Author Emily Henry is a master of the thinking person’s beach read.Penguin Random House Canada/Supplied
Emily Henry is on a writing retreat – a fitting place to find someone who made her name with books about the extraordinary alchemy that can happen between two people removed from their ordinary circumstances.
Exhibit A: Beach Read, her juggernaut 2020 breakout. Other examples include Happy Place, People We Meet on Vacation and three other novels that have seen Henry crest the recent romance wave right into readers’ hearts. Her books have also seen her become a ubiquitous presence on bestsellers lists, with over 10 million copies sold worldwide, according to The Times.
Her latest is Great Big Beautiful Life, set on a fictional island off the coast of Georgia. Henry is a master of the thinking person’s beach read, so this love story has layers. It’s about how parents and children lose – and find – one another, how fame always seems to take more than it gives and why the stories we tell ourselves about our lives matter.
In that same spirit of nuanced discovery, we chatted with Henry about her own journey to mind-boggling literary success – starting with the novel that altered the course of her life.
Beach Read was your big breakout, the moment everything changed.
I had been publishing young-adult novels. I was what we call a “mid-list” author. They sold okay, but weren’t bestsellers. But with Beach Read, I could tell pretty early on that things were shaping up in a different way, just based on the in-house support and excitement.
That’s a piece of things that cannot be overstated. If the people who do sales and marketing at your publisher read that early draft and are excited about it, that immediately gets a lot more attention and resources behind your book.
When you were writing Beach Read, did you have a sense that there was something about this book?
Not at all. It did not feel like: “This is a big special thing I’m doing.” A lot of the time, the books that feel really big and special to writers aren’t the books that readers connect with most, because they’re usually hyper-specific to our interests and tastes, and that might make them a bit less universally appealing. I really was just writing Beach Read for myself and I didn’t try to sell it for a couple of years. I didn’t even tell my agent it existed because it didn’t feel like something that would be published, let alone make such a big splash.
What was the catalyst for you to say, “Hey agent, I’ve got this book that has been kicking around?”
There started to be this big romance boom. The reason I tried to publish Beach Read is that I saw others doing similar things. I was seeing authors like Helen Hoang and Jasmine Guillory and Sally Thorne publish these romantic comedies that had similar sensibilities to rom-com films, but they were a bit sexier and a little more grounded in real life drama and heavier themes.
Great Big Beautiful Life is set on a fictional island off the coast of Georgia.Penguin Random House Canada/Supplied
People We Meet on Vacation was your next book. Were you writing that one in the background, as Beach Read found success?
I was lucky to write it before Beach Read came out because I know it would have been so much harder for me to trust the story. I would have had other voices in my head, I would have been thinking about what readers loved or didn’t like in Beach Read.
My editor was really pushing me to find the right next book, so we went through a lot of ideas before this one arose. When it came up, she and my agent were both really intrigued. I was going to think about it a bit longer, but then I just started writing it. I don’t really know if a book is going to work for me until I’m in it.
Book three, Book Lovers, was where I had to do more of that reckoning with success, and figure out how to keep writing what I actually wanted to write without letting these other voices drown out my own.
What do those voices manifest as?
I intentionally don’t read my reviews, so the things I find out are because people tag me in them or I see little snippets.
I spend a lot of time worrying about how the female narrating characters will be received, and if people will think they’re annoying or whiny or all of the things we love to call women. I always try to make sure the characters are distinctive, and not too similar to any of my previous characters – especially whichever book I’ve written more recently.
I’m aware of people hating what they call the miscommunication trope. With People We Meet on Vacation, I remember that a lot of those who didn’t like it felt the whole conflict between these two characters was just a miscommunication, which was not at all how I viewed it.
I felt like in my third book, I needed to avoid any miscommunication, but a lot of interpersonal conflict that isn’t driven by external factors is driven by our own inability to say what we’re thinking.
There are all these things that you learn people have really strong feelings about. Your job as a writer is to honour the characters. They should be leading the story, not your fear of people’s reaction to the story.
What would you want yourself to know 10 years ago about the roller coaster of publishing?
My first bit of advice would be to get into therapy sooner. You’re about to get very busy, so take care of yourself now. I feel so grateful that I started out with this very mid-list career, because it made me understand the reality of publishing. Now that I’m having this charmed experience, I know that’s not what it’s like most of the time. It’s not like this for most of my peers. It’s something I can keep in the front of my mind by appreciating what I have, but not assuming it’s going to continue.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
