One of the first things Carley Fortune said during our half-hour-long virtual interview (her in Toronto at 9:30 am, me in Mumbai, at 8 pm IST) was that she always wanted to write a book. Romance writer, though, is Fortune’s second career; her first was a long stint in journalism. She oversaw the launch of Refinery29 Canada, worked at The Globe and Mail and Toronto Life, so words always came easy to her. But after a particularly frustrating work call in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, she declared that she was going to write a book for herself. She didn’t intend to publish it.
“I wanted to write about the experience of growing up on the lake and Barry’s Bay,” said the author. That book turned into Every Summer After, Fortune’s smash-hit debut novel, which is now being turned into a Prime Video show starring Sadie Soverall (Saltburn) and Matt Cornett (High School Musical: The Musical: The Series). The sequel (but also a standalone novel) to Every Summer After is One Golden Summer, The Nod Book Club’s current book of the month.
It features a much-beloved character from Every Summer After, Charlie Florek, part-time resident of Barry’s Bay, who starts a summer flirtation with photographer Alice, who is spending the summer at the lake with her grandma. Both have history at the lake—Alice once stayed at a cottage when she was 17. It’s where she took a photo of three teenagers in a yellow speedboat. (Of course, one of the teens was Charlie, who grew up in the area.) It’s an image that changed Alice’s life and career.
Interestingly, the cover of every book by Fortune features a photo from the lake that’s been turned into a painting. Fortune even pivots the camera during our call to show me the painting by Toronto-based artist Elizabeth Lennie that’s on the cover of her novel Meet Me at the Lake. “We wanted the covers to stand out from a typical cartoon romcom cover. We wanted it to signal sweeping stories, these beautiful places, and big emotions,” said Fortune. If the cover is lake-inspired, then the title, One Golden Summer, is Harry Styles-coded. In a previous interview, Fortune said, “We really had a hard time coming up with a name for this novel. Of all the books, this was the hardest.” Fortune’s a big fan of the singer and her editor Amanda Bergeron suggested turning to Styles for inspo. And voila, his 2019 song ‘Golden’ proved the perfect fit for the book.
More insights from the author’s life and work in the excerpts from our conversation below:
Tell me about the setting of your novels. That’s the thing that first strikes one reading your stories.
The setting is always a deliberate choice. The story ideas kind of come out of the setting. One Golden Summer is set in Barry’s Bay, which is a small town in eastern Ontario where I grew up. And it’s teeny tiny, just 1,200 people. I grew up on the lake—very rural, very isolated. My parents sold that house when I was in my early twenties, but I keep going back to the area.
A lot of readers really wanted Charlie’s story after reading Every Summer After. Did you feel a lot of pressure to do justice to his character?
When I finished writing Every Summer After, before I had a book deal or an agent, I immediately started thinking about Charlie. I loved writing his character. I wrote a couple of words of a book told from his point of view and put it aside. My editor and I had always discussed going back and writing a book about Charlie. I just kept getting so many requests for more of Percy and Sam or Charlie’s love story. Some people really disliked Charlie. Some people preferred him. And I love him. Of all the characters I’ve written, he’s probably the easiest for me to conjure. I can tap into him so easily. So, when I sat down to write it, I was very excited. It gave me a chance to say what I wanted to say about Charlie. And I loved seeing the people who really disliked him in Every Summer After come around.
Is there a character that is inspired by your real life, or one that you really resonate with?
I think both Percy and Sam [from her debut novel, Every Summer After]. Sam is very much who I was growing up in a lot of ways. I put a lot of my own experiences living on the lake, working at my parents’ restaurants, wanting to leave my small town, my anxieties, my ambitions into Sam. Percy got a lot of the trouble I had with girls growing up, my lack of self-confidence, anxiety, panic attacks.
I find little bits of myself come into every book. I can’t help it—sometimes I don’t see it and somebody who knows me reads it and they’re like ‘I see you here’. I'm like, “oh, well, I didn’t know.”
Was there any imagery that inspired you when you were writing One Golden Summer?
My cousins had a cottage in Barry’s Bay and they had a retro yellow boat. And that is where the yellow boat [a recurring motif in the book] came from. My other cousins had an old green boat that had a horn that went ‘aaaah-whoooo-gaaaaah!’, like the yellow boat [in the book], so I put those two together. I also like to really visualise the place—I drew out the cottage that Alice stays in and the property around it. But because I grew up in the area, I can just conjure the place. There are these big oversized floating pool loungers that they use in One Golden Summer. We bought one of these for our cottage. It’s a big bird, a big loon, and they were so comfortable. Once I had a little Aperol spritz on it, so when I was thinking about Charlie and Alice and all the fun, silly things that they would do, I was like, they need oversized pool loungers for the lake.
That sounds like an idyllic summer moment. Are you a good artist? You said you drew Alice’s home.
No, I’m terrible. I’m terrible. Awful.
I loved Nan's storyline—her grief, her relationship with an estranged friend, her whole storyline... She really drives the story forward.
There’s always a relationship between women, at least one, within the books that is a crucial relationship. I had never written about a woman and her grandmother. This was a nice way to explore that dynamic but also this idea that we’re always coming of age. Even when we’re in our eighties, we are figuring out who we are. Nan lost her husband, her best friend. She has regrets in her life. She’s coming to terms with all that in the same way Alice is coming to terms with where she is, and Charlie is coming to terms with where he is in his life. I loved being able to show that.
Tell us about your new book, Our Perfect Storm.
It’s about Frankie and George, who have been best friends since they were eight. And now they’re adults. Frankie is about to get married; she and George have grown apart in their twenties, and they’ve had a fight. But he's supposed to come to her wedding as the best man, and she is not sure if he’s going to show up. He does, and everything is perfect until the day before her wedding, when her fiancé dumps her with just a note. She goes home to wallow; George follows her there and convinces her to go on what was supposed to be her honeymoon—with him. He has a plan to heal her broken heart, but she wants to repair their friendship.
It takes place mostly in Tofino, which is this incredible, small community on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It’s as far west in Canada as you can go and it’s surrounded by rainforests and misty beaches. It’s really the story of their friendship and falling in love and trying to figure out where you are. I’m really proud of it. I think it’s my best book.
I hear it has a lot of Little Women references in it, Easter eggs that fans of the classic may appreciate.
It does. Frankie and George’s dynamic is inspired by Jo and Laurie’s in that they’re very fiery, very stubborn. I grew up watching the ’90s version [of the Little Women film] with Christian Bale and Winona Ryder, and I just wanted Jo and Laurie to get together, so I was imagining what it would be like if these two characters were given a shot. [In the book] these characters watch Little Women together every year. There’s a mailbox in the hedge between their two houses, much like the mailbox that Laurie gives Joe. There’s a lot of little sprinklings of Little Women in the book.
