Romance on Canada Reads? Yes please, says panellist Mirian Njoh and author Carley Fortune
CBC Books | Posted: January 22, 2024 8:28 PM | Last Updated: January 22
The duo behind Meet Me at the Lake discuss the great Canadian book debate
Since 2002, Canada Reads has brought all kinds of books to Canada's reading list. But this year, a panellist and writer are changing the game by introducing a beloved genre that's never been on the show before — romance.
Fashion influencer Mirian Njoh is championing Carley Fortune's Meet Me at the Lake, a charming story where a first encounter, a magical day spent together in Toronto, doesn't live up to its initial promise. When the star-crossed couple gets a chance to finish what they started 10 years later, things get complicated — and it's these complications that shed light of all sorts into the human experience.
Njoh and Fortune met for the first time in studio on The Next Chapter, where they chatted with Ali Hassan about why romance should be recognized on a scale like this.
You wanted to be the first person to champion a romance book on Canada Reads. Why was it important to bring this genre into the spotlight?
Mirian Njoh: I was so excited to do it. I really am so honoured to get that possibility and that opportunity to introduce some genre that maybe people don't look at as much when they think about something that is such an honour and is such a platform like Canada Reads. And sometimes I feel like people's initial thoughts may be to only reserve certain types of maybe more highbrow literature like, 'Oh, it needs to be the autobiography of a dignitary.'
I wanted to say, 'Well, actually reading can be a lot of fun.' Reading for the everyday person doesn't have to be educational or aspirational. Sometimes it can be entertaining. It can actually teach us about ourselves and about people around us through reading these stories of people like us.
Carley, let me ask you about that too. How does it feel as a writer to have a romance book on Canada Reads?
Carley Fortune: I think it's wonderful. First of all, romance is the most read type of book. Romance is about people. It's about relationships. It's about learning to love ourselves and love others. It's about the challenges we have with our emotions and with our friendships and I think a good romance is about how we live and how we empathize with others.
Romance is about people. It's about relationships. It's about learning to love ourselves and love others. - Carley Fortune
It's important to me in my books to have this — there is a love story, always — but it's also about how we kind of survive as humans. So Meet Me at the Lake is a story about picking ourselves up after grief. It's a story about a mother and daughter relationship. It's a story of a female friendship that spans decades. And it also tackles stuff like mental health and that's all done under this romantic story. So you know that there's going to be a happy ending, but you're being taken on a very emotional journey. But ultimately, you as the reader know that you're going to end up smiling, that you're safe.
These are books that deal with themes like grief, parenthood and mental health, in the case of Meet Me at the Lake. So how do you strike that balance [between that and romance] in your writing?
CF: I don't think about that too hard, to be honest. I think that kind of comes naturally to me. I worked in journalism for 16 years as an editor and I think I used to see my career as an author and my career as a journalist as completely separate.
But the more time passes, I see how they've overlapped and the stories and issues I like to assign as an editor — so whether that's the struggles we have as new parents, whether that's mental health stories, whether that's stories about about friendship — more and more I see how they are reflected in my work as an author. For me, that is kind of natural.
Mirian, Canada Reads this year is looking for one book to carry us forward. That's going to be the theme when making the case for Meet Me at the Lake. Without getting into too much detail — because you'll have plenty of time to do that — what are some of the things you'll bring up?
MN: When we're looking for how to carry us forward, nobody knows the future and I think that that holds a lot of uncertainty. While we can't predict that and how we're going to move forward, the best way to be prepared for the future is to reorient ourselves in our past and in who we are presently. If we're looking for road maps on how to do that, this book is a beautiful way to show us who we are, who we want to be, where we come from, how we can join and meld all those things together so that when we do go forward into the future, we can confidently do that with certainty. That the decisions we made in the past will serve us and will be rooted in our identities.
This book is a beautiful way to show us who we are, who we want to be, where we come from, how we can join and meld all those things together. - Mirian Njoh
When we look at the characters and we look at their journeys, we see that everybody's life went in different ways than they maybe would have planned initially.
But when we see how they worked with what they had and how they rose to the occasion, how they displayed resilience and how they displayed tenacity and how a lot of times they display selflessness and sacrifice and responsibility, but still not forgetting what they love and their passions, making room for those things.
They display all the characteristics that we need within ourselves to help guide us to move forward.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.