“I started sobbing during the first scene”: Author Carley Fortune on watching the TV adaptation of her book

In the past five years, author Carley Fortune (who happens to be a former Toronto Life editor) has become the high priestess of the wistful Canadian summer romance novel. Since leaving journalism to write fiction full time in 2020, she’s published five gently steamy novels, all of which have become number-one New York Times bestsellers. Now, her romance empire has found its way to the screen. This week, Prime Video released Every Year After, an eight-episode adaptation of Fortune’s debut novel, Every Summer After. The series follows Persephone “Percy” Fraser, who heads home to Barry’s Bay for a memorial service that forces her to confront Sam Florek—her childhood best friend, her first love and the one who got away. After only two days, the series has already topped the streamer’s TV charts in Canada and the US. We caught up with Fortune to talk about watching her words come to life, why readers are so taken with Canadiana and how she’s managing the non-stop demands on her time.

Does it feel different sharing this story with a potentially even broader audience than the one that reads your novels? When your book goes out into the world, it’s your creation. It’s something you’ve spent a year working on and thinking about, and then you hand it over to the reader. With a show, it’s not exclusively my baby, so I don’t have the same nerves I have with my books. I watched the first episode from my hotel room in Vancouver. The showrunner, Amy B. Harris, was nervous about what I’d think, but I started sobbing during the first scene. Even though I had read the script and knew what it would be, it was very emotional for me. The series is a great adaptation—and I love the new storylines that help open it up for multiple seasons. I can watch it from the perspective of both an author and a fan.

Related: How Carley Fortune is reinventing the romance novel

You have two more TV adaptations in the works—including one from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s production company—plus your latest book, Our Perfect Storm, just came out. What’s your secret to working at a breakneck pace? My journalism training taught me how to work on a deadline. I love to work, and I’m a hard worker. The trick now, with the adaptations going into reshooting this summer, is finding even more time. With every book cycle, the demands on my time get bigger and bigger. I hired my best friend to come work with me a year and a half ago, and that was so necessary. My team has grown, but it’s hard to find a day to just concentrate on writing. So my next challenge is making sure that I don’t burn out the way I did as a journalist.

What’s the plan for avoiding burnout? You have to build time off into the calendar far in advance. Having a book come out a month before a show is wild—it’s like two full months of promotion. So we’re taking a family vacation, and I’m going to get myself to the lake. But I honestly don’t have a long-term solution yet. I want this moment to sink in because it’s so special—yet I also have to think about what I want my life to look like in the future.

The lake sounds like the perfect place for you. Speaking of which, has the real-life setting of Barry’s Bay changed since Every Summer After came out? Is it still as dreamy? There are certainly people who still make the trek to Barry’s Bay from the US and all over. They go to the tavern and have the pierogies. It’s changed since I grew up, but it’s still very much a working-class town that’s quiet in the off season and full of cottagers in the summer.

Your stories tend to rate about two or three chilis on the romance scale, with an emphasis more on yearning than on explicit sex scenes. How come? If I’m going to write a sex scene, it has to move the story emotionally. They’re not sexual awakening stories, necessarily. Sex is a part of these characters’ relationships, but it’s more about their emotional journeys.

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I’ve read that you’re a voracious romance reader, finishing close to 100 books in one year. Are your numbers still that high? God no. When I discovered contemporary romance, I really needed an escape from the professional stresses of my job in journalism. I loved how smart the books were, and it felt like discovering that there was a section of the bookstore I didn’t know existed. My idea of romance was what my grandma read. She had old-fashioned books with amazing clinch covers, and she’d say, “I just read them for the stories.” Now, I still try to read as much as I can, but my romance reading is primarily to write blurbs to support debut authors.

You mentioned that you like giving friendships more emphasis in your novels. Why is that important to you? My books are romances because they have a central love story and a happy ending, but I don’t look at my book and necessarily consider how it fits into a genre. I write stories that I want to read, and I want to read about women’s lives. Our lives are about so many things. Female relationships are interesting to me. Our Perfect Storm is very much about a mother-daughter relationship. It’s also an environmental storyline. I try to focus on what stories I want to tell.

In the wake of Heated Rivalry, it seems like everything Canadian is on the rise. Any theories on why that is? It’s the settings. The experience of a fleeting Canadian summer is really magical. One of my readers put it best: Every Summer After makes you nostalgic for a summer you may never have had. Following the pandemic, we’re still craving connection. So many of us want to have moments with people where we feel emotional and connected. That feels precious and necessary.

With multiple screen adaptation deals and non-stop bestselling books, you’ve surely taken a pay bump since your days as an editor. Has your lifestyle changed at all? Have you bought a Sicilian villa yet? I bought a cottage last fall on a lake where I’ve cottaged with my husband and kids since my oldest son was born. That was incredible. We also have a small 1950s bungalow, and thankfully renovating that was not as scary as it could have been. But we’re still two parents with two school-aged kids trying to figure it out day to day.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.