kind of find a writing home in North Carolina as well?
Oh my gosh, yes. First of all, I have the most extraordinary writing partner, and we’ve been writing together for 10 years. Alpin Geist is a writer of YA sci-fi, and as a result, is extraordinarily plot-driven, which is very helpful for somebody like me, who’s very description-heavy. It’s been wonderful.
And yes, I have met a number of other writers, and it’s always lovely to be included in their midst—there are some very accomplished writers in Hillsborough and with long careers. So I’m always honored to be in a room with all of those people.
How does it feel to have the book out in the world?
I’ve had a lot of very sweet feedback from people, which makes me feel good. You know, when you write a book to make yourself happy, you don’t always know if it’s going to make someone else happy, too. So I’m just delighted when I get comments like, “I cried, I love this, I love Gwen, love The Misses.” It’s been really, really sweet. I had been warned that sometimes writers feel a letdown after pub day, but that has not been the case for me.
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