Our Perfect Storm
Our Perfect Storm
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Carley Fortune on Our Perfect Storm
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A backyard rabbit and a VHS she turned offFortune had held Tofino in reserve for years, certain it deserved a story whose emotional scale matched the place. She had visited twice during the year she spent on Vancouver Island after graduating university, and the setting never left her.
It started with the setting, Tofino. I lived on Vancouver Island for a year after I graduated from university and visited Tofino twice while I lived there and it is just like nowhere else, honestly. It’s so otherworldly.
The characters who would eventually fill that setting arrived not from an outline but from a specific afternoon in her Toronto backyard, years before she had a plot to put them in.
I watched my kids chasing this rabbit one day across the grass, and it dove under the hedge, and I had this vision of two children meeting this way, this girl who chases a rabbit, and she finds a pair of blue eyes on the other side of the hedge. And I was like, who are these children? [paraphrased from audio]
She thought about those two children for years, in different configurations, before they became Frankie and George.
Once she had the characters, she needed the emotional logic that would make their dynamic feel inevitable rather than convenient. She found it in a film she had been rewinding since childhood, sometimes literally stopping the tape to avoid an ending she refused to accept.
What really unlocked figuring them out was thinking about Jo and Laurie. I hated it when Jo and Laurie didn’t get together in that movie. I hated it so much, and thinking about how the idea of them not working was because they were too fiery — they would kill each other. I was like, ‘Well, what happens if two people who are really fiery best friends, who are really fiery, end up together?’
How she wrote it
Spatial maps, Mary Oliver, and a Montreal bookshopFortune returned to Tofino twice while writing the book, because she held herself to the standard that the story had to earn its setting. She also designed the resort at the novel’s center as a composite of several real properties, so she could control its geography precisely.
The story had to be just as dramatic as the setting. And so I went back twice more as I was writing to research. [paraphrased from audio]
Because she cannot picture her characters’ faces clearly, she compensates by mapping physical space in detail. The resort in Our Perfect Storm got its own drawn floor plan before she wrote a scene set there.
Sometimes, I will draw out properties — like I drew out the resort property for Our Perfect Storm — because I just really need to situate people in a physical space, but their faces are just… a blur.
George’s occupation as a journalist who covered the 2023 Canadian wildfires was not planned from the start. The detail that gave him his full identity arrived by accident, in a Montreal bookshop, when Fortune spotted a title on a shelf.
I was in a bookstore in Montreal and came across a book called The Summer Canada Burned by Monica Zurowski. As soon as I saw it, everything about George started to come together. My books are so much about nature, and the fires are something I’m always thinking about now. I come up to the lake in Ontario, and for the past few summers, the sky has been different than it used to be. I didn’t want to ignore that.
Frankie and George are lifelong best friends, which created a specific craft problem: the physical ease of long friendship is exactly what kills romantic tension. Fortune had to engineer restraint into their bodies to keep the story from slipping into platonic warmth.
The trick with them — and it being a romance and not just a platonic story of friends — is that I wanted to make sure they weren’t physically buddy-buddy. They’re not hugging all the time. They’re not touching all the time. There’s tension there. So when there’s a brush of an arm or a hug, it feels loaded.
Getting into the right mental state each morning was its own problem. With two young children leaving the house in chaos, she was arriving at her desk rattled, not ready. Walking and meditating hadn’t helped. What finally worked was a gift from her husband: Mary Oliver’s Devotions, a collected volume of poems.
I would read a poem every day before I’d start writing... my husband bought me for Christmas a collection of Mary Oliver’s poems called Devotions... I would just pick a poem at random every day and read that before I started work and it really, really helped. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Eight-year-old Frankie, written firstFortune wrote the prologue, set when Frankie is eight years old and meets George for the first time, before any other section of the book. The sequence wasn’t a warm-up exercise: it became the document she returned to whenever she needed to remember who adult Frankie was.
Being in 8-year-old Frankie’s head — and it was the first thing I wrote — I had such an understanding of who she was. I was like, ‘I know her. I know her now.’ And then getting to revisit them at different ages, you get such a great understanding of the characters, and I love that. I love history between people.
The prologue also set the tonal target for the rest of the novel, which she knew she wanted darker and more atmospheric than her previous work. Hitting that target on the page, after carrying it in her head, was the central challenge of the draft.
The prologue told from 8-year-old Frankie’s POV felt like something special; it taught me so much about adult Frankie. I wanted the story to have a different tone, and the challenge was trying to bring what was in my mind onto the page.
What she wants us to sit with
Empathy for someone else’s version of the same storyBefore any argument the book wants to make, Fortune names a physical standard she holds herself to: the reader should feel Tofino in their body and feel the characters’ emotional stakes as something chest-level and involuntary.
I want to give you a really good reading experience — to feel everything... So if you feel like you’re in Tofino and really with George and Frankie, that’s number one. And then number two is having a visceral experience — like the book physically provokes something in you, whether that’s tears or laughter or tightness in your chest. I really want that.
Underneath the romance and the Tofino setting, the book is doing something quieter: examining how thoroughly we misread the inner lives of the people we think we know best. Fortune has said this is the idea she considers the book’s actual subject.
We all create stories about the people in our lives — we make up narratives about them — and that’s not necessarily how they see things. I think it’s about allowing space for someone else to have their own experience and accepting that their experience isn’t necessarily what you think it is. I guess… it’s about empathy, really.