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

The Age

2 days ago

This story is part of the June 1 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories.
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.
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.
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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.