One Golden Summer
One Golden Summer
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Carley Fortune on One Golden Summer
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Justice for CharlieCharlie Florek existed as a half-finished idea before Fortune had a single publishing credit. She had written a few words of his story, shelved them, and carried the project in the back of her mind through an agent search, a book deal, and several subsequent novels.
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.
The case for Charlie’s book eventually arrived in person, delivered by two readers who had waited at the back of a signing line for ninety minutes. The encounter put a face on what had been an abstract editorial conversation.
They were like, ‘We have a bone to pick with you. Justice for Charlie.’
Even with reader pressure and an editor’s encouragement, Fortune waited. Returning to Barry’s Bay, the Ontario lake town where Every Summer After is set, meant writing into an audience that already had strong feelings about every character, and she knew she needed to be a different writer than the one who had made them.
I felt like I needed to have a certain level of confidence as an author before I could go back to a place and characters that readers had such strong opinions about, a lot of passion for. And it was kind of a journey for me after I wrote this, my first novel and then after that, I was like, oh my gosh, I don’t know if I can do it again. It took a few books to feel like, okay, I understand I can write a book now. [paraphrased from audio]
That hard-won confidence, earned across three books between Every Summer After and One Golden Summer, is what let her put the audience’s expectations aside and tell the story she wanted to tell.
How she wrote it
Eleven thousand words in the binFortune usually begins with a setting, lets a protagonist grow from it, and then builds a love interest to match. With One Golden Summer, the setting and the hero were already fixed, which meant her standard method of working toward a character had nowhere to go.
The setting is what comes first for me. The protagonist follows, and her love interest grows out of who she is and what her journey is. But that all got upended with One Golden Summer, because I already had the setting and Charlie as the hero. It took a very long time figuring out who the protagonist would be, why she and Charlie were a good match, and her larger character arc outside of the romantic relationship.
The first protagonist Fortune built to solve that problem was a singer-songwriter who had spent a teenage summer at the lake recording an album. She wrote deep into that version before abandoning it.
I ended up writing 11,000 words of a completely different book that I ended up trashing because she just wasn’t right, and eventually, I found Alice.
Alice, the character who finally worked, is a photographer who has spent her life behind the lens and is uncomfortable being at the center of her own life, which Fortune saw as a direct counterweight to Charlie’s ease with attention and his gift for seeing people clearly.
Once Alice existed, Fortune used a specific physical detail, her hair, to map Alice’s interior journey across the book. The detail came before the arc, not after it.
She’s someone who is really comfortable behind the scenes and not stepping into the spotlight — that kind of classic photographer who is behind the lens in more ways than one — and her natural hair is this big, loud, red curly hair...she feels like it takes up too much space in a room; it sucks all the attention to her. So she spends all this time straightening it out and pulling it back for professional appearances. And over the course of the book, her relationship to that changes.
Alice also served a structural function that Fortune recognized only once the character was fully formed. Readers of Every Summer After had watched Percy and Sam’s summers at the lake from a distance, and Alice let them step inside that world rather than observe it.
What I loved about Alice is that she was a stand-in for readers who were also reading ‘Every Summer After’, watching those characters have this magical, these magical summers from afar. [paraphrased from audio]
The title arrived last, after every other element of the book was in place. Fortune’s editor, Amanda Bergeron, found the answer not in the manuscript but in a Harry Styles song catalogue.
We really had a hard time coming up with a name for this novel. Of all the books, this was the hardest. She was just looking at song titles and lyrics, and she’s like, ‘something, something golden.’ I love the word golden. It’s so perfect for the book. That’s how One Golden Summer came to be. So, credit to Mr. Styles.
The personal thread
The lake as raw materialThe physical world of the book is not invented. The yellow speedboat that appears throughout One Golden Summer was assembled from two real boats Fortune knew growing up: one cousin’s retro yellow boat and another’s old green boat with a loud, old-fashioned horn.
I put those two together.
The oversized loon-shaped pool loungers that Alice and Charlie drift around on came from a prop Fortune bought for her own summer rental near Barry’s Bay. The scene was written after she had already floated on one herself.
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.
What she wants us to sit with
One shot at being hereFortune built Charlie at 35, the same age his father was when he died suddenly. That biographical fact shaped everything about how she wrote him, and she wanted readers to feel it as a philosophical position, not just a backstory detail.
I really wanted to go there with Charlie in this idea of how we live our lives, how we can be grateful for living...He is someone who really appreciates being here on this planet. It is not easy to live as a person on this planet, but we only get one shot at it. And I think that’s all part of who he is.
The connection between Alice and Charlie was designed to make a specific argument about what it means to really know someone. Fortune wanted both characters to arrive at each other whole, not as edited versions of themselves.
With both of them, they get to bring their whole self to the table. I think when you meet someone who you really connect with, whether it’s a romantic partner or a friend, that is special — you can be a friend to somebody when you can bring your whole self to that person, and that’s what they have.
Readers who arrive already angry at Charlie for something he did as a teenager in Every Summer After are the specific audience Fortune had in mind when she built his arc. She wanted the book to push back on the idea that a single mistake is a permanent verdict.
Percy and Charlie got a lot of slack for something they did as adolescents, and I hope that this book gives people a pause to think about why we make mistakes and how they affect us and how we aren’t defined by our mistakes.
Nan, Alice’s grandmother, carries the book’s quietest argument. Fortune had never written a grandmother-granddaughter relationship before, and she built Nan’s storyline to run parallel to Alice’s and Charlie’s rather than beneath them, because the novel’s central question about self-knowledge belongs to all three characters equally.
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.