In Meant to be Together, Fortin, a renowned historian and author of How the Ideals of America’s Founders Lead Us to Purposeful Living, crafts a beautiful dual memoir with his wife of almost sixty years. While it may in some ways be an ordinary account of two people falling in love, Roger and Janet’s journey comes with unique twists and turns. Both grew up in Maine, but he came from a French-speaking neighborhood in Lewiston, while she was raised in an upper- middle class family in Kennebunk. And yet, the two managed to find one another in pure happenstance, marry soon after, and raise eight children together in Cincinnati.
 
Their story explores what it means to love through tragedy, heartbreak, laugh- ter, and the ever-shifting sands of time. “Today, memories are part of our life,” Roger writes, “connecting who we were becoming at different times in the past to who we are continuing to become.”