Emily Henry is leading a legion of new romantics as she dives into what makes a love worth fighting for.
Emily Henry writes a love worth fighting for.
The renowned contemporary romance author, credited by some for dusting the cobwebs (and stigma) off the so-called chick-lit genre, says conflict is the key to a well-written love story.
“I think the people you find that incredible intimacy with, closeness with, are the people who you can be vulnerable enough with to have those hard conversations,” Henry tells USA TODAY ahead of the release of her newest book, “Great Big Beautiful Life” ($29, out now from Berkley).
“Conflict is such a huge part of building intimacy with someone,” she adds. “If you’re not willing to have that, then you’re shutting the relationship down before it can go to the next level.”
Perhaps that’s why characters in a Henry novel fight, sometimes bitterly, before coming back together. Her latest novel is no different. It features two warring journalists − Alice and Hayden − vying for the chance to write the biggest celebrity memoir of the century. It’s a take on the popular enemies-to-lovers trope, a favorite of Henry’s.
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The sixth standalone novel in Henry’s brightly colored collection of romance books, “Great Big Beautiful Life” hammers home Henry’s point that discord can be a path toward – rather than an obstacle to – love.
“These survival tactics that we develop and that come out in our relationships are not actually serving us,” she says of the various ticks and coping mechanisms she bakes into her main characters. “I think every time I write a new heroine, I’m kind of trying on a new survival tactic in a way and seeing the flaws in that.”
Writing flaws in a way that is distinct enough to bubble up into conflict, but not so glaring that it makes a protagonist unlikable, is a fine literary line to walk, Henry says.
“Readers like a flawed, complicated male lead. I think that’s something that makes them feel real and familiar, like someone we could know and could fall in love with,” she explains. “But for whatever reason – I’m sure there are myriad options – we’re so, so, so much harder on female characters.”
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Fans will find pieces of Henry written into both her male and female characters. “I bleed into them equally,” she says.
In “Great Big Beautiful Life,” Alice represents “me at my best” − a true optimist who gives the benefit of the doubt sometimes unduly.
Hayden is “more cynical and a lot more guarded,” she explains, adding, “I’m a relatively private person. I like to have distinct boundaries and expectations.” Those characteristics, which readers might not as easily accept in a heroine, find a hospitable home in her heroes.
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“Great Big Beautiful Life” represents a slight departure from the classic rom-com structure loyal Henry readers have grown to love.
A sprawling, 432-page affair, the novel leans on all the elements of a good beach read: quaint townspeople; a misunderstood and charming male lead; a complex heroine with a creative job that somehow still affords her croissant and coffee money each morning.
But the backdrop to their story is complicated, too. It weaves together countless secondary characters with their own often tragic love stories. The subject of the celebrity memoir, which grounds the novel, is the heiress of a media empire who’s left to deal with a world defined by the tabloid culture her own family bred.
Henry was inspired to write a complex novel with the idea that love is not just about the two people at the heart of a rom-com. It’s about the invisible string that connects them to past loves – sometimes troubled ones – from which they came.
“I do think we’re all, to an extent, the products of the generations that came before us,” she says. “We’re reacting to how we were treated as kids by our family.”
She sees the book as a story about “doing the best you can with what you were given” and a testament to the fact that “every generation of our families … is trying to do just a little bit better than what they started out with, emotionally speaking …trying to be a little bit healthier.”
Even in Emily Henry’s sprawling new story, love is still in the details
In “Great Big Beautiful Life,” Henry-heads will read the same detail-oriented romantic sensibility that separates the author from others.
Her knack for creating a sense of place is uncanny, a well-named diner or perfectly described summer breeze lifting the reader out of their daily doldrums to a Reddi-Wip light beach town like Little Crescent Island, the backdrop for “Great Big Beautiful Life.”
Often writing love in subtleties, Henry has proven herself a master translator of our most puzzling and passionate feelings.
“I have been taught, and have seen to be true as a reader, that the more specific something is, the more universal it’s going to feel,” she says. So while you may not have “loved someone with a dent in their nose,” she jokes, those details are what connect a reader to a story.
“That’s also my experience of love,” Henry, who is married, says. She describes the feeling as “the longer that I look at you, the longer I’ve known you, the more I know you, the more and more beautiful that you become to me or that I understand you’ve always been.”
That poetic tidbit, spoken casually mid-interview, is as good a piece of evidence as any of Henry’s full-fledged grip on the romance’s loyal readers.
“Writing romance, it’s just kind of bottling that sensation,” she says. “I feel like it’s actually a pretty good parlor trick to write a love story.”
For Emily Henry, romance is not ‘wish-fulfillment’
As for those who malign romance as “wish-fulfillment” for women in search of lasting love in a sometimes inhospitable dating environment, Henry has a counter-argument: Her books are about the exception, not the rule.
While she acknowledges modern dating seems to be mostly “a wreck,” the words that pour from her to the page are proof of grand love, she says.
“All of those things that someone is writing came to them somehow,” she says. “So if I can feel that way, then other people can feel that way. Men and women out there can feel that way. And why would you ever settle for any less? If that’s the kind of love that you want, be with someone who has the capacity to love you like that.”
