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. I knew I wanted to write a book that had a happy ending, that’s all I could tolerate in 2020. in the pages were notes that my friends and I had passed in class, there were a few with tear stains on pages. And it really struck me how hard teenage emotions hit even 20 years later.

And I sat down one of the first weekends of lockdown and read all the journals. I kept journals from the age of seven through until university, really. 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.ĭid you have any idea what you were going to write? But as I grew up and went into journalism, it became this thing … (I) didn’t know if I would ever do. It was the summer of 2020, I had always wanted to write a book creative writing is something I loved as a child. 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.” Deborah Dundas spoke with Carley Fortune from her home in Toronto. Dealing with postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder, and putting it 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. 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. 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. Immersive summer reads are starting to make their way into people’s online carts, onto bookshelves and into suitcases.

Every summer after about