When Carly Fortune and I met for lunch on Queen Street West in Toronto, the new Prime series Every Year After, based on Fortune’s life-changing first novel Every Summer After, had been streaming for just 32 hours. But many viewers have already watched all eight episodes, and one viewer took the time to post a book-to-script, line-by-line comparison on Instagram of a key sequence that Fortune magazine calls the “coming back” scene.
In it, Persephone, aka Percy (Sadie Soveall), returns to idyllic Bally’s Bay for the first time in 10 years after a heartbreaking breakup with her childhood soulmate and teenage love, Sam (Matt Cornett). Page-to-screen alignment cue: 28-year-old Percy walks to Sam’s family-run tavern after hours. Sam used to work there happily. She peers through the diamond-shaped window in the hinged kitchen door. Sam is standing at the commercial sink with his back to her, washing dishes. Percy comes in with a heart in his mouth. She whispers his name. he freezes. Then he turns to her. “You’re home,” he says. Go ahead and quell your chills.
Fortune knows this moment is a fan favorite. When she read the scene for the first time at a 2022 event, she felt it and the audience gasped. She realizes that this is a “very simple sentence” and that she needs to land it correctly. She was impressed that someone took such great care.
“Every Year After” stars Sadie Sauveall as Percy Fraser and Matt Cornett as Sam Florek.Kate Cameron/Amazon Prime
But she’s not surprised by that kind of dedication, no more. Carly Fortune is a genuine Canadian-born international force with an unashamedly devoted readership, over 4 million books sold in 35 languages, and a net worth of $3 million to $5 million. Her latest novel, Our Perfect Storm (her fifth in recent years), shot to number one on the Canadian and New York Times bestseller lists on May 5th. The cover, which was released last August, deserved a full run on Good Morning America, and film rights are currently being negotiated.
Similarly, a 10-episode Netflix adaptation of her third novel, This Summer Will Be Different, is currently filming on Prince Edward Island with $5 million in funding from the PEI government. Her second novel, Meet Me at the Lake, is in development for Netflix through Archewell, the production company owned by Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. When Prime selected “Every Summer After” (and its de facto sequel, “One Golden Summer”), they tweaked the title with the hope that the series would run for several seasons. Oh, and right before Fortune embarked on this two-month long promotional campaign for the book/series, she completed the first draft of novel #6.
Fortune, 42 and married with two sons, ages 5 and 9, looks like the heroine of a novel, with her shiny black hair and big smile. She wears denim overalls and a white eyelet blouse with ruffled sleeves – she loves fancy sleeves – and her meal, pre-ordered by her public relations team to save time, is a rustic slab of chicken schnitzel and a Diet Coke.
Back in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic inspired her to try writing a novel, Fortune could never have imagined that Every Summer After would ever be published. But she no longer hesitates. She played a key role in the development of Every Year After, which needed to be set in Canada, for example, and visited the B.C. set twice to get approval for casting the lead. When she watched the final cut of episode 1 in her hotel room, she burst into tears with pride. Most importantly, she’s finished caring for the haters who rave about genre stories about orcs, spies, and murderers, but look down on books about young women’s lives.
“I’ve still been through a lot of layoffs, and I’m tired of it,” Fortune said. She has no trouble giving examples. An April article in the newspaper’s Report on Business magazine dismissed her and her fellow writers as “business-savvy scumbags.” Recently, the organizer of a fundraising committee she volunteered with asked a group of people on Zoom, “Do you Google pictures of fishermen’s biceps?” Last week, she went to a dinner party where a male guest hilariously declared, “My wife is an avid reader of your books. I always tell her, if she had spent all her time reading other books, she would know a lot by now.”
Oops. Let’s clarify this part. Yes, Fortune writes graphic sex scenes. Her main characters are thoughtful, lively girls who do not realize how beautiful they are. Her male lead is hot, with a sharp jawline and flecks of gold in his irises. Their hair is curled seductively into the collar of their shirt or spilled whimsically over their foreheads. Their forearms are strong, their abs are so cut that they cast shadows, beads of sweat drip deliciously from between their collarbones, and their voices are hoarse with desire. They know how to tuck a woman’s hair behind her ear and how to hold a woman’s face with both hands when kissing. In a passionate declaration, they use her full name – “I love you, Persephone Fraser!” and they know what they’re doing in the bag, generously, enthusiastically, and consensually.
But the sex in Fortune’s books is “only part of the story,” she says. “You can read a hotter book than what I wrote. I want the scenes to be descriptive, but not a game of Twister, left hand here, right hand there. There’s clear consent. There’s nothing toxic about sex, and the words aren’t unpleasant to the ear. I’m trying to let go of my inhibitions, but I’m not lighting a candle and listening to Barry Manilow.”In fact, she tends to type in “sex scene here” in early drafts and then fill in later, which can leave her writhing in tweaks with her editor.
Every Year After stars Joseph Chiu as Geordie and Aurora Perrineau as Chantal.Justin Yong/Amazon Prime
Of course, male authors like John Updike, Philip Roth, and Martin Amis famously wrote sex scenes without being labeled as business-savvy sleazy merchants. “But my book is centered around women’s pleasure, from a woman’s perspective,” Fortune says. “That’s easy to break.”
For me, Fortune shines in the way it creates a wide range of emotions that are essential to sex, but go beyond it: it’s also aspirational. Carly Fortune understands aspiration. In addition to how her characters miss each other, reading her books makes you want to be where they are. PEI oysters, cycling, and sea breeze. A moody drama where rainforest and ocean collide in Tofino, British Columbia. The dappled morning light reflecting off the water makes me wish it was my bedroom ceiling. That you were the one who spent all day in a swimsuit that never dried completely. Smell the coming storm and taste sublime tomato slices sprinkled with flaky salt.
“Aspirations are nerves,” says Fortune. “Don’t give the characters what they want. More importantly, don’t give in to the reader’s desire for these two to get together. Find the points that bring them closer or pull them apart to create a sense that it’s inevitable but not easy. That’s the job of the characters, not the sex scenes. It’s about creating believable characters.”
She doesn’t like stories where the obstacles are external, like a bad boss or a missed flight. Her stake is an emotional one. For example, in both Every Year After and Our Perfect Storm, the lovers begin as best friends and are hesitant to admit that they want their relationship to be more than that. “That’s a huge emotional risk,” Fortune says. “If things don’t work out, losing your best friend is much worse than losing your boyfriend.”
It is another important yearning that appears in Fortune’s book. It’s a young woman’s yearning for a bigger life, a life that suits her: the right home, the right job, the right friends. It pains me that our current culture diminishes it, as if men aren’t interested in love, as if men don’t crave love. That contempt solidified and gave birth to the manosphere.
“I think a lot of people are feeling very lonely and disconnected, and the manosphere is one of the ways that that can come out,” Fortune agrees. “Books like mine and Rachel Reid’s” — she also mentions Tia Williams, Annabelle Monaghan, Emily Henry and Rainbow Rowell — “are important because people are looking for authentic emotion. Young people are I especially want to connect, but I don’t know how to do it in person. If a woman were to say to her boyfriend, husband, or male friend, ‘Watch Every Year After with me,’ I think they would be happy. But I’m not here to change their minds.”
Before writing novels, Fortune worked in media at companies such as the Globe and Mail and Chatelaine and Refinery.29 She witnessed how stories written and consumed by women were treated as “less than.” She still writes consistently during her day job, sitting when the kids are at school and working until they get home, with a fact-checker’s eye for detail.
“When I’m writing, I can’t see the words; my face is just blurry,” she says. “But I can visualize a setting, I can draw a room, I can tell you where the refrigerator is in the kitchen, and I’ll be there many times to make things right.” She had Islanders read her PEI novels to make sure the way locals referred to water was correct. “We’ve set them in these surreal locations so you feel like you’re peering into real people. It allows you to express emotions in a big way.”
Let her grow up. The characters in “Fortune” love each other fiercely, intensely, and fiercely. Their hearts race and their breathing stops. They are wiped out, consumed, and committed to the end of time. “But I hope it’s a big success without being completely stale,” she says. “I try to express the feeling I get when I meet someone I’m crazy about. I don’t usually consider myself a romantic person, but I’m sure I am. I can touch my teenage self: the person I crush so hard on, and the person I crush so hard on.”
Michael Bradway (Charlie Florek) shares scenes with Percy, played by Sadie Soveol. Fortune played a key role in the development of Every Year After, including approving the casting of the lead actors.Kate Cameron/Amazon Prime
What did Fortune want? “What didn’t I aspire to?” she replies with a laugh. “I lived on a dirt road in Barry’s Bay, Ontario. I went to a 200-student school. I didn’t have any friends for a long time. I spent my breaks writing scary stories by myself. By the time I was 13, I put this on paper. I had crushes on 20 boys.”
She watched grainy VHS tapes of Megan Follows’ Anne of Green Gables, Colin Firth’s Pride and Prejudice, and especially Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women over and over again. (The plot of “Our Perfect Storm” can be summed up as “What if Jo had chosen Laurie?”) Fortune’s early diary entries, which inspired her to write “Every Summer After,” are full of desperation for someone to meet her, to have her. After that, she aspired to “go to the city and be successful and make something for yourself.”
She met her husband, Marco, in a magazine class at Toronto Metropolitan University. “He was a beautiful writer, and I loved that,” Fortune says. “He loved music and was a drummer. One day we were having dinner with a group of friends and he was talking about his Sunday lunch with his Nonna, his Nonna’s lasagna. I thought, ‘Oh, I want that. I want Marco and his Nonna and that lasagna.'” The couple recently bought a cottage on a lake near Barry’s Bay, near her parents. Her sons will grow up doing some of the things she did, like eating pierogi at Wilno Tavern and driving to Bent Anchor on the river.
Fortune flatly dismissed accusations that her novels set unrealistic expectations about sex and love. “‘Unrealistic expectations’ is something men worry about,” she says. “I’m not interested in writing about perfect people. My characters are messed up. What they want is what a bar should be: someone who sees you, listens to you, appreciates you for who you are, and feels comfortable enough to let you see yourself. I think we should have high expectations of our partners. What’s so wrong with that?”
Fortune’s wish has come true, but she is still on the path to success. “I’m proud of myself,” she admits. “It took me a while to accept that this was real, that it wasn’t going to explode, that I could write a book.” Once the press rush is over, she and Marco plan to take their children to France, where “we’re going to sit and take it all in. We know what happened is incredible, and we want to feel it and appreciate it.”
Being Carly Fortune, she is also going to think about what should happen next. “Where do I want my life to go from here? How do I approach my next six books?” One thing she already knows: That means I’ll be going to the lake as soon as I get back from France. Go home.
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