Beach Read Romance Queen Emily Henry Opens Up About Her Newest Book

Goodreads: My first question for you has got to be: How does it feel to have one of the most eagerly awaited novels of the year?

Emily Henry: Oh my gosh. I mean, it is surreal. It is intimidating. But it's also very, very exciting. It’s like every year I've had a new book come out, I've felt a little bit more pressure. It's mattered more and more to me to keep my readers happy. The longer this has gone on and the more that I feel like we've gotten to kind of know each other, I know what they like. I am excited to be able to be a part of people's summers. So yeah, it is like a full cocktail of emotions, but mostly I feel supremely honored every single day.

GR: Well, based on the feedback I’ve seen, you're definitely keeping readers happy!

EH: I hope so [laughs]. Thank you.

GR: What type of novels make you happy?
 
EH: I read all over the map. There was definitely a time where I was pretty much exclusively reading romance at the start of the pandemic, especially just needing that escape and that promise of a happy ending. But I also now have kind of eased back into really loving reading thrillers and suspense, a little bit of horror and sci-fi. I read everything, but I think in the summer especially I do find myself craving those kinds of books that have a really fun setting that feels like its own kind of getaway. Like a fun, frothy romance.

GR: Who are some of your favorite authors?
 
EH: I've got to move in front of my shelves so that I don't forget people, but I'm going to forget people. Last year I really loved Emma Straub's newest book, This Time Tomorrow. She is definitely one of my favorites. I thought that book was so phenomenal.

In romance, specifically, Kennedy Ryan is one of my God-tier go-to reading experiences. She's so incredible. I also really love Denise Williams. I think her books are just like…they just all feel like a hug, and that is something I am all about. And Nisha Sharma is fantastic. And Christina Lauren is another huge staple.

I'm trying to think who else. I mean, I really could go on forever, but I love Taylor Jenkins Reid. She's been someone whose books I look forward to every year. Another one is Mhairi McFarlane. I'm reading her newest, upcoming release, Between Us, right now, and it is just so good. I feel jealous every time I'm reading one of her books [laughs].

GR: What is it about romance writing that you enjoy?
 
EH: I love everything about it, but I think that the thing that keeps me coming back to it is the hopefulness and the earnestness of it. I like writing in other genres, you know. I like to write as widely as I like to read. But there's just something so special about writing a love story to me because you are kind of forcing yourself to face your own cynicism, I think, and really embrace the idea of a happily-ever-after. Of this being something worthy of your time and energy.

I mean, I get the same thing out of writing them that I do out of reading them, which is ultimately this feeling of hope and comfort. And I think that's a really valuable thing to bring into the world at any time. But especially right now.

GR: In Happy Place, there's of course the love between Harriet and Wyn, but there's also the love between Harriet and her two best friends. Do you have that kind of female love friendship in your life? And if so, what does it mean to you?
 
EH: Definitely, definitely I do. I wasn't born with any sisters. I have sisters-in- law now, who I'm extremely close to, but because I didn't grow up with sisters, I think my female friendships especially meant so much to me.

My two best friends—one of them has been my best friend since we were ten years old. And the other I met the first week of college. And those friendships, to me, I always think of them as two of the great love stories of my life. I think that there's something to that, that we know there's value there, but there's such an emphasis in our culture and in our society on finding a romantic partner and that being your soulmate. But I think a lot of times we have a lot of different soulmates, and some of my friends are really my soulmates. They just bring out pieces of me that I didn't even really know were there until I met them.

Writing about friends has always mattered to me, but with this book especially. I think the pandemic and being cut off from friends and family made me appreciate my close friends even more than I already did and understand how important it is to keep those relationships nurtured and tended to the same way that you would tend to a long-term romantic relationship.

GR: Here’s a lighter question: All of your books have been the perfect beach reads. Do you have a particular book that you love to take with you on vacation?
 
EH: That is a good one, too! I don't know if there's one book I always like to take on vacation. I think Sophie Kinsella when I was growing up. Those were the books I would always want to take on vacation.

But now I think the book that I probably reread more than almost any other book is a historical romance by Sherry Thomas titled The Luckiest Lady in London. Really, all of her books are great, but I especially love this one. It is a really good vacation read. Just very sexy and angsty and immersive.

It’s available in mass-market paperback, which I feel is the ultimate vacation-reading experience because they're just like indestructible books. They're meant to get soaking wet and be folded over themselves and all that.

GR: You really specialize in playing with tropes in your novels. What is it about doing that that appeals to you?
 
EH: I think what it is, is that tropes have to come from somewhere. I feel like the reason that they come up so often in stories, why they become codified, is that they actually do happen in real life.

I do have friends who are married to each other who were childhood best friends and didn't get together until they were adults. And I have a lot of friends where they broke up years before and then reconnected, and I have friends who hated each other when they first met and then fell in love.

So I think the tropes really do come from real life, but then when we use them in fiction a lot of times we're heightening them and making them a bit more playful and dramatic and extreme. Then there's something fun to me about taking those tropes and stripping them back down a little bit and really making them feel like people or relationships that you're familiar with and how they operate in the real world.

As a reader, I really enjoyed the heightened, almost more screwball play on tropes, but I just have not found myself totally capable of writing them that way. I really just kind of like to deconstruct them a little bit and really see why this would happen in real life and what would that look like.

GR: Your books are filled with so much witty banter. Harriet and Wyn’s conversations are so quick, and I love that. Do your characters talk to you? How do you get that dialogue so tight and down pat?
 
EH: Thank you so much. When I come up with a premise, honestly, what happens usually is I'll have a premise that's just sort of a hook, and for this one it was this couple who's not really together anymore, having to pretend that they're together on this group trip.

So usually I'll have kind of an idea of the opening scene for this hook, this setup, and then there will just be like a few little jokes that will occur to me over the next couple of weeks that really just come from the setup.
 
A lot of times I don't really have my character's voices very firmly until I've written at least one draft of a book. And, unfortunately, sometimes it's more like the second or third draft when I start figuring out more who the characters are on a deeper level. Then the dialogue comes much more easily at that point because it's like I know these characters and I do hear them at that point.

I know exactly how they would speak to one another and what their comebacks would be, but before I get to know the characters, there are times where I'm just kind of white-knuckling it and writing filler dialogue. But dialogue is overall the thing that I think does come the most naturally to me. But again, you just have to know those characters for it to work.

GR: Harriet is a major people pleaser. Is that a trait you share?
 
EH: Yes [laughs]. I think with every book there is a part of me that's exorcising some part of myself or at least just investigating it a little bit. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work on a character who was a people pleaser because I am, and it's something I've spent time disentangling from my identity but is still very much a part of me and something I struggle with. I thought from a purely selfish perspective it might be helpful to me to write a character whose people pleasing is like kind of ruining her life and make her deal with it.
 
GR: Has it caused you to reexamine your life at all? I don't want to give away any spoilers, of course, but yeah, this book definitely takes on doing the thing that you want to do versus doing the thing that you feel like you're supposed to do.
 
EH: Right? I think that it has. I think that in a way I'm very, very, very lucky to be doing the thing that I want to do. Like that's not just a given. So I don't take that lightly at all.

But I think that on a more small-scale level, it's helped me reexamine just kind of my day-to-day. The fact of Harriet just feeling sometimes like she's in a race to something instead of just enjoying her daily life…I feel like since the pandemic [started] that's something that I've been trying to think of a lot more, just being present in the small moments instead of thinking about what comes next and also really practicing mindfulness.

I think working on this book helped with realizing how much the people-pleasing kind of drives that feeling of being stuck in a rat race versus being present in your real life and enjoying what you already have in front of you. I think it was helpful to me, and I hope it will be helpful to readers.

GR: Is there a character in the novel you wish you were more like?
 
EH: I wish I was more like Cleo, because Cleo's the one who does have a backbone. Cleo's the one who…she's not mean, but if she doesn't want to do something, she'll just say she doesn't want to do something, and that's something I've been really working on.

The book is dedicated to a friend of mine who will always just answer the question, “Why not?” with, “Because I don't want to” and she knows she's not being mean, and I really love that about her. I think Cleo is aspirational. It's like that's who you want to be. You're kind, you're compassionate, but you also have those boundaries of being comfortable just saying when you don't want to do something and not feeling like you're being so difficult or rocking the boat or whatever.
 
GR: The action in this novel is built around an annual vacation that these friends take. Where's your favorite place to vacation?

EH: I love a couple of places. I love going to Lake Michigan. It's within driving distance, and so I do that one somewhat regularly, but I think my favorite might be Northern California. I love going to wine country, and I love going to the redwoods. I just love how many different kinds of landscapes there are so close to one another in Northern California. I find that very magical.

GR: So is that your happy place? Or if you had to say there was one place that was your happy place, where is it?

EH: Well, I think if I had to say there was one place, I probably would say Lake Michigan, which is funny. It’s maybe not my favorite place to go. It doesn't feel quite as exciting, but when I'm there I feel really grounded and really connected to myself in a kind of weird mystical way of just feeling like there's something about the lake that makes me feel really grateful to be alive and happy to just be like a small little human on the planet.

GR: You've gotten so much attention because of the commercial success of your novels. Does that feel stressful for you?
 
EH: I think the biggest stress associated with that really is just having readers who've been so wonderful and so supportive of my career and really wanting to make them happy.

Before, I had sort of a small devoted following, and it felt like I was writing more for me. And now I do still feel like I'm writing for me, but I'm just conscious of this group of people who have done so much for me and my career in my life, and I just feel like the sense of responsibility toward them to make something that brings them joy. So I think that's, that's probably the biggest stressor there.

Obviously, my schedule's also much, much fuller now with a lot more publicity stuff than I am used to and all of that sort of thing. But the biggest thing, really, is just wanting to make sure that the books are everything they possibly can be and that they make the people who've made me happy as happy as possible.
 
GR: Is that veering into people-pleasing, but in a good way?
 
EH: Oh, definitely [laughs]. I mean, it's definitely veering into people-pleasing. I don't know if I'd say it's a good way or a bad way, but I think I have to stay true to my own voice and what I want to work on. I'm also always balancing that.

It's not like I'm writing books that I don't believe in. I'm writing books I hugely believe in and want to share with the world. Right now I'm trying very actively to bring something specific into the world and into people's lives. And someday I probably will write something weird and different that will be more for me and whoever chooses to follow me to read. But right now I just want to be giving a gift to these people who've given me this gift.
 
GR: What do you think weird and different might look like for you, if you wrote something like that?
 
EH: Like I said, I write a little bit of everything. I just don't necessarily take it forward far enough to try and publish it. I do hope eventually that I will get to do some more genre-bent work, and I'm hoping some horror. But right now I'm really loving what I'm doing, so it's just a matter of when will be the right time to add something else to the mix.
 
GR: Did you approach Happy Place differently from any of your other novels?

EH: I don't think I approached it differently, but I think that it just became its own different thing. I think I mentioned earlier to you that I feel like with tropes, I like reading them when they're a little bit more screwball.

And when I started working on Happy Place, that had been how I had been envisioning the book, but I knew I was writing this broken relationship between these two people, so when I started really getting to know the characters and writing their story, I could not find a way into that more screwball angle no matter how hard I tried. It just wasn't happening. And so I think the book feels a bit more melancholy and angsty than my previous books, but that's just the nature of these particular characters' story.

Maybe the only way that I did actively set out to do something different was I decided I wanted to write about a friend group, and I knew that that was going to be a challenge after doing three books where I got to really hone in pretty close on just two or three characters in their relationships. I knew that was going to be a real challenge for me to balance the romance with this friendship love story.

GR: You've touched on the pandemic a few times. How did the pandemic change you?

EH: I had already kind of accepted what an introvert I am, but I think during the beginning of the pandemic it was really interesting how much I realized I actually do need people around me beyond just my immediate family, like those friendships that we were talking about and having a deeper appreciation for those and what those bring into your life.

But then also knowing that things have kind of eased up again a little bit, it’s interesting having gotten so used to being such a homebody and having to find the energy to go out and do things. Knowing that it's important for my mental health and for my relationships, but also feeling like I could pretty much just be home writing all the time and be happy, which I'm very lucky that that is basically my life. It’s also just kind of funny that I have kind of gone through this weird global phenomenon we've all been dealing with and come out of it being like, “Oh, I really love being at home.” That's a nice thing.

GR: Is there any part of Harriet's life that you would like to embody? Like a place where she's at in the novel that you wouldn't mind hanging out at?

EH: She’s getting into pottery as the book goes on, and I have never really done any pottery or at least not since I was a kid. Because I love writing so much and I love reading so much, I don't have a ton of hobbies that are not book related. That’s kind of something that whenever I'm writing a character who has some other hobby, I'm like, “Ohhh that could be fun. Maybe I should get into that. Maybe I should try that.”

I think there's something really healthy about having a thing you like doing that has no connection to your work whatsoever. It's just kind of weird when your work and your passion and your hobbies are all overlapping. It's hard to find that balance.

GR: Finally, in this book, Harriet and Wyn are keeping a pretty big secret from their friends. What's the biggest secret you've ever kept?

EH: Oh my gosh, really? [Laughs.] I am bad at keeping secrets, and I'm also one of those people who has that feeling that a secret is a lie, and so I feel like the biggest secrets that I've really kept have probably just been like surprise parties and that's so boring. I'm trying to think. I mean, I guess there are big things that I've had to keep under wraps. Like whenever you get film deal news, that's something that you can't talk about for usually years. There are legal reasons that you can't, so it's not like a fun scandalous secret that you're keeping. It's just that I don't want to get sued!