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Soon after Emily Henry left Hope College, a small, Christian-values-lite school in a tiny town in Michigan, she found herself living back in Cincinnati, trapped in her first postcollege job doing technical writing for the city’s phone-and-cable company. She’d always liked creative writing, but it seemed as plausible a career choice as her childhood dream of being a WNBA player. However, she discovered while spending her days writing company manuals and handbooks for set-top boxes that nothing makes the creative spirit bloom more than a mind-numbing job.
So she woke up early before work and started churning out a YA novel. When it was done, she Googled agents until she found Lana Popovic Harper, who agreed to represent her. Henry wrote four books in three years, teenage coming-of-age stories full of darkish magic realism. The books were well received and sold modestly, but the back-to-back pace left her feeling burned out and uninspired. “I didn’t have much more to say about teenagers at that point,†she explains, settling into her writing couch at her home in Cincinnati, legs crossed, elbows on knees; in the position of eternal adolescence.
She was also approaching 30 and found herself wrestling with the bumps and lumps of a second coming of age, one that was a lot less optimistic than her first. This was 2019. Faced with another nail-biting presidential election, and aging, and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, Henry realized how little control she had over her world. “I was not doing great,†she says. “I wasn’t properly medicated at the time, which was part of it. I was just so stressed out and anxious.†She’d always preferred darker stories and sci-fi to explore existential questions, but suddenly she couldn’t bear the darkness. She had writer’s block, so she decided to try her hand at something lighter.
“It was just my secret little thing I would go into my office and write,†she says. In the story she eventually produced, January Andrews, a millennial romance writer who can’t write, is unlucky in love and grieving the death of her father. Too broke to pay rent, she moves into the lake house he left her on the shores of Lake Michigan, where she is reunited with her college nemesis, Augustus Everett, a successful “serious literary writer†who also can’t write his next book, about survivors of a local death cult. Naturally, they fall in love (and finish their books).
It’s a standard romance, but embedded in the enemies-to-lovers, small-town, and opposites-attract tropes is a not-so-subtle manifesto dressed up as smoldering banter. January and Augustus have “will they or won’t they†arguments about the merits of romance that seem to address a body of invisible, internalized critics whom Henry foresaw dismissing her novel as trash. Henry writes this rant for her heroine:
If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns do you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction … but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I’ve eliminated half of the Earth’s population from my potential readers, and you know what? I don’t feel ashamed of that. I feel pissed.
An impassioned prelude to a prelude to a kiss (things burn slow in EmHen world), it was also Henry’s way of reassuring herself that wanting to write romance in all its sincere, vulnerable glory was worthy of respect. In the end, January not only gets the guy but learns that he’s always respected her writing, even when she thought he didn’t. Even when she didn’t.
Although there’s a happy ending and a love story, the resulting book was a lot heavier than she expected. She meant to write something purely lighthearted, and she wound up with grief and familial betrayal and cults, but also kissing. When Henry started writing it, she saved the document as “Beach Read.†She’d intended to change the title and then realized it served as a cheeky joke about “our preconceptions about the genre.â€
When Henry was done, she put the manuscript away, taking it out just once to show to Harper, who liked it but didn’t really know what to do with it. It was hard to find a place in the market for a romance that prominently features a B-plot about a death cult.
A lot can happen in a two-year span. Henry went on Zoloft and started to feel better, and the pandemic forced millions inside, where they began losing their minds in their own unique ways. Among the trapped were a legion of Gen-Zers, some recently graduated and craving lighthearted, nonacademic reading, some just depressed and seeking nourishing distractions. Millennials had tried decorating with soft pink throw pillows and basic acts of maintenance they called “adulting.†These new adults looked around and saw an inhospitable world that was hard to manage, inhabited by people so jaded by a decade of slogging through swipes on dating apps that they’d conditioned themselves into near psychopathy instead of admitting they just wanted to spoon.
Amid the loneliness and disconnection and confusing sexual politics, romance — a genre that honored big feelings and crying jags and a nice, soft world where people were free to be corny and earnest and direct — became a balm. Once denigrated as a guilty pleasure for the desperate, horny housewife, to Gen-Zers, romance wasn’t embarrassing at all. In fact, they loved it. And when Beach Read finally came out in May 2020, those young readers put their hearts in Henry’s hands. She has since sold 2.4 million books collectively and spent a cumulative 145 weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list. Two of her books, Book Lovers and People We Meet on Vacation, were recently optioned for films. Her fourth romance novel, Happy Place, comes out next month. She’s already working on her fifth.
Love is embarrassing. Every aspect of it requires maximum humiliation. And while it’s human nature to love, to want love, it’s mortifying to be caught in the act of it: putting yourself out there for it, asking for it. It is embarrassing to receive it, to open yourself up to it. Love is like a high-school bully, poking at tender spots, forcing a response, reducing us to — what? Softies! Simps! People who want to gaze and smile and sigh and melt. Who feel a spark and sit with it long enough to let it catch fire. Who luxuriate in silences and sexual tension. Who exchange little kisses, not just in dark bars but on the street, in the grocery store, in front of their friends. Who hold hands. Who nickname. Who interlace fingers and stroke hair and make up excuses to brush their person’s eyebrow because they like to touch their person’s eyebrow, but that’s so weird, haha. It’s all so cringey! To call someone “your person.†To be caught singing a little song because you’re in love. Or doing a little dance … together? Oh my God. Touching knees? Biting lips? Having your special li’l nook under their arm? Tearing up over gestures both grand and mundane? Oh my God, please, wow, nope, don’t look at me. Romance? Is there a witness-protection program for little bitches? Sign me up.
“But that’s the joy of romance,†exclaims Henry. “Dating is humiliating. Sex is funny and embarrassing. I think there’s so much beauty in having a genre that’s like, You’re going on the most vulnerable journey a human can go on with a fake person. You’re going to imagine what it’s like to fall in love.†When Henry started writing, she had to — and, she admits, still has to — “race through those puppies†in order to overcome the embarrassment of writing about love enough to write about it. She had to learn to manipulate fights and maintain blind hope in the face of heartbreak, squirm through earnestness, and, finally, land the big declaration that leads to a believable, satisfying happily ever after, contractually guaranteed. She finished that first manuscript in six weeks, writing so quickly she left sentences unfinished. She had to write the way people in romance novels fall for each other: breathlessly, jumping in fast enough to get swept away before they start to second-guess themselves.
Henry is in the periwinkle vintage-diner-inspired kitchen, rocking back and forth on her red-socked feet, trying to make an espresso while keeping up a steady flow of conversation. She lives in a friendly cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Cincinnati in the mid-century-modern rancher she shares with her husband and a deaf American bully named Dottie, a cookies-and-cream-colored “goblin angel†who greets you enthusiastically (but can’t hear when you ask her to stop licking your face). She chats about The Bachelorette, then interrupts herself to wonder if she’s doing the espresso right, then interrupts herself to explain what kind of milk she has, then to tell me she vacuumed earlier, then cuts herself off one last time to assure me the lid of the garbage can isn’t gross. She will later DM me to apologize for making a mediocre espresso.
As she flits about the kitchen, she’s her own novels’ Everywoman come to life: a lanky honey blonde in blue jeans and a pink-and-yellowish checked sweater. The type of woman who manages to still pull off a 2009 wispy-bang topknot, who projects “real,†and “lovely,†and “charmingly goofy†without it feeling like a bit. She’s like the coolest friend at the Nashvegas bachelorette party.
On Instagram, she promotes her books with heartfelt captions about what the work means to her and plugs the books of other romance novelists. She posts photos of Dottie with self-deprecating captions that insinuate the dog thinks she’s a dumb human. She likes bright and whimsical prints and red lipstick and bold winged eyeliner. She’s aware her tiny nose ring might look like a booger, so her bio reads, “it’s just my nose ring.†During a round of press for her first book, she was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly, and the resulting headline was “Emily Henry’s Beach Read was built on yogurt and good lighting.†She was slightly mortified that she seemed so boring. She does love yogurt, but more than that she “loves not making decisions,†she explains before admitting, “Earlier today, I was, like, cleaning to impress you, and I started marching around the house chanting, ‘Yogurt break! Yogurt break!’ Then I went to the fridge, and I had one yogurt left, and I was like, I hope this doesn’t come up because I’m going to look like a fraud.â€
Henry has since realized that this accessibility and familiarity, bordering on basic, is sort of her superpower. When she launched her Substack last year, she called it Emily’s Grocery List; the first post was an extended riff on, you guessed it, why she likes yogurt and the agony of having her tastes and personality reduced to “Yogurt Queen of the Ohio River Valley,†but, hoping to be useful, she also shared two recommendations for yogurts she likes. Her characters talk like she talks. (“Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day,†says Nora, the protagonist in her third romance novel, Book Lovers.) Their worlds are littered with familiar, just-hip-enough modern products (they sip from Estelle wine glasses, for example), and the clothes they wear are Nordstrom accessible, not SSENSE intimidating. They shop at Trader Joe’s. You sense that, like Henry, they absolutely listen to Taylor Swift. In fact, these books give off the energy of having been written in a multiverse where Swift didn’t pick up a guitar and instead chose romance novels as the medium to express her yearnings. As with a good Swift song, someone could read her books and feel comforted by the fact that a woman who really likes yogurt can be seen and chosen and adored by a perfectly calibrated love interest.
“I’ve very, very recently realized that every time I put out a book, I have basically the same fear right beforehand, which is how the heroine will be received,†says Henry. “It’s funny. It’s always a different reason.†She was worried that readers would be annoyed that January was so emotional and cried a lot. She worried that people would think Poppy from People We Meet on Vacation told too many jokes, or consider Nora from Book Lovers a bitch, or find her latest protagonist, Harriet from Happy Place, “too spineless†or a “people pleaser,†she explains. “There was a moment where I just came full circle and my head popped off and rolled across the floor because I realized, Oh, I’m afraid of how people see me. It does feel like I’m putting this little part of myself into these characters. If people don’t like that thing about her, reject that thing about her, I am probably going to take it too personally. But there’s always women who relate to it.†Henry pauses and carefully corrects herself: “There’s always readers, regardless of gender, who relate to these characters.â€
The relatability tour continues as we move from the kitchen through the rest of the house, full of mid-century décor that’s slightly more whimsical than West Elm: lots of records and vintage furniture, bright printed area rugs. Wooden birds hang on one wall in a flying V formation; a mural painted by Henry’s friend is on another. Each day, after Wordle and Spelling Bee confirms her genius, Henry starts writing from her living room, lying on her couch like a frail Victorian poetess except with a laptop on her chest instead of a piece of parchment. She’ll rotate couches when she wants a different view: the fire, the yard. Sometimes she’ll move to the guest bedroom, where there’s a walking treadmill and some hand weights. Only occasionally does she work from the emerald-green velvet couch in her office, which functions more as a trophy room: boxes of her books and shelves lined with international editions. She points out titles in Polish, French, Italian, and Spanish. “It’s my version of Duolingo,†she jokes. She avoids the room when she’s trying to work; the bound and complete copies just taunt her with her own success. “Every time I’m writing a book, I keep thinking, I don’t know about this one,†she jokes. She’s sort of waiting for the flop.
It wasn’t until after she began writing Beach Read that Henry started reading more romance: research, mostly, to find her place in it. Romance is a parachute-size genre, big enough to fit any and all desires. Within that vastness, it splits off into many branches, the biggest of which are contemporary romance, historical romance, and paranormal romance, categories that are distinct enough that, for example, when writer Jayne Ann Krentz strays from her usual contemporary romance, she uses different pen names (Amanda Quick for historical and Jayne Castle for paranormal). Within those buckets, there are sub-subgenres (suspense, Regency era, monster) and sub-sub-subgenres (kidnapping, female rake, werewolf) and on and on until you find your hyperspecific yum.
Henry’s own journey started with Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game (an enemies-to-lovers, workplace-set contemporary romance that was recently adapted into a movie) and soon discovered Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test and Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date. The books are fun and frothy, but they also deal with “real stuff,†she says. The writers can ruminate on illness or death or grief or other heavy aspects of life so long as they have the safety net of a happily ever after. And because they aren’t set in Regency England, love, sex, and power dynamics play out in a way that feels, if not applicable, at least aspirational. The characters’ problems are familiar, they look like people in the world (i.e., some of them aren’t white, straight, or thin), and they have jobs and cell phones and listen to Miley Cyrus and talk about their IUDs and antidepressants and consent. It isn’t for everyone (my friend Jen wants no iPhones or dating-app mishaps in her romance novels; she wants her bodice ripped), but it was exactly what Henry needed, and what she realized she was writing.
Henry was discovering this subgenre just as Guillory’s books were gaining mainstream popularity. The spicy romances (the ones with more fucking) that had grown in popularity in the 2010s — thanks both to the rise of e-books, which granted readers more privacy, and the explosion of E. L. James and Fifty Shades of Grey — had waned. These new romance novels had more emotional buildup, and the nasty, naughty, freaky stuff happened off the page. These were the books drawing in new readers.
Leah Koch, the co-owner of the Ripped Bodice, a Los Angeles–based romance bookstore, has noticed these new romance dabblers, who come in asking for things they’ve seen on BookTok: Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us or Henry’s Book Lovers. Articles dissecting the sudden appearance of Gen Z in the genre come prepared with the preemptive defense against people who deride romance — an oft-cited string of stats tells a story of a hugely profitable, if continuously disrespected, genre (romance novels generate more than $1 billion each year, while the rest of the publishing industry’s sales decline; 46 percent of romance fans read at least one book a week).
These stories go on to declare that this is not their mother’s romance. In some cases, though, it is. What it isn’t is their mother’s attitude toward romance. These new readers don’t need to be convinced it’s okay to read about love. Koch points out that the “collective consciousness of misogyny in general†has created a better environment for romance. “People have a better understanding of how previous societal attitudes about romance were rooted in misogyny, as opposed to, say, discussions of quality,†she says. “So more and more women in general — not only women, but for the most part — are feeling, I think, more comfortable reading romance more widely, discussing romance more widely, and giving less of a shit about other people’s opinions.â€
These readers are also expanding the philosophical and political benefits of reading “books with kissing.†Sanjana Basker is a New York–based grad student who applies her sex, gender, and women’s-health studies to review romance novels on TikTok, where she goes by BaskinSuns. As she explained recently on the podcast Care So Much, “The notion of being earnestly devoted to something is really difficult to engage with for a lot of people, especially academics or self-described intellectuals,†especially in a way that resembles a young woman’s dramatic and intense emotional life. “Emotions make people antsy. I think it makes them uncomfortable to think about love with any seriousness.†Romance is all about the willingness to fall and let yourself be caught, about learning how to be vulnerable with another person. “If you read it right, it challenges a lot of ideas and structural problems,†she said, so long as people could get over what she’s diagnosed as “our societal problem with sincerity.†A Henry fan, Basker tells me what she really responds to is Henry’s ability to be earnest. “That earnestness and sincerity is the thing that sparks off the page,†Basker says. “You don’t have romance without earnestness and optimism and sincerity. It just doesn’t work.â€
In romance, as in all genre fiction, there is a contract between the writer and the reader that the material will go a certain way. A romance requires a central love story and a happy ending. Koch adds a third requirement: The author and the publisher have to say it’s a romance. (Considering Normal People, Sally Rooney’s epic love story, sold some 740,000 trade-paperback copies even with a Hulu adaptation, while Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation has sold over 1 million, these authors may want to rethink their marketing strategies.)
The current iteration of contemporary romance, specifically the rom-com Henry writes, is reminiscent of a genre that fell out of favor in the early aughts: chick lit. Those big paperback books with high heels and knocked-over cocktail glasses on the cover and women who fight at sample sales and publicists who flirt with their domineering bosses. Books by Jane Green and Jennifer Weiner and Sophie Kinsella that were in lockstep with a feminism that just loved to take pole-dancing classes at Crunch Fitness (but kind of looked down on sex workers). There was very little explicit sex, but you knew everyone was getting laid.
“The market is being cyclical on this,†explains Sarah Younger, a literary agent at Nancy Yost who represents several women’s-fiction authors. “It’s like we lost rom-coms in the film space, and now they’re getting a chance to live again.†But chick lit didn’t really die; the genre just “became pejorative,†as Younger puts it, and so those kinds of books got hoovered back up into contemporary romance. “It’s mostly a name change,†Younger continues. “There are some updates to how the stories are being told and what the characters are doing.â€
What was relegated to chick lit in literary fiction is a “gateway†to romance. Henry offers a gentle, non-alienating introduction to the genre, a way to decide if you like romance and want more, like romance and want more but different, or hate romance altogether. (My gateway writer was Green and her 2000 chick-lit masterpiece, Jemima J. I kept going down the path, taking hard left turns until I found my home in dark erotic romance. Welcome. I’ve lived here for years.) Claire McLaughlin, a.k.a. Claire Reads Books, a die-hard romance reader and popular BookTuber, has noticed more of her friends coming to Henry and her cohorts like Guillory and Ali Hazelwood: “It’s been a gateway for a lot of women who think of themselves as too smart and then read these books and think, Oh, I actually like this type of story too.†She points to one friend who previously read only “super-hard-core history stuff†but now identifies as an EmHen fan.
In an EmHen book, the men not only have voices that “undo your spine like a zipper,†they not only have “one curl that hangs over their eye,†they don’t just growl “You fucking undo me†right before they bone, they also go to therapy and get on meds, even if they are from hardy midwestern families. When a new romance reader comes into the Ripped Bodice, someone who has encountered Henry and is looking for more, Koch will ask for a distillation of what it is they liked about her books. Is it the banter? The steady, nice men who see a therapist? “Books where the hero goes to therapy are people’s favorite,†says Koch. “When I hear gaggles of people who come into the store, someone has read the book and they’re like, ‘Oh my God. You have to read this. The hero is so cute. He’s such a cinnamon roll’†— a term borrowed from fan fiction that means the male love interest is “really sweet, but he’s not a pushover.â€
“Love and respect actually do go hand in hand,†Henry says, “and I’m not sure that’s something that was modeled much in our media growing up. There was even that whole craze where they were like, ‘Women need love, and men need respect.’ I need both, and if I’m choosing, I maybe even need respect more.â€
Henry writes in familiar tropes, respectfully, whether in People We Meet on Vacation (city girl, friends to strangers to lovers, opposites attract, forced proximity, there’s only one bed) or Book Lovers (enemies to lovers, fish out of water, small town) or Happy Place (second chances, fake engagements, forced proximity, there’s only one bed). “It’s a translation of a translation of a good rom-com,†explains Maddie Caldwell, an editor who runs a popular romance book club at Word Bookstore in Greenpoint. Henry’s not trying to subvert these tropes, just wink at them. Caldwell understands the appeal of the relationships Henry creates. “They’re really respectful. They’re really nonconfrontational and unproblematic. It’s the opposite of Colleen Hoover, who is kind of digging into the dark places of romance and letting you be a voyeur into some of the darker moments, but Emily Henry, I think, is giving you the Platonic ideal of a relationship right now.â€
That ideal is a throwback to the rom-com virtues of yore, when foreplay wasn’t an obstacle-free rush to hit the sheets. In an EmHen book, there won’t be a random blowjob on page 25, I learned after reading her books, because you have to emotionally earn the blowjob. For the hard-core romance readers, the dearth of explicit sex can be an annoyance — sex is part of what they come to romance to luxuriate in. (“I will say, as a romance reader, I do think that sometimes falling more into the gray area between romance and relationship fiction, it can get a little bit frustrating,†says Caroline Green, a.k.a. @salty_caroline_reads, a San Antonio BookToker. Emily Henry isn’t who she goes to for sex.) Koch insists that these relationship-forward books don’t indicate Gen Z doesn’t like a horny erotic novel, but, she points out, even readers fresh off Fifty Shades of Grey tend to say what they liked most about the book was the intricate details of a relationship they might want for themselves.
For Henry, the choice is in part about trying to avoid the trap of the blasé “smart cool woman†who’s “allowed to be horny†but isn’t allowed to mix horniness with romanticism. She still gets uncomfortable when she has to go over the mechanics of a sex scene in detail with the copy editors, she says. What Henry excels at, though, is the buildup before the sex: Foreplay begins by making sure your values align and evolves with every step, with every date, with every first kiss, with every boundary clearly set. Then comes the yearning, the heat-filled kisses before you wait to retrieve a condom. There are often conversations about birth control in Henry’s sex scenes because she likes to have at least one “levelheaded character.â€
It’s a romance that has to be safe before it can be passionate. Henry’s books are full of people who are messy and know they need to deal with it before they can be good partners. And while the books might seem a little prudish in their adherence to no assholes, no volatility (isn’t the sex better in books where toxic assholes roam free?), this offering of normal and supportive love is its own kind of radical. Love, as Henry presents it, is sturdy, long-lasting if cared for correctly, a low-grade constant warmth versus a hot, devouring flame. “Love, after all, was often made not of shiny things but practical ones. Ones that grew old and rusted only to be repaired and polished,†she writes in Beach Read.
“I can imagine reading that for the first time feels exciting,†says Caldwell. “If romance is anything, it’s a rubric for female autonomy and having a space to say what you want and see what you want written about in a meaningful way. So I can see how, for young readers, that would be a really exciting proposition because they’re kind of trying to evaluate what a healthy relationship looks like.â€
1. People We Meet on Vacation (May 2021): Poppy and Alex are the new When Harry Met Sally …, two BFFs who find they may be more than friends when their vacation turns into a total disaster. Copies sold as of March 11, 2023: 1,039,009
2. Happy Place (April 2023): On a trip to Maine with their college friends, a recently split couple so convincingly pretend to still be engaged that they fall back in love.
3. Beach Read (May 2020): Two depressed authors in a slump challenge each other to finish writing their books but get distracted by how much they want to make out with each other. Copies sold: 728,045
4. Book Lovers (May 2022): A cutthroat New York City literary agent agrees to spend the summer in a small town with her pregnant sister. She runs into a grumpy (but secretly soft) book editor she hates, and their professional beef soon turns into a sweet Hallmark-movie romance. Copies sold: 635,312
In her Cincinnati living room, as the light shifts from early-afternoon gray to late-afternoon gray, Henry puts down glasses of water for both of us and offers me a Clif Bar from a jar of them. The glasses, which are adorable and vintage like everything else in her home, were a Christmas gift from her husband. “This sounds depressing, but you know that thing of getting older where your presents become really practical and you’re like, Oh hell yeah!†That’s the kind of thing a Henry male love interest would absolutely do: build a table, buy the right glasses, remember to get blueberry ice cream for his beloved.
Where do we learn to love? For Henry, her philosophy of love came from watching her parents read. When she and her brothers were kids, they would read to them every night, sitting in the hallway between their bedrooms. “My dad would do all the character’s voices,†she says. “He still does that for my mom. She’ll fall asleep with her CPAP machine on, and he’ll be reading loud enough for her to hear it,†she adds, casually tossing out the most devastatingly romantic act I’ve heard in some time.
Henry grew up in Kentucky and Ohio with two older brothers who instilled in her a tenacity to prove herself, always. Her mother and father worked at the phone company. She remembers a girlhood spent in freedom, reading with a flashlight in the closet after bedtime and roaming the woods pretending to be a witch and painting her face with wild-berry juice until her mother blew a whistle to call her home. But she also remembers the pervasive feeling in the ’90s that “girlhood was just embarrassing,†she says. “Womanhood was embarrassing, desire was embarrassing, and you weren’t supposed to feel any of that, engage with any of that. And liking things that were deemed traditionally ‘feminine’†— air quotes — “was not cool.â€
She was 7, maybe 8, when she had her first crush. “I wrote him a note that was probably like a ‘Do you like me? Yes or no.’ His mom found it in his backpack and for some reason called my mom. And it’s like, Why?†she says, sitting back on her couch and messing her Zooey Deschanel wisps into a curtain to hide behind. “We were tiny children. I don’t understand what the intent was. Maybe she thought it was cute. I think that was probably the first time that I was just like, Oh, that’s so embarrassing. And it hadn’t really occurred to me when I wrote the note that it could be. I don’t think I yet had that fear of what it would be like for this boy to say, ‘No, I don’t like you.’â€
Her family moved to Cincinnati when she was in high school, where it took her more time than she’d care to admit to make a group of friends. She did, though they were mostly boys. She describes herself as someone who “just kept breaking her own heart over and over†by finding someone with the “worst problems†and offering them her whole heart. That ended when, at 18, she met her husband, a touring musician. They started dating while she was in college, and eventually she moved back home to end their many years of long distance. “We met when we were babies, but we dated for a long time before we got married. I highly advise it because we were totally different people from when we started dating.†Now she’s almost guilty over how much she loves their life together. “It’s so great to have a partner where we go to opposite ends of the house and just work all day long and leave each other alone and then afterward be like, ‘And now we can pick out what we’re going to watch or what board game we’re going to play.’â€
As if on cue, her husband, a mustached, hoodie-wearing dude, emerges from his basement studio and interrupts politely. “Sorry,†he says, moving as fast as possible through the living room. “I’m just putting away the Green Chef.†And then, just as suddenly, he is gone. While Henry’s male protagonists have historically been moody fixer-uppers with hearts of gold that just need to be therapized into beating, the guy she’s writing for her fifth book is more like her husband. “It’s the most golden-retriever-ish hero I’ve ever written. Just a very nice man. I feel like as we get older, we appreciate nice people way more.â€
She thinks a beat. “It’s actually very Freudian,†she jokes. “My dad is such a kind, sweet man, and my husband is a kind, sweet man in the same way. My grandpa is that magic grandpa where you’re like, ‘You’re so nice.’ Anyway!†she continues brightly.
Although Henry is seemingly well adjusted enough not to struggle with giving and receiving love, she did struggle with the more overt aspects of being a woman who desires and has feelings. “You thought to be smart, you should like things that are basically marketed toward men. If you’re not smart, then you like things that are marketed toward women or girls.
I really unfortunately did buy into that until college.†She got to college and made a group of girlfriends who liked rom-coms and makeup, and that helped her stop feeling insecure. But it wasn’t until she started writing and reading romance that she began to reconsider her relationship to love and sex, and her “puritanical†relationship to romance in general. “Sex and the conversations that sex leads to or that happen during sex, or the embarrassment that can come with having sex with someone for the first time,†she realized, was an important part of the story.
Henry’s next book, Happy Place, will be released in hardcover and has sprawling intersecting story lines. She takes out the big corkboard she used to plot it out and tries to explain the system she used, struggling to remember which color corresponds with which timeline. It’s a book that seems to be taking Henry further away from the genre. She uses flashbacks and an ensemble of friends that each have clearly defined trajectories. While it does focus mostly on Harriet (Harry) and Wyn, a recently separated couple who pretend to still be engaged during a friend-group trip, it’s not necessarily a book that will lift you out of your romantic gloom, even if it does deliver on the genre’s promise. The love will sneak up on you. “I think there are still so many people out there who don’t know that they would love romance novels,†she says. “I’m just trying to trick people into reading them because their lives are going to be better for it. That’s my big master plan.â€
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