The opportunity to dash down to Charleston to enjoy a beach day and a delicious meal in town is one of the perks of studying at the University of South Carolina.

For alumna Rachel Beanland, ’03 public relations, trips like this also provided inspiration for a book she would write years after graduation.

“When I was at Carolina, my girlfriends and I would jump in the car and drive to Charleston all the time,” says Beanland. “We would either go to Isle of Palms or Sullivan’s Island or Folly. But we would always aim for one of the Charleston beaches, and then kind of roam around downtown afterwards.”

Those memories of roaming Charleston are woven into her latest novel, The Half Life.

In The Half Life Beanland tells the story of Eileen O’Malley, a 23-year-old who’s been born and raised in Charleston. When she meets a naval officer named Paul Archer, they begin a whirlwind romance that ends with a quick marriage so that she can accompany him to La Maddalena, an island in the Mediterranean. As she settles into life on the island, Eileen quickly discovers that the local community has concerns about U.S. submarines and the possible presence of nuclear contamination in the water.

La Maddalena was already part of Beanland’s family history before she wrote the novel. She had lived there and in Charleston briefly as a child, following her father’s naval postings.

Beanland revisited the island in 2019 with her children and husband. She was surprised to see that the American community she had known as a little girl had vanished.

“The Americans pulled out of La Maddalena in 2008,” says Beanland. “The elementary school that I went to was just falling back into the earth.”

Upon returning home, Beanland read everything she could find about the Sardinian archipelago, which La Maddalena is a part of, and she realized the debate about nuclear contamination provided a unique backdrop for a novel.

Beanland drew on her own experience as part of a Navy family and her time spent in Charleston as a student to give her characters depth and her settings vibrancy.

“I think part of that is because I was a Navy kid, and I moved around so often. I would show up in these different places — and University of South Carolina is no exception to this,” Beanland says, “and I would kind of look around, make good observations and try to figure out how to fit in.”

The classes she took in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications continue to influence her writing style years into her career.

“In the journalism school, the professor who made the biggest impact was Doug Fisher, who taught me copy editing,” says Beanland. “It was not a class you had to take as a PR major, but I wanted to take it. I learned a lot of rules that I still use today.”

Among those rules? Short, punchy sentences; unflinching dedication to the proper use of commas; and front-loading important information in stories, paragraphs and sentences.

Beanland applied these rules throughout a productive career in PR before transitioning to writing fiction full-time. The Half Life is her third novel; the common thread among them is the way they tie into her lived experience.

“I have to have a real reason that the story resonates, because you work on these books for such a long time,” says Beanland. “I usually spend at least two years writing a novel. And if you're coming back to it day in and day out, you've got to really embrace the story.”

The Half Life, published by Simon and Schuster, hits shelves on July 14.

Meet Rachel Beanland