She’s written five bestsellers in five years, all before turning 35

There is a theory that the best romantic fiction mimics the intoxicating feelings of falling in love – joy, euphoria, anguish, distraction, hope. It’s no wonder, then, that Emily Henry has such a devoted following. Every year, without fail, she makes her readers fall hopelessly in love.

For Henry herself, the process is an equally seductive experience. “Even when I’m writing these books, I feel like I’m falling in love,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Cincinnati, Ohio. “When I read my favourite romance writers, I feel that same giddiness and desperation for more. You just can’t get enough.”

The 34-year-old, who grew up in Kentucky and Ohio, began her career writing young adult fiction after graduating from university. Then, in 2020, Henry published her first adult romance, Beach Read. She has published a novel a year since, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide and dominating The Sunday Times (UK) and The New York Times bestseller lists. All five of those books are being adapted for film or television, with every production update and casting announcement sending her excitable fans into raptures.

Emily Henry: “Even when I’m writing these books, I feel like I’m falling in love.”

In the modern romantic literary universe – where the author Rebecca Yarros creates fantasies featuring dragons and battles, while Colleen Hoover explores trauma and heartbreak – EmHen, as she is known to her fans, has established her own category of crushingly romantic books charged with longing and sexual chemistry.

Her novels typically include women who are self-possessed and funny and men who are emotionally available, while the setting is always picturesque; the distinctive ice-cream colour palette of the book covers depicting these sun-kissed settings belies the sophistication of her writing. There is plenty of rom and even more com, but Henry elevates the genre with carefully wrought characters and clever banter.

A love of literature is all-defining for Henry. Many of her characters are authors, or work in publishing, and she regularly shares book recommendations on social media. These are mostly new titles, though the classics regularly come up too – J.D. Salinger and Jane Austen are just two of the names she drops during our conversation.

In person, Henry is as thoughtful and disarming as the characters she conjures up. Having been married for a few years (she won’t share how many), she says it’s a long time since she’s had her heart broken but that she’s still able to summon the emotions from formative heartbreaks. “I’ve always been a person with really, really big feelings, so those heartbreaks definitely made a mark.”

Big feelings are key to the enormous success of Henry’s books, in which both her characters and readers have to really earn the emotional rewards. In You and Me on Vacation, which was published in 2021, Poppy and Alex spend 12 years and 361 engrossing pages navigating friendship, professional disappointments and misunderstandings on the path to realising what they mean to each other. In Beach Read, the title of which is a knowing wink to the preconceptions about the genre, January and Gus, both authors crippled by writer’s block, have to confront their individual relationship histories and overcome their creative conflicts before they can enjoy true happiness together.

There is a playful nod to many rom-com tropes in Henry’s writing too – slow burn, enemies to lovers, forced proximity, opposites attract – but she cleverly subverts readers’ expectations in the execution. As the UK Sunday Times columnist India Knight (like me, a fan) has said: “It’s not just that Emily Henry can write and has wit and elan to spare, but also that she is clever – just when you think, well, now she’s obviously now going to do X, she does Y. She’s also made me think that many of the female characters at the more tiresome end of literary fiction look awfully self-obsessed, weedy, navel-gazing and a bit dim about themselves when viewed through the Henry lens.”

The secret to Henry’s success is her ability to offset the sincerity and big-heartedness of her characters with bite, humour and intelligence. “In my last book, Funny Story, there was a line about how being a cynic is just a romantic who’s too afraid to hope,” she says. “And I really believe that, because actually, at my core, I’m sort of a cynic.

I keep writing these stories to remind myself that there are these beautiful parts of being alive.

Emily Henry, author

“It’s really easy for me to see the bad in things and expect the worst and I think I keep writing these stories to remind myself that there are these beautiful parts of being alive that can justify and absolve a lot of the pain.”

On Instagram, Henry has over half a million followers, and there can be a dialogue between the author and her audience. “The reactions of the fans trickle through to me,” she says. “They feel very connected to my lead characters because I always go deep into their psyche and history. The idea in writing that the more specific you get, the more universal something feels, is really true. I think we’re always looking to see ourselves in a way that makes us feel less alone.”

Henry’s success has also been turbocharged by BookTok, the community of (mostly young, mostly female) fans who evangelise about books and authors on TikTok. Henry doesn’t have a TikTok account herself, but the hashtag #emilyhenry has been used in more than 100,000 posts.

Henry’s latest book, Great Big Beautiful Life (GBBL), came out last month and, like the others, the setting is a location scout’s dream. Little Crescent Island is a fictional place based on an island Henry visited in the southern US state of Georgia, complete with oak trees, Spanish moss and a salty sea breeze. It’s here that her protagonists, Alice and Hayden, compete for the job of writing the biography of a famously reclusive heiress.

“I feel like with every book, I create some new challenge for myself,” Henry says. “So when I was going into GBBL, the thing that I was most concerned about was creating a situation where two characters realistically could not be together for concrete reasons. Because I did that, the interpersonal conflict between the main characters was set, and that was easy, but there were all these other new issues.”

Every time she finishes writing a book, Henry texts her friends to tell them that this is the one that just won’t work. And every time they tell her, “You said that last time.” “The self-belief doesn’t get easier,” she admits.

Meanwhile, the film adaptation of You and Me on Vacation (called People We Meet on Vacation, to match its US title) “shouldn’t be too much longer”. How does it feel to collaborate with directors and studio execs when you’ve been creating whole worlds at home in your tracksuit for so long? “It is nerve-racking,” she admits, “but the draw of an adaptation is the collaboration.”

When Henry saw the audition in which My Lady Jane star Emily Bader read Poppy and Tom Blyth (The Hunger Games) read Alex, it was obvious within two minutes that they had the right chemistry to bring her beloved characters to life. “They did such a phenomenal job that they became the characters to me, and I think a lot of readers will feel the same way.”

Though she has multiple adaptations in the works, like many fans Henry remains frustrated by how few rom-coms make it to the big screen. “It still feels like a lot of the people at the top of these studios don’t think it’s viable and have blinders on to the power of the genre,” she says.

Before she dives into writing the next book, Henry is giving herself some time to recover. “I get sick of writing for periods of time, but I always come back to it. And if I can bring people some joy and laughter and give them the experience like they’re falling in love while they’re reading, I do feel that’s a noble pursuit. But mostly I just love doing it.”

The Times (UK)

Great Big Beautiful Life (Penguin) by Emily Henry is out now.

Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up here for our free newsletter.