This all started when I was dreaming up backstory for one of the side characters in a new novel I was working on. She was in her sixties, and I thought it would be a fun twist to make her a former Bunny at the “family-themed” Playboy resort that operated in Wisconsin from 1969 to 1981 (for real!). But I needed more information, and after unsuccessfully searching for retired Bunnies by scouring local newspaper articles, I launched an informal word-of-mouth campaign. “There’s a woman in my Bible study who used to be a Bunny,” someone would say in a whisper. Others replied, their voices thick with disapproval, “Weren’t they prostitutes or exotic dancers?”

I had no idea. I’d heard about the resort but was too young to have been there in its heyday, and I’d also never given much thought to Playboy, a brand I associated with my father’s stash of glossy magazines and late-era Hugh Hefner marinating in Viagra.

The more roadblocks I encountered, the more I was overcome with curiosity about what it must have been like for small-town girls in farm country to transform into Playboy Bunnies and enter a world of ’70s glitz and glamour. How must it have felt for someone who’d never worn high heels in her life to leave her father’s dairy farm and walk onto the floor of the resort in stilettos, her shoulders, usually covered in a wool sweater, exposed for the first time? Did tongues wag back home? And how did that experience sit with them forty years later?

I’m not sure what I expected, but the former Bunnies (they call themselves Rabbits) I talked to were all … normal. They have grandkids. Some go to spin classes and are members of Rotary and book clubs. One Bunny baked me homemade sourdough bread and gave me bracelets made with fair trade beads. While they all had different stories about their former employer, they generally loved to wax nostalgic and looked back on the experience with fondness. “Oh, I had the time of my life,” one woman told me, and it sounded like a confession. Her former coworkers I spoke with shared this sentiment, even the women whose own grown children didn’t know they’d once worked for Playboy.

“Once in a lifetime, you can have the time of your life” is now the marketing tagline for Shoulder Season, a novel that bears little resemblance to the one I’d begun. I found this specific Playboy resort, in America’s heartland, and this particular moment in time so odd and fascinating that it sucked the oxygen out of my original story. The minor character I’d started with became my main character, Sherri Taylor, a woman who gets a job at the resort in 1981 and runs recklessly headlong into the joys and pitfalls of adulthood. It takes her forty years to come to the startling realization that she’d actually had a good time.