Early on in This Summer Will Be Different, Fortune establishes Lucy’s strained relationship with her family. Through Lucy’s journey to find love and belonging, Fortune posits that blood relationships do not necessarily define family. Lucy ultimately finds a place where she belongs outside her biological family, creating a “found family” comprised of her friends and partner.

Lucy is a creative and design-oriented person in a family of “practical, stern” people. Her mother is a dentist, and her father is a mortgage broker. As a child, her parents devoted most of their time to her older brother, Lyle, a budding hockey star who was “promising enough to capture their attention” (48). Lucy is not close with Lyle, whom she loves but finds “a little boring” (109). What little attention was given to Lucy was stifling; her parents discouraged her from seeking independence, even paying her to put off getting her license under the guise of protecting her. They continue to micro-manage her into adulthood. At the start of the novel, Lucy has recently quit her job at a public relations firm, much to her parents’ disappointment. It is implied that they pushed her into the job, wanting her to follow a conventional path to financial stability.