Every Summer After
Every Summer After
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Carley Fortune on Every Summer After
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A work call she never recovered fromThe decision to write the book took about thirty seconds. Fortune was at a rental cottage near Barry’s Bay in July 2020 when a work call snapped something. Sixteen years of journalism, most recently running the editorial team at Refinery29 Canada, had consumed everything she had to give.
I remember getting off a stressful work call and thinking, I have given everything to my employers and kept nothing for myself.
The work call was the trigger, but the material had been accumulating since March. During an early lockdown weekend, Fortune pulled all thirteen of her childhood diaries from a closet and read them straight through for the first time. What she found on those pages had not gone quiet.
The emotions in those diaries felt raw to me, even 20 years later. I really yearned for my ‘person.’ I felt so isolated and lonely.
Those diaries also contained notes she and her friends had passed in class, a letter she wrote to a crush and never sent, and a letter from a best friend ending their friendship. The longing and the loss on those pages fed directly into Percy’s interior life.
Fortune kept the project almost entirely private once she started. She had a clear mental image of the look she would get from someone if she announced she was writing a novel, a face that wordlessly asked whether she really thought she could do that. Writing in secret removed that pressure entirely, and so did her stated ambition.
I wrote it totally selfishly. Like, I wrote the book that I wanted to read.
How she wrote it
388 words before the toddler woke upFortune approached the manuscript the way she had approached editorial deadlines for sixteen years: set a number, divide by the days, hit it daily. She had a full-time job and a toddler, which meant her writing window was five to seven in the morning before anyone else was awake. The math was what made the whole thing feel possible.
For my romance/women’s fiction debut, I aimed for an 80,000-word draft, which meant I needed to write 388 words a day to finish it by the end of the year. I’ve worked with journalists who file daily stories with original reporting at much longer lengths, so 388 words seemed manageable, especially when those 388 words didn’t have to be perfect.
Fortune builds characters as she drafts rather than planning them in advance, which meant Percy’s name had to earn its place in the story as she went. Percy’s father is a Greek scholar in the book, and the full name Persephone needed to carry a specific contradiction that Percy would spend the novel growing into.
I wanted a name that she could play with that would show how she changes throughout her life.
Sam’s name had a more practical origin: Fortune was pregnant while writing the book, her husband Marco had already vetoed Sam for the baby, and the character inherited it instead.
Coming from journalism, where every detail is borrowed from reality, Fortune hit a conceptual wall early in the drafting that stopped her mid-scene. The realization that solved it was genuinely new to her.
There was a moment where I got stuck at the beginning of writing Every Summer After. I didn’t know what happened next and then it dawned on me for the first time that I could just make it up. It hadn’t occurred to me that the story lives and breathes in your mind.
The book’s title came from her agent, Taylor Haggerty, not from Fortune herself. Fortune had been calling the manuscript ‘Swear On It’ through the entire drafting process. The new title landed on the two structural facts that define the book’s form: its summer setting and its alternating timeline.
The title is absolutely not my title. I was calling the book ‘Swear On It’ when I was drafting... She came up with ‘Every Summer After’, and I thought it was just brilliant. [paraphrased from audio]
The cover went through a similar negotiation. Fortune prepared a presentation for her publisher that included photographs of the lake and paintings by the Group of Seven. Her editor, Amanda Bergeron, wanted an oil painting rather than the cartoon-style covers then common in romance, and they landed on Toronto-based artist Elizabeth Lenny.
Fortune was advised more than once, including by a Canadian agent, to relocate the story to an American beach town. She declined every time, and the book’s specificity of place, a year-round community of about 1,200 people on a lake in rural Ontario, became one of the things readers responded to most.
In hindsight, I’m so glad I didn’t do that. I can see now that Barry’s Bay really became a character in the book.
The personal thread
The kid who stayed when everyone else leftFortune grew up in Barry’s Bay as a year-round resident, one of the few children who remained when the cottagers went home each fall. She worked evenings at her parents’ restaurant the same way Sam does in the book. When she divided the two protagonists between herself, she gave each of them a different piece of her.
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.
Charlie, Sam’s older brother, started as a device to create friction between the two leads. But from the first scene Fortune wrote involving all three of them, the raft scene where Percy first watches the brothers together, Charlie’s function crystallized into something she had not fully planned.
Sam’s older brother, Charlie. From the first scene I wrote with Sam and Charlie, where Percy sees them messing around on their raft, I knew Charlie’s role was to be a constant thorn in Sam’s side, at least when they’re teenagers. Every time Charlie enters the room, he’s trying to provoke Sam and sometimes Percy, too.
What she wants us to sit with
Losing a place, not just a personThe first thing Fortune names when asked what she wants readers to feel is escape with physical texture: the sensation of being somewhere, not the receipt of a message. She is precise about what that somewhere looks like.
I hope the book gives people a similar escape — that they feel like they’re sitting on a dock, looking out over a glittering lake as they read.
Fortune thinks popular culture tends to treat teenage emotion as something that diminishes with retrospect, something slightly embarrassing once you have adult perspective on it. The book was written against that assumption, and she believes the readers who have responded most strongly are the ones who felt that assumption most keenly.
I think there’s something validating about reading a book that basically says all these wild and really heavy feelings you had as a teenager, these people who meant so much to you in your past actually do matter in the long run. I think that’s kind of, like, really struck a chord with people, particularly younger readers.
Percy spends twelve years away from Barry’s Bay, and Fortune is careful to name what that absence actually contains. The book’s geography is not backdrop. It is part of what Percy lost and part of what she has to decide whether she can reclaim.
Barry’s Bay is very much a character in the story. When Percy loses Sam, it’s not just a bad breakup. She loses a place that means everything to her.
That layering is also what shapes the book’s argument about forgiveness. Percy has been punishing herself for a decade, and Fortune draws a line between that punishment and accountability. The book asks whether Percy can return to the lake at all, and what she will have to let go of before she can.