Emily Henry's latest novel 'Great Big Beautiful Life' explores love beyond romance
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It occurred to me listening to today's interview that in the English language, we have a word to describe the sweeping beauty of love between a person and their partner. It's romance, of course. But where does that leave descriptions of the love of a parent and child or between siblings or friends?

Emily Hedney is the super popular romance novelist behind such books as Beach Read and Funny Story. Her new book, Great Big Beautiful Life, broadens out what she's trying to do when she's writing about love. She speaks with NPR's Miles Parks about why she wanted to challenge herself to expand her writing and how grief is an integral part of love. That's coming up.

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If you were a fan of HBO's Succession, you might be interested to learn about Margaret Ives. She's the elusive, fictional media heiress at the center of Emily Henry's new novel, Great Big Beautiful Life.

It's a story within a story about two journalists, Alice and Hayden, who are thrown together as they compete to write Margaret's memoir. But this is an Emily Henry book. She is the patron saint of millennial romance, so you know these journalists are not staying just friends. Emily Henry, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. So...

I want to start with the relationship between these two journalists. It's in some ways standard romance fare. They meet, they misunderstand each other at first, but then gradually start to fall for each other. But then this book has this whole other layer on top of it of Margaret Ives' century-long family drama. Can you talk to me about why you decided to kind of add this extra layer on top of this genre that it feels like you've kind of mastered at this point?

Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like you said, I don't know that I'd say I had mastered it, but I've been doing this same general thing for a few years now and I love it so much, but I definitely wanted to challenge myself in a new way. And so that was part of it. But also, you know, this story kind of came to me just from the idea of wanting to delve deeper into mother-daughter relationships originally. And I

I really only had one idea that was sort of grounded in that. It kind of sprung, not fully formed, but fairly fully formed from quite early on. And so...

I didn't make so much of a conscious decision to make this shift to the side so much as it was the story that was dying to be told inside of me. And like you said, it's got these two different plots that are running alongside each other. But the real story to me is sort of this third rail that's the way that the two stories interact. And the idea being that neither of them

is complete without the other story. They both are braided together to tell this other story that you don't really know what that is until the end of the book. Obviously, this is a romance book, but there is also a lot of grief in it. You know, Margaret's story, her kind of her whole family's story over the last hundred years is filled with all of this kind of tragedy. And then Alice is also still mourning the fairly recent loss of her dad. And

This could have been kind of a purely feel-good book. Why did you decide to kind of have so many of these characters also working through grief?

Well, first of all, I generally find it kind of hard to write a love story where you don't deal with grief a little bit, partly because I think when you're getting close to someone, that is just a part of the process. You do this sort of personal excavation where you're sharing the things that matter the most to you and that hurt you the most and that you treasure the most. And then partly because I just do think that grief is the flip side of love. You really cannot have

love without grief or grief without love. Those things are just two sides of the same coin. And the thing that makes grief bearable is that love is so immense and life-changing and beautiful that we can handle what comes after love. So that is the short answer. But beyond that,

Another one of the starting points for this book was just thinking about legacy in the way that the good things and the bad things in our family histories, the generations that come before us get passed down in a way that we don't even necessarily understand. Most of us don't have our family histories preserved as thoroughly as a family like, you know, the British Royals or the Kennedys, those families that are in the public eye and have been for generations. We can trace those

the ripple effects that move through them. And I found that to be just a really interesting concept for how we could explore our own personal sense of legacy by looking at these larger than life story dynastic families and tracing the way that love and grief especially are passed down from generation to generation, each generation sort of reacting to what it did or didn't get and needed. Yeah.

Well, and this sense of free will, it feels like, too, of like in that situation, the amount of control that these people have is so much less in a lot of ways, even though they have abundance. And I felt like to me, the most powerful line in this book was when Margaret was talking about her father and how he didn't do enough for her mother. She says, for the one you love, you unmake the world and build a new one. If that's what you want.

that is what needs doing. And I guess I wonder, how much is this also a book about sacrifice and what it takes to actually successfully keep love alive? Yeah, I mean, I think the same way that grief is the other side of love. I think sacrifice is intrinsic to love. I think

You can like and enjoy and care about people, but love is when you feel something for someone that would make you put them above yourself and your own needs. And when you feel like you would do anything, even things you really, really, really don't want to do for this other person.

Um, so I just think that's an inherent part of, of really loving someone. One of my favorite things about this book was that you have the kind of the main romance at the center of it, but it actually explores a lot of different romances and marriages, um, you know, through, through the generations and through, um, one of my favorite, um,

kind of relationships. I'm also a new parent. My child's about to turn one, so I feel like the... Congratulations. Thank you. But the dynamic of Alice and her dad and her parents and watching that kind of develop throughout the book was really beautifully done. And I wondered how that came about. Yeah. Well, so I've written kind of a lot about father-daughter relationships. It's something I really enjoy both writing and reading about. But this was the first time that I had really tried to drill down into mother-daughter relationships because...

I just find them to be fascinating in different ways. I think my relationship with my mom were very close, but I do think that there was a sense for a lot of my life that I had, whether she intended this or not, that like her hopes and dreams to some extent maybe were on my shoulders, even if those were sort of vague. And so...

That was something I really wanted to explore, this idea that, like we were talking about, these good things and these bad things, these excesses and these just losses, all of this gets passed down generation to generation. And the only way to really reckon with any of it is to have kind of hard conversations. And I wanted to have Alice and her mom talk.

deal with the fact that there are these unspoken things in the way of their relationship and get closer because of it. Well, and I love not viewing kind of the idea of love is so binary of like romantic love versus like in this book, it feels like especially with Margaret and her sister, Laura, I feel like their love ends up being such a huge focus as well. And, you know, I just feel like the line between what these different loves mean to these people just becomes kind of blurred. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I don't, I'm sure people have different experiences of love than I do. But I really feel like love is sort of that thing we were talking about. It's that need to make the world better for someone else, that need to make sure they have what they have before you have what you need. To me, I'm like, love is like, it's so simple. It's not something we can really grasp or understand.

make concrete, but I do feel like it's just this simple thing that's in all these different relationships and it can manifest slightly differently, but I don't necessarily even think that one is more valuable than another, like romantic love versus friend love or familial love. I think all of them matter to each of us on different levels. Yeah.

I'm not sure it's simple, but I am glad that we have your books to kind of help us all unpack it. Emily Henry's new book is called Great Big Beautiful Life, and it's out April 22nd. Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you so much. This was great.

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