‘Every Summer After’ author Carley Fortune heads back to the lake

Immersive summer reads are starting to make their way into people’s online carts, onto bookshelves and into suitcases. With just one big book under her belt — 2022’s “Every Summer After” — Toronto’s Carley Fortune became a name, landing firmly in the beach read genre.

While her books — she’s just out with her second one, “Meet Me at the Lake” — have love and romance at the core, they are much more than that. Dealing with issues including postpartum depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, and putting them in the context of an accessible book, makes the conversations themselves more accessible and provides a way to talk about uncomfortable things in a meaningful way, even while escaping into its pages. Deborah Dundas spoke with Carley Fortune from her home in Toronto.

In your personal essay at the back of the book you talk about books providing you with two different kinds of escape: “I wrote ‘Every Summer After’ partly as an escape from life in 2020, but I created Brooksbank resort to give myself a world to escape into.”

It was the summer of 2020, I had always wanted to write a book; creative writing is something I loved as a child. But as I grew up and went into journalism, it became this thing … (I) didn’t know if I would ever do. I was very stressed out with work, I had a young child, and I got off a frustrating phone call and said to myself, “I’m going to write my book.” And I’m going to do this for myself.

Did you have any idea what you were going to write?

I kept journals from the age of seven through until university, really. Most of them are from high school. And I sat down one of the first weekends of lockdown and read all the journals. I’d never done that before. And it really struck me how hard teenage emotions hit even 20 years later. in the pages were notes that my friends and I had passed in class, there were a few with tear stains on pages.

I knew I wanted to write a book that had a happy ending, that’s all I could tolerate in 2020. I wanted to write about how I grew up (in Barry’s Bay, Ont.), I wanted to write a love story, The book came from a deep place of nostalgia, really.

“Meet Me at the Lake” is set in a similar place to your first book. What attracted you back to that setting?

I became pregnant (with my second child) while writing the first book. (I had a two-book deal.) I had insomnia throughout my pregnancy that didn’t go away. At the same time I’ve got this new baby, we’ve moved houses. I was really not in a great place. Really anxious. When I wrote “Every Summer After” I felt like that’s what I was meant to do … writing fiction, and I had so many ideas. But after the (second) baby was born I was like, I’ve got nothing. So I was lying there in the middle of the night thinking “Where do I want to be?” As an author you get transported to the places that you’re writing about and I just (thought), “I want to be at the lake. At a classic lakeside resort with a main lodge and bit of a retro feeling.” And that was where I wanted to spend my time as a writer.

How did your anxiety work itself into the book?

My anxiety problems following the birth of my children, both children, and the second time around it was really strong: fear, anxiety spirals. The first time it was postpartum OCD and the second time it was mostly just debilitating anxious thinking. I was so worried about so many things and I just dreamed up Brookbank as this place where I could go when I wrote to kind of get away from the difficulty I was having.

Can you explain what postpartum OCD is?

So postpartum OCD is an anxiety disorder. It is not one we hear much about. I think that’s because the symptoms are very hard to talk about. It is very hard to track how prevalent it is because it is really under-reported. There’s some research that says three to five per cent of people; there was a study that followed 400 or so birth moms and 16 per cent had shown postpartum OCD symptoms. It presents as intrusive thoughts and images a lot of time in regards to harming the baby.

The book is structurally interesting, going back and forth from one day, 10 years previously — when Fern and Will met each other and formed an intense bond — to the present action, which unfolds over a longer period of time. Why did you choose that?

I love past and present, I like the timeline switch. It can be complicated, but I feel like I’m also cheating a little bit because it’s like writing two short books instead of one lengthy book. I feel I can move the action along with that structure.

It’s propulsive. It’s about important issues, but you don’t want it to be a drag to read.

I want it to feel like an escape. I want people to go on an emotional journey and feel like they really know the characters and feel like they’ve been transported somewhere exciting with them. I like stories that go all over the place with emotions, where I’m laughing, I’m crying, I’m angry, I’m frustrated with the characters, even within scenes. I love that in TV and I really strive for that.

You’re a journalist turned writer. How did your journalism skills transfer to writing fiction, do you think?

Mostly I was behind the scenes, editing. One of the things I knew as an editor and advice I often gave writers was: “Just write a draft, we’ll figure out how to make it better later.” And that was the kind of spirit I took to writing. I do not go back and self-edit. I try not to worry about my sentences, I’m just trying to get a first draft done. Also, trying to bring readers to a story was a passion of mine as an editor: how to make sure a story finds its audience and is talking to the people who really need to hear it. I really love that part of publishing and I really embrace it. No book is for everyone, but in my ideal world anyone (can) feel they can pick the book up and enjoy it. That’s something that comes from my media background.

What was the most useful thing you learned about writing in journalism school?

In one class we took an entire article and took out every single word that didn’t need to be there. That was my favourite exercise ever, the satisfaction of getting rid of what didn’t need to be there. I think that kind of attention to word choice and being concise and the importance of clarity. Those kind of core principles of journalistic writing are there in my book.

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