For Emily Henry, her novels are time capsules. Writing a new book means that she’s infusing the characters with whatever lessons she’s learning at the moment, using the ins and outs of their arcs to learn more about herself. Which also means that when she goes back to read an older book, she’s immediately transported to where she was at that time.
“And there are things about each of the characters that I'm very attached to [where] I recognize myself,” she says. “All of them are being pulled from something that I feel very personally engaged with.”
There’s a general advice that one should avoid meeting their heroes, but in my case, it turned out to be a fantastic experience. Henry is as calm and collected as the blue paint on her walls. She offers both fun anecdotes and in-depth analyses of the human condition with ease, which seems to prove that as chill as she is on the surface, her mind is a wide-open playground for her imagination.
“Whenever I'm writing one of these books, it's like the characters are never me, but I'm always taking some facet of myself that I want to spend some time thinking about and working on,” she says. “It's such a work of self-reflection and investigation.”
In Henry’s newest novel Happy Place— released in hardcover April 25th, 2023 and *finally* hitting shelves as a paperback March 7th, 2024 — her heroine is a perpetual people pleaser (say that five times fast) and has a hard time figuring out what she really wants for her life. “That tendency to try to always keep the peace and to get along with everyone...is this coping mechanism of hers,” she says. “But [now] it's actually creating all this friction and all these tensions.”
I’ve written fiction since elementary school, and I know firsthand how exciting it is when your characters become so fully formed that it’s like they’re making their own decisions. This point in the writing process is also very exciting for Henry.
“Once the characters are fleshed out enough that their decisions are very easy for me to predict and understand, [it’s way more fun],” Henry says. In Happy Place, that moment came when she realized her leads Harriet and Wyn (who are pretending they’re still engaged while on a group vacation with mutual friends) needed to talk about why their relationship came to an end.
This approach to the characters also helped her during the big finale and the final act grand gesture, which (spoiler alert!) is a play on the familiar rom-com airport scene. But instead of having one character pursue the other through the airport, running through security at breakneck speed and declaring love in front of 100 strangers, she flipped the trope on its head.
After talking about the end of their relationship and spending the final night of their vacation together, Harriet leaves a sleeping Wyn without saying goodbye. She’s convinced that it’s what is best for him, but by the time she gets on the plane, heading back to a job she hates without the love of her life, she realizes that whatever dream life she built up for herself doesn’t matter if he’s not there. When she runs back outside, Wyn is already there, and they meet in the middle. Can someone pass me a tissue?
By this point in the novel, the reader is well acquainted with the airport and the wacky pilot that works there. The emotions that come with an airport experience — joy when you’re reunited with friends and sadness when you’re saying goodbye — make the conversation even more impactful.
“That was a tricky scene for me to nail down because so much of Harriet's journey is really internal,” she says. “And that's just tricky in general because when something is more external, [you have to think about] how the grand gesture should play out.”
Figuring out the specific ways that the characters failed each other, and how they got to the heart of each other’s insecurities, needs to have an equally emotional redemption. Henry went back and forth trying to pinpoint exactly what her grand gesture would look like, and who it would come from. But that exploration allowed her to discover something that is an excellent reminder for life in general: the end of their relationship was the buildup of wrongs on both their ends.
“This was not one person failing a relationship. It was two people who things broke down between and who both made their own mistakes,” Henry says. “I didn't really see a way that I could bring them back together and their big moment without both of them taking a pretty big risk.”
Harriet needed to admit what she truly wanted, and Wyn needed to admit how afraid he was of not being enough for her in the future. These ideas of happiness, love, fear, humor — Henry threads these real-world experiences throughout all of her novels. Beach Read deals with betrayal and grief as much as it does love, People We Meet On Vacation looks at the idea of home, and Book Lovers explores identity and independence. And they all feature two people who are very, very messy.
“When you write two characters falling in love, you are writing two people at their absolute most vulnerable. Because when you fall in love, you are kind of innately embarrassing,” she says. “You've met someone who you're so drawn to that you want to know everything about them [and] I feel like you kind of become very aware of your own trauma based on how you're reacting to the process of falling in love.
“I find writing the process of falling in love to be a really easy inroad to exploring a person's mental interiority and their emotional landscape,” she says. “Nothing really encapsulates what it is to be a human quite like the experience of falling in love.”
The complexity found within these books isn’t the simplified, superficial stories people think they are. There is so much enthusiasm and joy for the sake of joy — even if the characters are still dealing with heartbreak in all its forms.
“In general, romances have conflict like any other book. The difference really is that guaranteed happily ever after,” Henry says. “Yes, there are these horrible things happening and that's probably not going to stop any time soon. But even so, life is beautiful and worth living and that's how it was. So that's how I started this particular part of my writing journey, wrestling with that exact thing.”
Henry loves the fact that by ending a story with a happily ever after, she’s able to emphasize that that is the point of the whole journey. The future is uncertain but for now, the characters are choosing to go through the day-to-day of life together.
“The point of the story was the moment where love does conquer all and where these two people are blissfully happy,” she says. “And I really do believe as much as there is a point to anything, that's the point for me. The point is being with the people you love on the planet Earth...I think that's a worldview that is worth holding on to.”
I might have had to blink away a few tears at that, thinking about the hope and joy that her books have given me, and how Happy Place is already inspiring other readers, too. Naturally, I had to ask her about her own happy place.
“Usually once every year, every couple of years, [I] fly to San Francisco and I go to Muir Woods [and Muir Beach], and then drive up through wine country and go wine tasting and be out in beautiful vineyards,” she says. “And then I go up to visit my grandparents who live in Oregon. And there’s mountains, and usually you can drive up high enough that there's snow. And I love that I can just do all of that with one flight.”
Being surrounded by nature also makes Henry feel more creative. She offers a hint at her new book, which features a relationship that she describes as “something kind of close” to a grumpy/sunshine pairing, similar to her own relationship.
“My husband is truly, like the nicest person in the entire world. And I feel that I'm a very kind person, but I'm not like, sweet,” she jokes. “I'm like a little bit sassy and brash and mischievous.”
She’s drawn parallels in the past between book number five and “Karma” by Taylor Swift: “It's basically like something really bad happens to you but because of that, every great thing in your life is just kind of clicking into place.”
And as one final Taylor Swift lyrical Easter egg, she adds: “Hopefully it feels like ‘the wind in your hair on a weekend.’”
Rapid Fire With Emily Henry
Image via Devyn Glista/St. Blanc Studios
B+C: What is on your writing playlist? If you have any music that you like to listen to?
EH: I do not listen to music when I write because I'm so easily distracted. If there are lyrics, there's no way. I used to kind of put on classical music but even if I know the song, I'm waiting for certain parts I like. Sound is hard when I'm writing, unfortunately.
B+C: How do you come up with character names and locations?
EH: You have to remember that all of your characters have different parents unless they're siblings. So the way that they would have been named would have had so much to do with how old their parents are, where their parents would have lived, what kind of people they are...And then also, it really helps that they all have to be different. And so like meeting the variety of multiple syllables.
I'm definitely on nameberry.com a lot like a lot of writers, just looking at very specific lists that will be like artistic girls’ names from the ‘90s or whatever, just like looking for ideas.
[I’m also] trying to not name them people after people that I actually know and talk to often. But eventually I'm going to run out of other names, and friends and family are going to start showing up. I'm always so paranoid about that — or that I'll forget someone’s partner’s name and then I'll be writing a love story where the love interest looks like a friend's boyfriend and has the same name as him. Oh, I'm always so paranoid about that kind of thing, but so far so good.
B+C: Do you write during any particular time of day?
EH: Usually I write mornings through afternoon, usually from like ten to like three. I write most days.
B+C: What has surprised you most about writing books?
EH: That it doesn't get easier is probably true. I'm like, “I would have really thought it would get easier.” And instead, it’s sort of like, “Have I already done this before? Like, this is my first time writing a book, right?”
B+C: And do you have any favorite tropes? Whether you’re writing them or reading them.
EH: I love reading “marriage of convenience” in historical romance so much. That's one of my very favorites. And I do love enemies to lovers. I think I can be kind of picky about it, but when it's good, it's very, very good.
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Lead image via Devyn Glista/St. Blanc Studios
This interview has been edited for clarity.
