The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune "A radiant debut."—Emily Henry,#1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER! Named One of the Hottest Reads of Summer 2022 by Today ∙ Parade ∙ PopSugar ∙ USA Today ∙ SheReads ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ BookBub ∙ Bustle ∙and more! Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right. They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart. Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without. For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart. When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past. Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic story of love and the people and choices that mark us forever.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

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Today, another amazing author, all the way from Canada, like a long, long, clear one-way sign of the world there. Canada, you may have heard of it. It's the better half of the North America, as they like to call it. Or, I don't know, it's just true. What can I say? She's the author of the new book that came out May 10, 2022, Every Summer After, by Carly Fortune. She's on the show with us.

We'll be talking about her amazing new book. She is an author and award-winning journalist who has served as an editor at some of Canada's top publications. Her first novel, Every Summer After, is your next beach read. I'm going to take it to the beach next time I go. Or, you know, maybe I'll just read it. I don't need a beach. I'm in Utah.

I mean, it's a long way to the beach. The book is a nostalgic story of childhood crushes, first loves, and the people and choices that mark us forever. It's not like my story. She was most recently the executive editor of Refinery29 Canada, a job that gave her a lot of pride, joy, and a few migraines. Previously, she was the deputy editor of Chatelaine? Chatelaine. Chatelaine. Chatelaine.

Okay, I missed the E there in the middle. Chatelaine Magazine, where she oversaw the brand's digital transformation. After being promoted to editor-in-chief, she produced one whole issue, then left to launch Refinery29 Canada, making her the shortest-serving EIC in Chatelaine's 90 plus year history. A fact you will not find on its Wikipedia page. Welcome to the show, Carly. How are you? I'm well. Thank you for having me.

There you go. And I've learned a new word today, Chatelaine. Yes, Chatelaine. It is a magazine, but it is also the keys, the set of keys the woman of the house used to carry around back in turn-of-the-century times, the Chatelaine. Oh, wow. That's pretty amazing. This is why we do the show, so that I learn stuff. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the book. Give us your dot-coms, wherever places people want them to look you up and find you on the interwebs, please. Sure. So I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Carly Fortune and it's C-A-R-L-E-Y-F-O-R-T-U-N-E

and at CarlyFortune.com. Great. Now, what motivated you want to write this book? A bunch of things. I think primarily righteous indignation and nostalgia. I've always wanted to write a novel. Creative writing was my first love as a kid, but I had this idea in my head is that even as a young child, that being a writer was not a sustainable job. And so I went into journalism thinking that that was a better idea. And I worked as an editor for 16 years, newspapers, magazines around Canada. And in 2020, I was running Refire29 Canada. It was a very stressful job, a job I loved, but it had a lot of turmoil. And I was up at a cottage near where I grew up. I grew up on a lake in Berries Bay, Ontario, where the book is set. It's a small community, but I live in Toronto full time.

So I had been back there for the summer. My family was squatting at a cottage. The owner is an American, couldn't cross the border during the pandemic, so he stayed at his place. So I was feeling, yeah, it, just incredible. Thank you, Bob. So, you know, on the one hand, I was at this cottage on the lake, feeling very nostalgic for the summers of my youth, which were spent on the lake in a damp bathing suit on the dock reading, but also working a very stressful job. And one day I got off the phone after a horrible call and I said, that's it. I'm writing my book. And I didn't know what that book was going to be, but it just felt like something I needed to do, especially in 2020, when I think a lot of us were

thinking about what really matters and how we want to spend our time. And I decided at that moment, I was going to write a book by the end of the year. I calculated how many words I need to write every day in order to get an 80,000 word manuscript. And it was 388 words. And I thought, I can do that. No problem. So I would, I would get up every morning before my family was awake and before work and plug away at it. And I finished the manuscript before the end of the year. That's amazing. We had so many books that got written over the coronavirus thing. It was kind of a good time for books, technically, I guess. Yeah, I think, I mean, it was such a hard time for people. And I know some people weren't able to produce at all during the pandemic. Some writers found it was a very difficult time to write and other creative individuals just didn't have it.

And for me, I found it was my way to escape everything that was going on around me. And it felt like I was being really selfish and I was taking back my creativity and taking back my time as a parent. And I became pregnant too. So I was thinking about having a second kid and it felt like I needed to do this for myself. And it gave me so much joy. And it felt like as I was writing that that's what I was meant to be doing. And I didn't, while I started,

I didn't intend for it to become a book. I didn't really know very much about publishing, but it's kind of felt like this magical meant to be thing. I still kind of can't believe that there is a real book now and it's a bestselling book. And I'm like, what? That's awesome. That's awesome. So give us an overview of the book and what's inside. Yeah. So the book is, I would say a sweeping love story. It's about Percy and Sam who meet as teenagers when Percy's family buys the cottage next door to Sam's house on a lake in Barry's Bay. And the book is told like in alternating now and then timelines.

So in the present day as 30 year olds, they haven't spoken for more than 10 years, but we see them kind of, we see them go back and forth. So over six summers in the past where they meet and become best friends and fall in love. And then over a weekend in the present day when Percy gets this call that has her rushing back to Barry's Bay, it's a very tumultuous weekend and reuniting with Sam. And the whole time you're trying to figure out what happened to cause these best friends and people, kind of soulmates, to split apart and whether they can find their way back to each other in the end.

Oh, wow. I mean, I think this is probably maybe a story that resonates with a lot of people. Their first falling in love and always reminding of that. Yeah, I think there's something about, you know, I read my teenage journals in March of 2020. I hadn't read them before. I kept journals from the age of seven and through my university years. And it was kind of one of those first weekends in lockdown. And I went into my closet and I took out the two shoe boxes and there were 13 journals in there.

And I went through and read them all. And it was astonishing to me how those feelings of, you know, crushes and friendship dramas and all of that felt so raw. Like there were letters that we had passed in class between friends. There was a letter a friend sent me, six pages breaking up with me. There was a note that I wrote to my crush telling him I liked him that I never sent. And I think that it just felt so raw. Like, I think there's something about adolescent relationships that kind of stick to your ribs. They definitely. And it's your first, you know, it's your first loves.

I mean, it's, you know, after you've had like 500 of them, it's not the same, you know, it's just kind of, I don't know. I'm just doing jokes. I don't know. Well, it's mostly me having crushes. I think, I don't know what that means, but you know, I mean, it's, it's because, yeah, it's the new, it's the new freshness of it. You know, it's, it's, I think that's an impact. Plus there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, you're figuring everything out and all that stuff.

Yeah. Hormones. I remember hormones. It's been a while. But so what were some of the, how much is this in this book? Is there a lot of you that you put in this book? Do you see yourself as the character maybe in the book when you were? So I don't, there are, there's pieces of me throughout the book when you were so i don't there are there's pieces of me throughout the book i think you know i think it's especially true with debut novels where they really and this book i wrote it

over four months it really poured out of me and so i think every character has a little bit of me or my experiences in them but it's definitely not my story but what really is i think true to my childhood is the setting of barry Bay where I grew up. And I really wanted to kind of honor that place. It's a very small town of 1200 people. It's a working class town. And it's very sleepy until the summertime when it becomes kind of full of cottagers and tourists from all over the world coming to Algonquin Park, which is this beautiful provincial park in the area. And it's unknown even in Ontario, even in the province here. Most people from Toronto haven't heard of Barry's Bay.

And I also grew Sam, the character of Sam, he lives in the town and his family runs a restaurant. I grew up with a family who ran a restaurant. I grew up with a family who ran a restaurant. So a lot of that is pulled from my life and that kind of experience of wanting to escape your small town and working really hard to make something of yourself so you can build up for yourself, but then appreciating it more as an adult. That's kind of all like in the book. But I like to say that their teenage experience in the book has 99% more kissing than mine ever did. Well, I mean, that's the beautiful part about books. You can kind of enjoy, you know, the fantasy and thrill of it.

It only came out on May 10th. It's already got like 600 stars here on American Amazon. I don't know if it's different on Canada Amazon. Yeah, it was an instant international bestseller. So it debuted on the USA Today bestseller list as well as bestseller lists in Canada. So it has really, it's been wild. It's hard for a debut novel. It's hard for any book to stand out right now.

There is so much out there and there's so much wonderful stuff out there. And especially, I think, for debut authors with so many readers turning to backlist titles or older titles over the last couple of years, it's especially hard if you're kind of an unknown author. So it's been really wonderful to see. And it's been wild to over the past couple of weeks since it's come out, see the conversation shift on social media from, oh, yeah, I've heard of that book. I'm kind of interested in that book to that book is next on my to read list or I can't wait to read that book to is this book worth the hype? And Bookstagram made me buy this book. And it's just like, what is even happening? It's so and it's so wonderful. That is awesome.

Instant USA Today bestseller, named one of the hottest reads of summer 2022 by Today Parade, PopSugar USA Today. She reads BuzzFeed and BookBub and Bustle and more. Yeah, like, I think there's like 300,000, I think, I read books that are issued every month. Oh, gosh. That gives me goosebumps. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

It's so crazy. Yeah. It's really, it is weird. I wrote my first book in October. And it's weird because the writing, and I like how you broke it down where you're like, you just take small bites of the elephant and eventually you wake up and there's that book there. And I had like a writing, was it a uh, a thing with a group of us. We're all saying, yeah, write one hour a day. And that was our goal. And we all had like a accountability group. It was a peer pressure. And so I like how you did that. And then you just wake up one day

and you're like, Holy crap, there's a darn book there. I, I, I burned it out and sweated it out. And there it is. The other thing that worked for me, at least then is I didn't have to decide every day, whether I was going to do it or not. And maybe this was the same with your hour. It's like, no, I do do it. I like, no matter how I'm feeling, I just sit down and do it. You made it right. You made the right stuff. You're like, I don't know about that, but I don't know. It all kind of shapes up in the end. And so I'm glad you got through it and hit this huge success. Any movie stars that you were thinking of when you're writing the book?

Maybe if it ever ends up in theaters? I was not thinking of any movie stars. I mean, I would love to see it end up in theaters. Of course. I think every author feels that way. I don't have a clear sense of how my character, like I describe my characters, I can't like attach in my mind a particular actor or person to the character. So I think, you know, it's more with casting. It's kind of more about debate,

not about looks so much as like sensibility and vibe. It's all about vibes. The vibes. Cool. Anything more you want to touch on or tease out about the book that readers should maybe know about? Is there any, do you have any maybe stories you want to throw out that are teaser stories about read the books, just find out what happened? would be like a romance women's fiction book. But I've had some amazing response from men reading the book. I had somebody write to me and say, you know, I bought this book for my wife, but then I

just sat down to look at a couple pages and ended up reading the entire book in three sittings. And some readers who don't typically read love stories who have really responded to it and are like interested now more in books like this. And I think there's just so many great stories happening right now in this space and books, really, really smart books about what it means to have a relationship with another person and a relationship with yourself. And I think in music, love songs are, you know, the stuff of music legend. And in books, we still, I think many people are kind of like, yeah, romantic stories, relationship stories, not for me. But I just encourage people to maybe like challenge yourself there.

I think there's some really smart, creative stuff happening in the space. Yeah. And we're all looking for a little bit of a getaway when you see the news going on. Absolutely. Wars and everything else. We need something. We all need it. Yeah. We all need definitely need to get to the beach and read your beach book. So give me your plugs. Say you're dot com so we can find you on the interwebs. Yeah. So I'm at Carly Fortune on Twitter and Instagram and at Carly Fortune dot com. Carly. And thank you very much for Carly coming on. It's been wonderful to have you and fun.

Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thanks, Monis, for tuning in. Go order the book wherever fine bookstores are sold. But remember, stay in those alleyway bookstores. You might get, you know, you need a tetanus shot if you go in there. They got broken glass all over. Every summer after May 10th, 2022 came out, Carlyly fortune ordered the book up today share with your

friends neighbors relatives all that good stuff and also share with your friends and relatives the youtube.com for just chris voss uh goodreads.com for test chris voss all our groups on facebook linkedin twitter and instagram wherever those crazy kids are playing these days thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time