All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
There is something oddly familiar about speaking on the phone with Emily Henry. With nearly 2.5 million copies of her books sold (and two of them currently being adapted for the big screen), Henry has nearly perfected the romance-novel framework—creating a frenzy of Reddit threads, fan-casting roulettes, and even tattoos dedicated to her dialogue. Readers know without a doubt that an Emily Henry novel will make them yearn, sweat, cry, question, and scream—as any good book should. They will also recognize her voice, as I heard it over the phone: warm, curious, and focused.
Yet with her sixth novel, Great Big Beautiful Life, out today, Henry pivots away from that formula a bit. Great Big Beautiful Life centers on Alice Scott, a writer chasing an award-winning story. Alice finds herself on the sleepy Little Crescent Island, hoping to interview mysterious heiress Margaret Ives. The problem? Margaret has also summoned Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Hayden Anderson to the island for a monthlong trial period; whichever aspiring writer wins Margaret’s favor gets to pen her biography.
Ahead of the release of her most ambitious book yet, Henry spoke to Vogue about the nature of memory and legacy, her favorite romance tropes, and how Hacks influenced her storytelling.
Vogue: Great Big Beautiful Life does a bit of genre bending, leaning into literary fiction in a way that might surprise loyal fans of your work. Was that a conscious shift as you were writing?
Emily Henry: I’ve been thinking of it as a sidestep because the story still has a central romance and a lot of love in general. It wasn’t entirely conscious. I had been writing such straightforward romantic comedies for long enough that I felt ready to try something different. And, really, this book was one of those rare projects that appeared almost fully formed in my brain—and usually that is not the experience for me. After I’d written the first draft, I even tried to find ways to pull it back closer to how my previous books were structured, and everything I tried just led me back to this same basic road map for this book. Eventually, I just had to accept this was the book that I wanted it to be, and luckily I feel like my readers have already been so generous and supportive and willing to follow me into slightly different places. I’m excited and nervous for them to go on this journey because, you’re right, it is a little bit different.
GBBL has multiple reveals and timeline jumps and stories within stories. Did you find anything particularly challenging about writing in that way?
The first draft didn’t feel tricky—every draft after that did. A huge part of that was just trying to balance these two stories. I know you’re not supposed to look at reviews, but sometimes I peek at the good ones, and it is interesting how people seem to feel like this book is weighed a little bit more heavily toward this historical component, the second storyline—but that’s actually not true, on a statistical level. The book is still primarily this romance story between Hayden and Alice. The contemporary storyline is the bulk of the book. And so trying to balance those two stories so that both felt full enough was really a challenge. It kind of felt, at times, like I had just written two complete books, and there was even a stage of my editing process where I tried to figure out if this was two different books. But it really wasn’t because the two stories actually are braided together quite tightly in a way that isn’t necessarily obvious until the book is finished.
You’ve used flashbacks as a narrative device in some of your other work too. How did you decide in this book when it was time to jump back in time?
Great question. When I use flashbacks, typically they’re not being written separately from the main storyline. I’ve had instances where I’ve written additional flashbacks later, when I realized there were things that the reader needed to know or emotional beats I wanted to slip in there. But in general I’m typically writing the A plot and the B plot or the present and the past simultaneously. And so the point at which I jump from one to the other is really about setting up the next section, and that’s one of the really interesting things about memory in general.
That was one of my questions! Because GBBL really deals with themes of time and memory.
That’s how we experience it. It’s like we are moving along through our daily lives and something happens that jogs something in us and it feels like this coda, almost, in real life.
The storylines echo each other.
The overarching thing that I was thinking about and writing about thematically was legacy, and what’s interesting to me about that is the fact that each of us comes from somewhere. We know, to an extent, where we come from, but there’s so much that we don’t know or can’t know, and only some bits make it to us. Even with the people who raise us, we don’t necessarily know everything that shaped them into who they were and how they raised us. What is so interesting to me about these larger-than-life stories of dynastic families that are in pop culture and that we follow is that we can literally watch those reverberations through history because their lives are so documented.
You see it in the book: There is a kind of bargaining of information when two people are learning from one another.
That is what intimacy is. As we get more comfortable and feel safer, we become more vulnerable and share more of ourselves. There are people who, for whatever reason, just draw that naturally out of us. With Alice and Margaret, for example, they’re somewhat comfortable sharing things, even though they’re relative strangers. But then there’s the foil to that with Alice’s relationship with her mother, where they love each other, they’ve known each other for quite a long time, but there’s so much unsaid between them and so much that Alice doesn’t know how to broach, even if she wanted to.
I want to talk more about Alice and her relationship with her mother, since it is a large part of the book. Why do you think Alice struggles to see her mother in a three-dimensional way?
I love that question. Before I set out to write this book, I knew I wanted to write something that focused on a mother-daughter relationship because I write a lot about father-daughter relationships. [A mother-daughter relationship] is one of the trickiest and most complicated relationships, even when you have a great relationship with your mother. And with a mother-daughter relationship, there is an easy trap to fall into, [where you] become or remain an extension of your mother in a way, where your mother’s hopes and dreams are on your shoulders. There’s more being put on you that wouldn’t necessarily be put onto a son. Alice is at this point where she’s starting to see her mother more clearly and to see the parts of her mother that are outside of the identity of mom. That’s a natural thought as you get older and your view of the world widens.
I want to pivot to talk about the men in the book. Without giving away too much, you were tasked with writing lyrics for a character named Cosmo. How did you find that process?
It’s daunting. The thing that I take comfort in was that lyrics of that time were generally simple. I’m sure these were revolutionary for the time on some level, but the sound had just as much to do with it, of course. So I kind of gave myself a pass to not worry too much about it. I remember having a conversation years ago with Taylor Jenkins Reid about Daisy Jones and The Six because I thought some of the lyrics she wrote were just jaw-droppingly good. I was so disappointed that this one line that I love didn’t make it into the adaptation, but she pointed out that for a lot of the lyrics, she had to write them from the point of view of specific characters. And so that was kind of the deal with Cosmo. I’m like, This is a man in the late ’50s, early ’60s. I have to do my best to become that character while writing it.
Hayden is an amazing male love interest. You obviously have a knack for writing men we all wish were real. What do Alice and Hayden see in each other?
Alice is drawn to Hayden because she, in general, likes people. That’s the start of it. She likes people and wants to understand people. And when someone is closed off or doesn’t react to that, it doesn’t discourage her the way it would most people. She is patient and gives people the benefit of the doubt, which is a really lovely quality to have and can be hard to sustain. She is just innately curious and understands that when someone doesn’t put their best foot forward, there’s probably a reason. Hayden is just her opposite. He is pretty guarded and private and has strong boundaries around his personal life. And so when somebody reacts to him the way that Alice reacts to him, I don’t think he trusts it. He is just inherently suspicious of someone with that much relentless positivity and optimism. It’s only really when that lasts for some time that he starts to believe that it’s not a shtick and that she’s not manipulating him in some way. The thing that held him back becomes the thing that draws him to her. But I also think they’re really well matched because she has that optimism that he needs and that belief that there is good in the world and that love is worth fighting for and all of those things that can sound so trite and cliché.
They’re also both writers! Writers, booksellers, and book people appear often in your work.
For sure. Because with writers and all book people, there’s this thing in common of extreme curiosity. It’s the work that I’m most familiar with. There are so many different ways to be a writer and work in books. And beyond that, it’s just something that, right off the bat, gives readers an in and a connection to a character.
In a world of sequels, prequels, and duologies, your books are stand-alones. Why is that?
To write a story that I enjoy writing and reading, there has to be conflict. And because I’m writing stories that are romances at their core, the actual emotional arc is this couple finding their way to each other or working through something. And once I’ve written them through something like that, I don’t really want to mess them up again. And realistically I know that all these characters will go on to have fights and periods where they’re just not connecting, but I don’t feel much of a need to write them through that. It hasn’t been that long since I’ve published most of these books, at this point. Beach Read came out five years ago, so maybe in 5 or 10 years I’ll feel differently and want to revisit characters, but at this point, I just don’t have a story I’m itching to tell about them.
I would love to dig into your favorite romance tropes. What do you gravitate toward? Single bed? Will they, won’t they?
I do love a single bed and a sick-bed scene. As far as broader tropes, like relationship dynamics, I love a good enemies to lovers. When it works for me, that’s like, chef’s kiss. And then in historical romance, I love a marriage of convenience. I know they exist in contemporary romance, but it just takes much more finagling to make that a convincing sell. With historical romance, I’m like, Yeah, of course you guys have this arrangement to get married and don’t care about each other.
What about second chances? I know you’ve written one before.
As a reader, it’s not the thing that I tend to pick up unless it’s coming from a writer whom I already know I love—and then it can become one of my favorite books. I loved Kennedy Ryan’s Before I Let Go: It was a divorced couple finding their way back to each other, and it was so beautiful. I’m obsessed with it. But if it hadn’t been a Kennedy Ryan novel, I’m not sure if I would’ve picked that up right off the bat. So I can be sold on anything.
Are you watching anything that’s inspired your writing? Or is TV your vegetation time?
That’s more vegetation time. I just watched Severance, and before that Silo, and those didn’t have a huge impact on my writing. I don’t think the Real Housewives have a huge impact on my writing, but I do enjoy watching it. But something that I do think has had an impact on me wanting to tell this story was Hacks. I love that there is this intergenerational friendship between these two women who mirror each other. And they’re at very different points in their lives, and there’s this enemies-to-lovers thing almost going on between them, this contentiousness but also camaraderie. It’s such a beautiful story of friendship, and that’s influenced this novel.
The last thing I’d like to ask—I spoke with Yulin Kuang, who adapted People We Meet on Vacation and who will be directing Beach Read. What are you most excited about in terms of seeing your book on the big screen?
I’m so excited for people to see Tom [Blyth] and Emily [Bader] as these characters because they have fundamentally shifted the characters in my mind in a really great way. They have so embodied them that there are now new levels to these characters than there were before. I keep getting a lot of questions about if a lot had to change and how I feel about that, and the truth is one of the things I’m most excited about with the People We Meet on Vacation adaptation is that there are some new scenes that are so wonderful and that for readers mean they get extra Alex and Poppy content that didn’t previously exist. It all works, but it’s new. And that’s just a really fun treat I didn’t expect to feel this excited about.
That’s really nice. You love your fans!
I do love them. That’s the main anxiety with the adaptations—I just want them to be happy. The book exists; that’s mine. I had total control over that. And the adaptation can’t be that, but as long as they love it, then it’s a success to me.
Do you want to do more movies in the future?
.jpg)