The Chicago Review of Books: Love in Multitudes-Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life
Reviewed by Angie Raney
Like most readers, I go through reading slumps. Right out of undergrad and after four years of being told what and when to read, I found myself floundering trying to find what type of books really interested me. Whenever I heard someone say “contemporary romance,” I thought of what I’ve come to know as “bodice rippers”—little trade paperbacks clad with a cover of a shirtless Fabio. But after lackluster mysteries and haughty literary fiction, I took a chance and grabbed a colorfully bound romance off the shelf. That book was Book Lovers by Emily Henry, and it revitalized my love of reading. You can imagine my awe and excitement when I received her new novel.
Great Big Beautiful Life follows Alice Scott, a bubbly celebrity journalist who tracks down the Paris Hilton-like heiress of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Margaret Ives, in an effort to write a biography of her extravagant and tragedy-ridden life. When Alice arrives on Margaret’s coastal Georgia island, she quickly realizes she is competing to write Margaret’s story with Pulitzer prize-winning biographer and broad-shouldered grump Hayden Anderson. Now in her eighties, the former tabloid princess puts Alice and Hayden each on a one-month trial in which they separately interview her, with a decision of who will tell her story to come at the end of the month. However, the stories Margaret provides Alice and Hayden aren’t the same, and neither writer knows why. Navigating NDAs, burgeoning romance, and professional ambitions, Alice and Hayden must put aside their differences and unravel the mystery that is Margaret Ives and her family’s empire.
As Ms. Henry said herself, Great Big Beautiful Life is a departure from her previous novels. Sure, the Emily Henry signatures are back—cozy, vibrant small-town settings, heartwarming familial subplots, and laugh-out-loud dialogue. But this book does something different than Book Lovers or Beach Read—it centers the importance of familial love as much as the romance storyline. For example, Alice and her mother Angela traverse the rocky terrain of mother-daughter relationships after parental death. Margaret recounts the complex history of the Ives lineage. Hayden struggles to process and break free of past trauma and rigid expectations. In the end, while this is a love story, it’s not strictly a romance.
This isn’t at all to say that romance isn’t a core part of the story. Trust me, there’s a lot of sexual tension but it isn’t what drives the novel. Instead, the novel’s driving force is Margaret and the life story she recounts to Alice. To move the plot forward, Ms. Henry carefully intersperses Margaret’s biographized memories and family lineage within scenes of Alice and Hayden and Alice and Margaret in the present day. These flashes of unique histories create an anecdotal quilt of family narratives, grief, and perseverance against all odds.
Because this novel was so different from her past works, it took me a second to “get into” Great Big Beautiful Life. A novel about two writers duking it out to tell the glamorous life of a recluse heiress is honestly right up my alley, but I clocked very early that this one would move differently than her previous books I admire so much.
Alice and Hayden’s characterizations lean a bit more into the tropes of a sunshine lover girl and aloof Adonis than I’m used to reading. At times, the romance feels a bit fast, so the mystery of Margaret’s life left me itching to return to the Ives storyline. While their romance moves quickly at first glance, Henry draws a touching connection between Alice and Hayden and Margaret and her husband, Cosmo Sinclair. Though they take place decades apart, both couples’ loves are swift, all-consuming, and somewhat instantaneous—testaments of how beautiful it is to love so deeply that time stops mattering.
Henry also gives plenty of room for Alice to grow. She allows Alice to challenge her sometimes-overly sunny tendencies and be honest with herself and others, ultimately endearing her as a relatably flawed, but nevertheless lovable main character. While Hayden wasn’t my favorite male lead of the Henry-verse, he is sweet, genuine, and loves hard. Amidst a cast of incredibly rich and compelling characters, he holds his own.
This novel is also yet another show of Emily Henry’s writing prowess. The beach breeze feels tangible, the humidity on the lake sticky and stifling, the lowlights of the neighborhood bar warm against your face. From the sweltering Georgia heat of her mother’s garden to the opulent castle of the Ives, Henry has created a story, or more aptly, remade the world for the reader.
Great Big Beautiful Life is complicated and emotional; sweet, sexy, and ultimately what you expect from the queen of contemporary romance: full of love. Henry would say that, at its core, so is this great, big, beautiful life we get to live.
Kirkus Review: Great Big Beautiful Life
Two journalists compete for the chance to write the biography of an aging heiress.
Alice Scott works for a pop-culture website, but she hopes writing a biography of Margaret Ives, a reclusive heiress known as the Tabloid Princess, will boost her career to the next level. One problem: Margaret Ives is incredibly hard to track down.
Make that two problems: When Alice finally finds her on a small island off the coast of Georgia, another journalist is there, too—Hayden Anderson. They both want this job, and Margaret wants to be sure she can trust the person telling her story, so she proposes an unusual deal. Both Alice and Hayden will stay on the island and work with Margaret for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll decide who gets to write her book. Hayden couldn’t be more different from Alice—while she’s optimistic and friendly, he’s cynical and standoffish. She’s desperately seeking her family’s approval and thinks she can get it by writing a book, and he’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The two of them sign ironclad NDAs, but it’s a small island and they can’t help running into each other—and then, against all odds, they even start to like each other.
Alice and Hayden’s unlikely attraction is only one of the book’s timelines, however. Although Henry is known as the queen of contemporary romance, here she explores the world of historical fiction as Alice interviews Margaret and learns about her family’s history—going back to the gold rush and the early days of Hollywood—and finally the tragic love story that led her to retreat from the public eye. Alice also begins to unravel her own family history and learns that the stories she’s been telling herself may not have been true after all.
Alice and Hayden’s romance is a delightful slow burn and Henry, as always, shines when exploring family drama, but the emphasis here is on Margaret’s past and how it ties into everyone’s future.
Both a steamy romance and a moving look at the sacrifices people make for love.
Vogue Talks with Emily Henry About Her New Novel, Ceding (Some) Control Over Her Adaptations, and More…
By Maya Lane
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.… Here, Henry soeaks to Vogue about the nature of memory and legacy, her favorite romance tropes, and what has 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. 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 - the ‘now’ and the ‘then’. The book is still primarily this romance story between Hayden and Alice - 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: it’sis one of the trickiest and most complicated relationships, even when you have a great relationship with your mother. There is an easy trap to fall into, where you become an extension of your mother in a way, where your mother’s hopes and dreams are on your shoulders. 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.
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. 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. 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. They’re 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.
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. It hasn’t been that long since I’ve published most of my books, 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.
The last thing I’d like to ask— What are you most excited about in terms of seeing your books People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read 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 means 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.
Emily Henry is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers, People We Meet on Vacation, and Beach Read, as well as the forthcoming Happy Place. She lives and writes in Cincinnati and the part of Kentucky just beneath it.
Find her on Instagram @EmilyHenryWrites.