Great Big Beautiful Life

by Emily Henry ★★★★★

Alice Scott is on the verge of something big. She's a mid-level celebrity journalist, living in Los Angeles and writing articles for a fictional publication called The Scratch. But through a combination of luck and perseverance, she has somehow managed to track down Margaret Ives. Ives is celebrity royalty—or at least she was at one point decades ago. Once married to Cosmo Sinclair (who was "Elvis before Elvis") and an heiress to the Ives media fortune, there was a time when Margaret had a Princess Diana-type hold over the American public and was a staple in every tabloid publication. But then, suddenly, Margaret disappeared, and no one has been able to locate her for over twenty years. Against all odds, Alice has somehow found her on a small island off the coast of Georgia, and moreover she has managed to get Margaret—now in her eighties—to take a meeting to discuss the two of them collaborating on a memoir detailing Margaret's unique and tragic life story.

However, things quickly become more complicated. Upon Alice's arrival on the small island, she runs into Hayden Anderson. Hayden isn't just another journalist; he's the author of a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of a musician suffering from dementia, a book that Alice admits was truly amazing. Hayden has all the credibility in the world, and both he and Alice found the reclusive Margaret Ives at the exact same time. Suddenly the prospects of Alice landing this project seem slim.

After an initial pitch session with Margaret, Alice is invited back to Margaret's house to discuss the potential project in more detail over dinner. Brimming with excitement over the possibilities that a second meeting portends, Alice arrives...only to find Hayden is also there. Margaret tells the pair that she is willing to tell them each her life story—separately—over the course of a month. At the end of the month, Margaret will choose one of them to work with on the memoir.

The novel is split along two story lines: one covers Margaret retelling her family history to Alice, and the other is focused on the in-between moments, when Alice is not interviewing Margaret and slowly starting to grow closer to a standoffish Hayden. As I said in my review of Funny Story, "Henry has a rich talent for getting readers to fall in love with her characters while those characters fall in love with each other," and that's once again the case here. The juxtaposition between Alice—a glass-is-half-full, smiley, bubbly friend to all—with the quiet, guarded, and brooding Hayden works especially well this time around. There's enough opposites-attract love story to keep most romance fans glued to the page.

Layering in Margaret's life history, however, adds depth, and makes this feel as much like a generational novel in the literature and fiction category as it does something to be slotted on the romance shelves. Relationships and the nature of love are still at the forefront of Margaret's story, but the 150-year history of her family adds several opportunities to explore the nuances of human interaction that otherwise wouldn't be accessible in a tale about a singular couple. After all, if you're deep-diving on just two people, they only have so many experiences from which the author can craft an examination of love and the ways that we form relationships. With Margaret's family history, we get to see a plethora of characters, connections, and family dynamics, with couplings that span everything from passionate, world-stopping love to marriages arranged for political and financial reasons.

There's also a protective subtext to the way in which Margaret's shares her family history that doesn't go unnoticed. Both Alice and Hayden can sense that while Margaret isn't outright lying to them (although she may be), she's at a minimum obfuscating or omitting some key bits of truth. Even Margaret admits as much: "There's an old saying about stories, and how there are always three versions of them: yours, mine, and the truth."

I've really come to appreciate the risks Henry has taken with her writing in recent years. I'm sure it would be easier for her to churn out simple, tropey, pure romance novels year after year, and her adoring fans would continue to gobble them up (myself included). But she has continuously pushed the envelope with the last few books she's released, and she's continued to become a better writer as a result. She stretched beyond romance in Happy Place to explore the nature and importance of lifelong friendships, and she continued her evolution in Funny Story to dig deeper into the impact family history can have on a person's ability to form relationships. She goes even deeper down that path in Great Big Beautiful Life. Alice and Hayden both have complicated relationships with their families—something they actually bond over—and both suffer from feelings of not being good enough for their parents, especially as compared to their over-achieving siblings. But with Margaret sharing not just her life story, but the history of the Ives family going back four generations, Henry explores an even more complicated family situation, one whose imperfections are exacerbated by fame and wealth and a prominent place in the public eye.

All of the familiar smile-inducing elements of an Emily Henry novel are present: the witty banter, the lovable characters, and the passionate proclamations of world-stopping love that will make even the biggest cynic swoon. But once again Henry drifts into sadder and more serious subjects, just as she did in Happy Place and Funny Story. For audiobook fans—always my choice for an Emily Henry novel—the inimitable Julia Whelan once again narrates in perhaps her best performance yet. This is Henry's most complex novel to-date, by a fairly wide margin, and the added layers that the enigmatic Margaret and her life story provide take it up a notch. I appreciated the ambition of the novel, and the execution lived up to challenge of writing something that was quite a bit bigger and more nuanced than her previous novels. It checked all the boxes that I wanted from this one, plus some. It's another winner from Henry.