Love in Multitudes: Emily Henry’s “Great Big Beautiful Life”

Like most readers, I go through reading slumps. Right out of undergrad and after four years of being told what and when to read, I found myself floundering trying to find what type of books really interested me. Whenever I heard someone say “contemporary romance,” I thought of what I’ve come to know as “bodice rippers”—little trade paperbacks clad with a cover of a shirtless Fabio. But after lackluster mysteries and haughty literary fiction, I took a chance and grabbed a colorfully bound romance off the shelf. That book was Book Lovers by Emily Henry, and it revitalized my love of reading. 

As an Emily Henry stan (yes, I’ve read every single one of her books), you can imagine my awe and excitement when I received her new novel, Great Big Beautiful Life. 

Great Big Beautiful Life follows Alice Scott, a bubbly celebrity journalist who tracks down the Paris Hilton-like heiress of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Margaret Ives, in an effort to write a biography of her extravagant and tragedy-ridden life. When Alice arrives on Margaret’s coastal Georgia island, she quickly realizes she is competing to write Margaret’s story with Pulitzer prize-winning biographer and broad-shouldered grump Hayden Anderson. Now in her eighties, the former tabloid princess puts Alice and Hayden each on a one-month trial in which they separately interview her, with a decision of who will tell her story to come at the end of the month. However, the stories Margaret provides Alice and Hayden aren’t the same, and neither writer knows why. Navigating NDAs, burgeoning romance, and professional ambitions, Alice and Hayden must put aside their differences and unravel the mystery that is Margaret Ives and her family’s empire. 

As Ms. Henry said herself, Great Big Beautiful Life is a departure from her previous novels. Sure, the Emily Henry signatures are back—cozy, vibrant small-town settings, heartwarming familial subplots, and laugh-out-loud dialogue. But this book does something different than Book Lovers or Beach Read—it centers the importance of familial love as much as the romance storyline. For example, Alice and her mother Angela traverse the rocky terrain of mother-daughter relationships after parental death. Margaret recounts the complex history of the Ives lineage. Hayden struggles to process and break free of past trauma and rigid expectations. In the end, while this is a love story, it’s not strictly a romance. 

This isn’t at all to say that romance isn’t a core part of the story. Trust me, there’s a lot of sexual tension and a good amount of dry-humping (I never thought I’d use that term in a professional piece), but it isn’t what drives the novel. Instead, the novel’s driving force is Margaret and the life story she recounts to Alice. To move the plot forward, Ms. Henry carefully intersperses Margaret’s biographized memories and family lineage within scenes of Alice and Hayden and Alice and Margaret in the present day. These flashes of unique histories create an anecdotal quilt of family narratives, grief, and perseverance against all odds. 

Because this novel was so different from her past works, it took me a second to “get into” Great Big Beautiful Life. A novel about two writers duking it out to tell the glamorous life of a recluse heiress is honestly right up my alley, but I clocked very early that this one would move differently than her previous books I admire so much. 

Alice and Hayden’s characterizations lean a bit more into the tropes of a sunshine lover girl and aloof Adonis coupling than I’m used to reading. At times, the romance feels a bit fast, so the mystery of Margaret’s life left me itching to return to the Ives storyline. While their romance moves quickly at first glance, Henry draws a touching connection between Alice and Hayden and Margaret and her husband, Cosmo Sinclair. Though they take place decades apart, both couples’ loves are swift, all-consuming, and somewhat instantaneous—testaments of how beautiful it is to love so deeply that time stops mattering. 

Henry also gives plenty of room for Alice to grow. She allows Alice to challenge her sometimes-overly sunny tendencies and be honest with herself and others, ultimately endearing her as a relatably flawed, but nevertheless lovable main character. While Hayden wasn’t my favorite male lead of the Henry-verse, he is sweet, genuine, and loves hard. Amidst a cast of incredibly rich and compelling characters, he holds his own.

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This novel is also yet another show of Emily Henry’s writing prowess. The beach breeze feels tangible, the humidity on the lake sticky and stifling, the lowlights of the neighborhood bar warm against your face. From the sweltering Georgia heat of her mother’s garden to the opulent castle of the Ives, Henry has created a story, or more aptly, remade the world for the reader. 

Great Big Beautiful Life is complicated and emotional; sweet, sexy, and ultimately what you expect from the queen of contemporary romance: full of love. Henry would say that, at its core, so is this great, big, beautiful life we get to live.

FICTION
Great Big Beautiful Life
By Emily Henry
Berkley
Published April 22, 2025