Carley Fortune didn’t even take a crack at writing fiction until a particularly frustrating work call in 2020.Jenna Marie Wakani/Penguin Random House Canada
The road to Carley Fortune’s second romance novel, Meet Me at the Lake, wasn’t easy. But last month, the book – like her first, Every Summer After – was met with instant acclaim. A love story about two strangers who find each other twice – a decade apart – when they need each other most, Meet Me at the Lake topped The New York Times’ Paperback Trade Fiction bestsellers list when it was released in May.
But it took months of battling self-doubt and negative self-talk to see the book released.
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“I was so worried about disappointing everyone and letting the team down,” she says. “Because Every Summer After had been so easy, it felt like it was a fluke. I wasn’t sure if I could do it again.”
Fortune didn’t start out writing fiction. In fact, she didn’t even take a crack at it until a particularly frustrating work call in 2020 – she was the executive editor at Refinery29 Canada at the time, after 15 years working as a journalist – gave her the push she needed to walk away and reclaim her lifelong dream.
She finished the 80,000 word manuscript for her first book before the end of that year and secured an agent soon after. She sold the book, set in her hometown of Barry’s Bay, Ont., in March, 2021. The editing process took just two short weeks from start to finish.
“It really was this very fast, very easy, joyful experience,” the 39 year old says. “In some ways it felt like magic.”
Published in the summer of 2022, Every Summer After was an instant international bestseller. The acclaim was the cherry on top of what was a thoroughly fulfilling experience for the author. But writing Meet Me at the Lake – the second novel in her two-book deal – was an entirely different beast. This time the process took a little more than a year, with much more intense editing than she’d experienced with her first book.
Fortune began working on her follow up just six weeks after giving birth to her second child in April, 2021, before her first novel had even been published. She was in the throes of postpartum anxiety, though it was nowhere near the postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder – an anxiety disorder marked by intrusive thoughts and images often related to harming the baby – she experienced after giving birth to her first son.
“When I had started having these thoughts and images, I thought I was experiencing postpartum psychosis,” she says of the period following his birth. “I was afraid to be alone with the baby – it was awful. I was afraid if I told anyone, I would be institutionalized.”
She eventually did tell her husband and later her doctor, leading to a diagnosis and enabling her to get the help she needed. Going into her second birth, Fortune was more prepared to “see the thoughts as just thoughts and send them on their way.” She didn’t experience the return of postpartum OCD the second time around, but she did face significant anxiety. She now sees how her mental state unwittingly seeped into her writing: Meet Me at the Lake explores themes related to how parenthood changes us in unexpected ways.
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“I had coffee with a friend of mine and we had this discussion about mental health that we had never had before,” she recounts. “It was very tearful and I told her what I had been going through with the kids. She said, ‘I wonder if this will ever come into your writing one day.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ But the more I thought about it, the more it kind of unlocked something in the book.”
Despite her choice to touch on heavier subjects, Fortune wants her books to feel like an escape.
While most of the story is set in cottage country, reflecting the lakeside setting where Fortune wrote both books, Meet Me at the Lake is also rooted in Toronto. During the book’s rigorous editing process, Fortune and her editors decided to set the portion of the book that takes place in the past in the city.
“I call Every Summer After a love letter to Barry’s Bay, and Meet Me at the Lake a love letter to Toronto,” says the author, who spent her 20s discovering Toronto.
The path to her new novel may have been bumpy, but Fortune’s efforts paid off, and then some. Days after it was published, her editors scheduled a Zoom meeting to discuss the release. When she joined, staring back at her was the NYT list with her book in the No. 1 spot.
“My children had just gotten home and I was sitting at my desk in the living room area, just gaping, and I was obviously so excited and then I started to cry,” she says. The particular struggles that accompanied the creation of this book, she says, made its subsequent successes all the more rewarding.
Fortune is currently working on her third novel, the details of which she can’t yet share, aside from promising another summer love story set in a gorgeous place. And while she still battles self-doubt every now and then, she has rediscovered what it is to truly enjoy writing. Meet Me at the Lake may have been a “heavy lift,” as she puts it, but this next book has her feeling much lighter.