Despite the fact that I love to read, I never thought I’d write or share a piece about books. I am aware that this is a huge divergence from the film and television-related content I usually come out with. However, earlier this year I binged all three of Emily Henry’s novels back-to-back. And I was completely spellbound, swept up in her funny and undyingly romantic but melancholic world. Without wanting to sound cliched, they spoke to me on a level few contemporary novels have. I found myself both delighted and moved by them. Her hotly anticipated new release, Happy Place (2023), comes out tomorrow. In addition to that, it’s now been confirmed that all three of her previous novels Beach Read (2020), People We Meet on Vacation (2021) (or You and Me on Vacation as it is alternatively titled in Europe) and Book Lovers (2022) are being adapted for the screen. And so, I’m using these combined factors as an excuse to immortalise my love for the woman who is, in my opinion, the current reigning queen of romance.
Emily Henry exploded onto the literary romance scene in 2020 with the release of her debut novel Beach Read, which firmly established her as a force to be reconned with. Now a #1 New York Times best-selling author, the Cincinati-born writer in her early thirties has three smash-hit novels which have redefined contemporary literary romance. Drawing from what she knows, her stories often revolve around the literary world. Be it with Beach Read , the story of two authors, Book Lovers of a literary agent and book editor, or even in the case of People We Meet on Vacation, a travel journalist and an English teacher/writer. There are some ridiculous criticisms of this making her novels samey or derivative of each other, but I couldn’t disagree more. Each story feels completely distinctive and grounded in its own environment. Using the touchstone of the literary world only makes these characters feel more authentic and lived in based on Emily’s own experiences.
The romcom is a genre so well-worn and arguably tired, it’s challenging to truly breathe new life into it or give it the complexity that only true masters of the form can. But from the early pages of Beach Read, Emily Henry’s distinctive voice leaps off the page like a breath of fresh air. She’s effortlessly funny without ever trying too hard and her observations on the world are sharp. Even whilst only having one or two gracefully executed sex scenes per book, each of her love stories are deeply sensual and seeped in sexual tension, as it slowly builds through each romance.
There is something so authentic and emotionally intelligent about the characters Emily Henry writes. Her female protagonists are deeply empathetic figures with relatable insecurities. However, they’re capable and headstrong figures who, even at their most vulnerable moments, exhibit grace and resilience. So often, the failure of first-person POV romance novels comes from the character whose head you are living in being frustrating or flimsy in their choices and motivations. But in the case of Emily Henry, I found myself tethered to all three protagonists, revelling in every moment I got to spend in their internal worlds and acutely understanding who they were and why they made each of their decisions, even if I didn’t always agree with them. And there’s a perfect balance between all three women being infused with the same vivacity, intellect and often fears about the world, while being completely distinct from each other.
And I am willing to make the bold claim right now that Emily Henry has gifted us the greatest book boyfriends of all time. I cannot imagine male love interests more dreamy and idiosyncratically perfect than the whip-smart, perceptive and conscious men Henry delivers like the most gratifying form of wish fulfilment. Like the women of Emily Henry’s world, her three male leads are each specific and distinctive while having in common the emotional intelligence and sensitivity one can only dream of in a partner. One of the things I respect the most about Henry’s work is that while never making a point of doing so, her novels are refreshing subversions of so much of the patriarchal tropes which dominate the majority of love stories. As someone who has read an unhealthy amount of romance books, getting men like the ones Henry writes, who are devoid of the macho, dominant bullshit which we have been convinced makes up the ideal man, is unfortunately rare. In the same way that few others like Sally Rooney have mastered it, Henry’s love stories truly feel like the convergence of two likeminded souls who are pulled together like magnets, without any of the external, societally induced trappings which other stories get so bogged down in.
When you read the back of an Emily Henry book, there are certain preconceived notions you may have of her work based on its fantastical romantic trappings. But if I had to describe the tone of her work in one word, other than romantic, it would be melancholic. While she loves her own version of a happily ever after and clearly believes in the ability of love to persist through struggle, there is undeniably tragedy woven through her love stories.
As I go on to discuss what I adore about each of her novels, what will become clear is that there is one theme which I feel defines all of her work. In essence, it’s what it seems Emily Henry believes to be the true meaning of being in love with someone. And that is the idea of being seen by someone in the deepest sense. It is, in my opinion, the pursuit of all three of her complex, fierce protagonists wading their way through the world, to find the first person who sees them in their entirety and isn’t scared by what they see. In honesty, it might be fair to label this as the core pursuit of all humans. Which is why this universally relatable desire is such an anchoring core to Henry’s luscious love stories.
“When I watch you sleep,” he said shakily, “I feel overwhelmed that you exist.”
Author January Andrews is a once-terminally optimistic romantic. Her incessantly positive outlook on life has now been extinguished by the death of her father, and by the subsequent revelation that he had been having an affair for years, shattering the picture January held of her perfect family. Upon his death he left January a beach house which she was unaware existed but has now moved into for the summer to focus on writing the next romance book which her publishers are hounding her for, though she is feeling anything but romantic at this moment. As fate would have it, the beach house puts her right next door to Augustus ‘Gus’ Everett, fellow author, though of broody, cynical stories devoid of romance, and January’s college rival. They have a contentious history, apart from one night at a frat party January tries her best to forget, where the pair got a little hot and heavy. As they're both struggling with writer's block and each have less than favourable views of each other’s area of writing, Gus proposes a bet where they will swap, and each attempt to write a book in the other’s genre.
The pair fall into a rhythm of writing in their neighbouring homes and going on weekly excursions to everything from drive-in movies to line dancing as part of January’s romance 101 course for Gus. And depressing interviews he’s been conducting with ex-cult members make up Gus’s introduction for January into his somber, psychological stories. And through slipping into in this pattern, the authors slowly melt into each other. Their rivalry and relentless banter thaws to reveal friendship, which warps into an intense attraction that becomes hard to ignore. The sexual tension between January and Gus is thick and palpable. It clings to them through the slow burn of their romance until they eventually give up fighting it.
Beach Read is a tender and easy love story. Its romance may not explode into a noisy supernova, but it breeds a quiet love born from the comfort of being with someone who makes everything that is terrifying about the world feel a little more manageable. And Emily Henry poses, as she will continue to do through each novel, that the rawest essence of what it means to love someone, is to see them and feel seen by them.
“I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.”
Its romance is one which slowly creeps in on its characters, twisting around them like ivy until they’re entangled in each other.
“I always like that thought, the way two people really did seem to grow into one. Or at least two overlapping parts, trees with tangled roots.”
But it's also a love story which forces two people who have each been wounded by loss in their own ways, to be brave enough to take the plunge, despite knowing all too well the pain that they face if they crash and burn.
Beach Read was my introduction to Emily Henry’s unique cocktail of romance and poetic misery, managing to feel simultaneously devastating and completely uplifting. Reading the book enlightens you to the tongue-in-cheek nature of the title and tagline, which I believe to be knowingly ironic. Because Beach Read, though in a literal sense set in a beach house and centred around books, couldn’t be further from the breezy, shallowness associated with the literary term. And while the tagline promises “Two writers, one holiday. A romcom waiting to happen...”, Beach Read, though certainly both romantic and funny, feels pointedly largely opposed to the typical trappings of a romcom too. It’s an infinitely richer text than meets the eye.
Yes, it’s about January and Gus falling in love. But it’s almost just as much of a reflection on grief and how to possibly keep going and rebuild when it feels like your entire worldview has been shattered. Almost as key to the third act of the book as the romantic climax is a devastating scene in which January is forced to finally reckon with the despair of losing her father that she has been desperately restricting herself from feeling. Coming to the understanding that her only hope of overcoming it is to allow herself to feel it in its entirety and know that she is strong enough to emerge at the other side.
“I was a wound, half-healed-over and scraped raw again.”
The story is a reflection on the mystery which is an inherent part of all human relationships and how you may never truly know all of a person, as difficult a revelation as that may be to accept and grapple with.
“we can never fully know the people we love. When we lose them, there will always be more we could have seen.”
The novel is a push and pull between the cynicism of knowing the very nature of humanity in some ways is for us to let each other down, and nothing is certain, and the optimism of choosing to believe that it’s worth the risk of being let down for the reward of loving and being loved. January and Gus’ hazy love story gorgeously unfurls through Emily Henry’s breakthrough novel. Sure, there are a couple of slightly outdated millennial quirks which Henry brings to the table (can’t say I didn’t cringe at the “new phone who dis” reference or January wearing a pizza print hoodie) but she has such a firm grasp on these characters and sketches them to perfection. Her voice is fresh, her tone is effectively bittersweet and the love story in question is sweet and sexy and poignant.
“I think,” I whisper, “you’re one of the least disappointing people I’ve ever met.”
Nora Stephens is a cut-throat, successful New York City literary agent and workaholic who has it all, except someone to share it with. Her younger sister Libby, the apple of Nora’s eye, convinces her to go on a well-earned, month-long vacation to the small town of Sunshine Falls, which the Stephens sisters soon discover doesn’t quite live up to its idyllic name. Libby has hopes that Nora, who has been unlucky in love through being closed-off and career-focused, may find a hot local to shack up with. But to her bafflement and displeasure, everywhere Nora goes in the dingy town, she runs into Charlie Lastra, the scowling book editor who she has had less than favourable professional run ins with in New York.
Nora and Charlie quickly realise that they are far more similar than they’d like to think, and each learn that there is much more to the other than meets the eye, hidden beneath their matching steely exteriors. But Nora, whose success is born from a fierce determination to never regress back to the poverty and struggle of her upbringing, doesn’t see a possible scenario where she really can have it all; her career, her life in NYC, the only place she feels she truly belongs, her close relationship with her sister and Charlie, who she never intended to fall for.
Book Lovers exists upon the paradox of being both the closest thing Emily Henry has written to a traditional romcom, with a basic plot description which sounds like an early 2000s movie starring Cameron Diaz, while also being, to me, the most deeply cynical of her novels. Nora Stephens, who was forced to take on a motherly role to her younger sister upon their mother’s death and has worked herself within an inch of her life, is a fascinatingly tragic depiction of a woman who has been forced to compartmentalize her emotions and lock them away tightly. Being a natural fixer for everyone around her but never giving herself permission to dream or to allow herself to strive for unabashed happiness.
“All those years spent thinking that I had superhuman self-control, and now I realize I just never put anything I wanted too badly in front of myself,”
She also allows for Henry’s most head-on tackling of patriarchal constructs.
“That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch,”
That’s one of only many of Henry’s biting takedowns of the double standards women are laden with which, while arguably somewhat on the nose, undeniably ring true. This is especially poked at in the context of career-driven women. Men are turned off Nora for her self-assured, headstrong nature and the confidence she exudes. They’re intimidated by it. Nora is known in her industry as a 'shark' and this probing of why men are so offput by ‘sharky’ women is a running theme. As Nora tells Charlie:
“You can afford to be all surly and sharp and people will admire you for it. The rules are different for women. You have to strike that perfect balance to be taken seriously but not seen as bitchy. It’s a constant effort. People don’t want to work with sharky women […] And even men exactly like us don’t want to be with us. I mean, sure, some of them think they do, but next thing you know, they’re dumping you in a four-minute phone call because they’ve never seen you cry and moving across the country”
As she grapples with either being too much or not enough for everyone she meets, and keeping her hopes and dreams padlocked away, it also becomes clearer that Libby, the most important person in the world to Nora, is slipping from her grasp. They may want much different things in life than Nora had realised and she struggles to let her sister and pseudo-surrogate daughter go. She finds herself completely unravelled and lost at sea. But just when she needs it, it is Charlie Lastra who exhibits not just his ability, but his desire, to anchor her.
“You, Nora Stephens, will always be okay.”
Charlie is clouded in his own pessimism as he is threatened with the prospect of having to give up the life he chased in New York and ran from small town life for, and be stuck, wasting away in Sunshine Falls forever. He is perpetually weighed down by this fear of amounting to nothing but dissapointment and wasted potential. However, as is the eternal theme which courses through each of Henry’s novels, Book Lovers is a story about finding someone who sees you and allowing that to liberate you from the weight of your own fears. What is so beautiful about Charlie as a male love interest is that in many ways it is him who embodies many of the traits typically associated with female characters in fictional relationship dynamics. He’s more passive and perfectly happy and willing to take the backseat to Nora and watch her shine. He likes that she's a ‘shark’ and he’s naturally more sensitive and in touch with his feelings in a way which allows him to slowly transfer some of this to Nora, coaxing her repressed fears out of her with unconditional support.
“I read once that sunflowers always orient themselves to face the sun. That’s what being near Charlie Lastra is like for me. There could be a raging wildfire racing toward me from the west and I’d still be straining eastward toward his warmth.”
The paradoxical nature of the text is threaded perfectly by Henry, balancing on the knife’s edge as she manages to deliver scenes which have the ability to both absolutely melt you with their dreamy evocations of love;
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I doubt I will ever like anyone else in the world as much as I like you,"
while inspiring deep sadness from the inability of these characters to let themselves be happy. In an emotional scene between the pair in Charlie’s childhood bedroom after Nora breaks down about being considered the ‘wrong type of woman’, we get one of my favourite passages from Emily Henry’s body or work, which embodies the full spectrum of her brand of enchanting, romantic, tragedy:
“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and – I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”
I can see all the shades of him at once. Quiet, unfocused boy. Pretentious, resentful preteen. Broody high schooler desperate to get out. Sharp-edged man trying to fit himself back into a place he never belonged to begin with.
That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.”
So yes, in typical Emily Henry fashion, Book Lovers ultimately poses that, though often an agonizing game of sacrifice and setback to get there, in a sense love can conquer all and free us from constant self-scrutiny and the weight of our fears. However, only if we are willing to allow our innermost hopes and desires to see the light of day, however terrifying that prospect may be. Because in Book Lovers, in truth, the only thing ever really stopping Nora and Charlie from being happy is their inability to acknowledge that they actually deserve to be.
“I don’t think I knew I was lonely until I met you.”
People We Meet on Vacation/You and Me on Vacation was the last of the Emily Henry trilogy I came to. With the tagline of “Two best friends. Ten Summer Trips. Their last chance to fall in love,” I went into Poppy and Alex’s story with average expectations for a friends-to-lovers tale, and wanting only to be swept into Emily Henry’s world once more. Instead, I found myself moved beyond words by what is one of the most profound and intricate depictions I’ve ever read of how deeply it is possible for another person to burrow themself inside your soul. 'Love story' is far too simple of a term to use to categorise the dense tangle of emotion henry paints over the decade plus that this book spans.
Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen meet on their first night of freshman orientation at the University of Chicago. Their first encounter is awkward, as they are diametrical opposites in every conceivable way. Poppy is a bright-eyed, whimsical free spirit. This is in direct contrast to the sensible, practical-minded and, on the surface, dull Alex who is bashful and introverted. They have no desire to get to know each other further and don’t speak again for the duration of the school year. But as fate would have it, the pair are from the same quaint town in Ohio. Through a carpool scenario, this leads to them being forced to spend hours confined in a car together on a road trip back to Linfield.
The journey begins painfully tense as Poppy tries to wrestle conversation out of a reluctant Alex. But through persistence, she manages to slowly pull on the threads of tightly wound Alex until he unravels in her hands. Each with a biting sense of humour more similar than they had realised and uniquely similar core beliefs beneath their opposing attitudes towards most surface-level things, the two develop an unlikely but undeniable chemistry. From this serendipitous moment, a deep connection is born and over the next year the pair become inseparable. So much so that after their first vacation together the following summer, they make a pact to go on vacation together every single summer.
But the relationship between Poppy and Alex is a vast and complex one, which both seem terrified to ever actually delve into far enough to uncover what’s at its core. They’re ‘best friends’ but there is a palpable romantic and sexual tension interwoven through their friendship, which is squashed down and ignored for the sake of maintaining a companionship which is so sacred to them both.
“ninety-five percent of the time, I see Alex Nilsen in a purely platonic way […] but for that other five percent of the time, there’s this what-if.”
This ‘what-if’ is the unspoken tension which lies just beneath the surface of every vacation they take together. The reasoning behind never allowing herself to entertain the what-if, Poppy's incessant need to pretend that she is capable of just being friends with Alex Nilsen, can be boiled down to a sentence:
“I would rather have one tiny sliver of him forever than have all of him for just a moment and know I’d have to relinquish all of it when we were through.”
And, so begins almost a decade of summer vacations and the pair falling in and out of failed relationships with other people, desperately trying to force themselves to be in love with anybody else.
“Do you love him?”...
“I do.” …
“Do you love him like you love Alex?” …
“I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone the way I love Alex.”
Eventually, a drunken lapse in judgement one night in Croatia blows down the delicate house of cards they had constructed around their feelings for each other to maintain the façade of friendship.
“We’re magnets, trying to draw together even as we cradle the careful distance between us.”
We don’t discover the details of what happened that night until late into the novel, but we know from the start that it leads to them not speaking for the next two years. Poppy is wracked with regret and grief for the most important relationship in her life being taken from her in a way she cannot process. And so, in a last-ditch attempt to get back the man she loves, if only as a friend, she reaches out and wrangles Alex into one more vacation, which she hopes can smooth everything over between them and allow her to compartmentalize her feelings for the sake of keeping him in her life by any possible means.
“Our only hope of maintaining this relationship is through the platonic friendship we’ve always had. That five percent has been creeping up for years, but it’s time to tamp it back down. To squash the what-if.”
What makes People We Meet on Vacation is its intricate and ingenious structure. The book has dualling timelines which are woven together, given to you in a jumble like important puzzle pieces to sift through. There is the present day, in which Alex and Poppy are in Palm Springs, reunited after their years apart in the hopes of restoring their friendship. But intercut with this is the story of all their previous vacations from summers past which have led them to this point. You are presented with the fragments of a decade of Alex and Poppy littered through space and time. And slowly, you are able to piece them together into a kaleidoscopic mosaic of the profound love between these people who know each other better than they know themselves.
“I know,” I tell him, and, “I love you too.” It’s true, but not the full truth. There aren’t enough words vast or specific enough to capture the ecstasy and the ache and the love and fear I feel just looking at him now.”
It’s such a rich text that I have spent a considerable amount of time since my first readthrough re-reading and annotating, slowly piecing together the jagged jigsaw pieces of Poppy and Alex’s history and constant fluidity of where a deep, almost familial love ends, and romance begins. But the crux of this dense knot of intense desire is the way in which each of them never felt seen or understood by another person the way they do by each other. This is particularly vital in the case of Poppy.
“It’s fascinating. How so much of love is about who you are with someone.”
As noted, this is arguably the key theme of all three novels. However, People We Meet on Vacation blows the other two out of the water in the profound, labyrinthine nature it expresses this sentiment. There are multiple passages in the book so beautiful in such a raw, unabashed manor, I had a physical reaction to them, often needing to set the book down for a minute before continuing. It’s a love story in which the characters in question love each other so much and so deeply, it seems to almost transcend the limitations of literature. I want to include some of the most devastatingly moving quotes from the book while not knowing how I can possibly encapsulate them in any kind of analysis. They’re evocations of love as touching as they come.
“I don’t know how to love someone as much as I love you.”
Reflecting on that fateful car journey years after the fact, Alex tells Poppy that;
“I don’t think I knew I was lonely until I met you […] You asked me who I was and – it was like the answers came out of nowhere. Sometimes I feel like I didn’t even exist before that. Like you invented me.”
To be very transparent, Poppy is a strikingly relatable character for me. On the surface she’s bubbly and oozing with passion for the world around her. She’s desperate to suck the marrow out of it in any way she can. But underneath her cover, Poppy is a person who is cursed with the lifelong affliction of crippling loneliness, whether she’s surrounded by others or not. She carries around the core belief that she can never be seen and understood. But some divine force lands Alex Nilsen in her life who, Poppy poses “deep down, where it matters, is like me.” This is the simplest of terms to describe the most powerful of connections. After reading a short story of Alex’s, being invited into the privacy of his writing, she is moved to tears by the revelation that there is at least one other human being on this earth who understands her.
“[I wondered] how I could ever stop feeling lonely when no one could ever know me all the way. When I could never peer into someone’s brain and see it all. And now I’m crying because reading this story makes me feel for the first time that I’m not in my body. Like there’s some bubble that stretches around me and Alex and makes it so we’re just two different colored globs in a lava lamp, mixing freely dancing around each other, unhindered. I’m crying because I’m relieved. Because I will never again feel as alone as I did during those long nights as a kid. As long as I have him I will never be alone again.”
This idea of feeling like you never fit into the world in a profound sense, and then finding someone who allows you to create a little world for two with them, protecting you from the pain of isolation you have been burdoned with, is one of the most romantic ideas of all time.
“I’ve never really felt alone since I met you. I don’t think I’ll ever feel truly alone in this world again as long as you’re in it.”
Because no matter how bad things get, Poppy can now feel “Like I’d never been that girl who felt entirely alone, misunderstood, and I’d always been this one: known, loved, wholly accepted by Alex Nilsen.” She knows that “this Poppy feels safe in the world because he’s in it too.”
“When I look back up at him, he’s beaming up at me, and I think, I love you more now than I ever have. How is it possible that this keeps happening with him? “Can we take a picture together?” I ask, but what I’m thinking is, I wish I could bottle this moment and wear it as a perfume. It would always be with me. Everywhere I went, he’d be there too, and so I’d always feel like myself.”
Poppy echoes this throughout the book, with Emily Henry helping her find a million different ways to say variations of “he makes the entire world feel safer for me.” This idea of universal safety from existential fear is beautiful and expressed in the tiniest of gestures. My favourite of which being when at a dinner party, when people are condescendingly debating Poppy on her love of The Bachelor and she feels embarrassed, with it touching on a deeper nerve of insecurity. Then:
“Alex bumps his leg into mine under the table, and when I glance at him, he’s not even looking my way. He’s just reminding me that he’s here, that nothing can ever hurt me.”
The only thing close to a critique I have of what, if it’s not already clear, is probably my favourite book I’ve ever read, is that for as vast and complex as the novel is, it seems like Emily Henry wasn’t quite sure how to conclude it. She ambles her way through a happy ending which feels a just little too wrapped up with a bow for the length and complexity of Alex and Poppy’s dynamic. That’s not to say it’s not earned or that it’s not still incredibly emotionally satisfying, but there’s something ever so slightly underwhelming about the execution of the concluding chapter and epilogue. That being said, People We Meet on Vacation is a masterful and deeply poetic dissection of every way that you can love a person. Spanning a decade in the lives of two people who are so earth shatteringly, terrifyingly in love with each other, they have to spend ten years trying not to be.
“And here it comes, the moment that keeps slipping through my fingers, like it’s the game-changing detail in an instant replay I can’t seem to pause or slow down. We are just looking at each other. There are no hard edges to grab hold of, no distinct markers on this moment’s beginning or end, nothing to separate it from the millions just like it. But this, this is the moment I first think it. I am in love with you. The thought is terrifying, probably not even true. A dangerous idea to entertain. I release my hold on it, watch it slip away. But there are points in the centre of my palms that burn, scorched, proof I once held it there.”
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