A few weeks after Emily Henryâs second romance novel, You and Me on Vacation, was published in May 2021, she noticed a âgiantâ spike in sales. Her editor and agent had noticed it too. They were all emailing and texting, trying to figure out what was happening, when someone finally cracked it: âItâs BookTokâ.
Henry had already made it on to the New York Times bestseller list twice, first with her romance debut, Beach Read, then with You and Me on Vacation. But TikTok videos made by impassioned fans vaulted the American author to a new level of fame. Since then, videos tagged #EmilyHenry have been viewed more than 300m times, and her books have sold more than 4m copies. Three of her five romances are being adapted for film.
Henryâs romcoms feature many hallmarks of the genre â blossoming romances, idyllic settings, happy endings. Yet her characters also work through grief, betrayal, loneliness. âI find it really hard to write a compelling love story where you donât pick at the emotional scabs of the hero and heroine,â she says from her home in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she lives with her husband. The early days of falling in love involve âemotional excavationâ; a âlong-form game of show and tellâ in which partners âtrot out everythingâ from their past to get to know each other. Problematic exes, hang-ups, family dramas â Henryâs characters have all their baggage laid bare.
In her latest novel, Funny Story, librarian Daphne is dumped by her soon-to-be husband and moves in with her ex-fianceâs new girlfriendâs ex-boyfriend, Miles. Henry knows âmore people than you would expectâ who have found themselves in a similar situation. While the partner swap is the marketable storyline, Daphneâs struggle to belong, her longing for friendship and her fraught relationship with her father anchor the plot, making her a more complex, believable heroine.
Henry, 33, believes the huge success of her books is down to this blend of escapism and reality. She says she was drawn to the genre because while characters do face the messy complications of real life, the focus remains on âthe hope of the worldâ. Readers need this â during Covid, the time when Henryâs novels took off, people âwanted to believe that weâd get through that, and that life would be beautiful againâ.
Growing up in Cincinnati, Henry was a âhuge readerâ, and began writing what was essentially fanfiction, though she didnât know it had a name. âAs a kid, I would get up to date on whatever series I was reading, and I would just want more and there wouldnât be more.â Later, she studied creative writing at Hope College, graduating in 2012. Her first job was a technical writing role for a phone, internet and TV provider â a âvery corporate, boring jobâ. On the side, she edited novels she had written in college, and began sending them to agents.
Henry didnât start off as a romance writer: she began her career writing young adult novels, a genre that appealed because it featured âgirl- or woman-centredâ stories, with emphasis placed on emotions and sentimentality â something that âmore literaryâ fiction had struck her as âallergic toâ. Her first YA novel, The Love That Split the World, was published in 2016, and three more would follow.
There was a moment, however, when Henry began to feel she had said everything she wanted to say about teenage life. She was also feeling âvery overwhelmed [by] the world at largeâ and wanted to write something âwarm, inviting, cosyâ â and so began what would become Beach Read. She did not tell anyone that she was writing it, and she had âno intention, reallyâ of publishing it.
The pivot from YA to romance was also partly down to her newly becoming a romance reader, arriving at the genre late having internalised the social snobbery towards it. Reading romance was considered a shameful hobby, she says, of silly or lonely women â âsuch an offensive kind of stereotypingâ.
Beach Read pokes at this snobbery. The heroine, January, is a romance writer who spends the summer living next door to her college rival, an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January laments: âIf you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what youâd get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, Iâve eliminated half the Earthâs population from my potential readers.â The two characters making cases for why their genre is more worthy felt like the âtwo sides of my brain arguing with each otherâ, she says.
The book was partly inspired by her experience on the creative writing programme at Hope, where sheâd tried to write her âversionâ of literary fiction, but ended up largely mimicking other writers â she hadnât found her voice yet. âI have not lived Ernest Hemingwayâs life, it makes no sense for me to try to write The Old Man and the Sea.â
Henry thinks the recent boom in romance is partly due to our particular âmoment in historyâ leading people to reach for stories with hope at the centre, and partly because of younger generations embracing the genre, and raving about it online. She does not have a TikTok account, but she admires its grassroots, reader-driven nature.
BookTok users often recommend romances based on plot âtropesâ, such as friends-to-lovers, opposites attract, or childhood sweethearts. Funny Story features several tropes, including âfake relationshipâ: Daphne and Miles pretend to be a couple to attract the envy of their exes. The âtropificationâ of the genre has been criticised for narrowing reader tastes and for encouraging writers to build stories around tropes. Yet, for Henry, âtropes donât matter if you donât buy into the story, and I think thatâs always character-basedâ.
One popular trope â which appears in her first romance, Beach Read, and her third, Book Lovers â is enemies-to-lovers. The device is tried and tested: think Pride and Prejudice. âIf you write an enemies-to-lovers dynamic,â says Henry, âthere is instantly tension and conflict, so there is an opportunity for more playful dialogue.â That tension is âa lot harder to create, in my experience, if youâre writing a friends-to-loversâ.
The friends-to-lovers trope features in Henryâs You and Me on Vacation; other examples include Austenâs Emma and David Nichollsâ One Day. That the conversation about tropes is so focused on romance is not âtotally fairâ, she adds. âThere are not that many ways to break a story down. So I donât think romance is any more formulaic than any other kind of story out there. Thereâs a natural beat and rhythm to a love story that is just kind of innate.â
Though Henry says that none of her characters are based on her, she always incorporates aspects of herself. In her fourth romance novel, Happy Place, protagonist Harriet is a âhuge people pleaserâ. âThatâs something that I see causes problems in my life, so it made sense to take this piece of myself that I find very frustrating and try to work it out and understand why I am that way and why Iâm actually so afraid of confrontation at all costs.â The personal elements that Henry incorporates are what make her âvery protective of the characters and worried that everyone will hate themâ.
Henry met her own husband âvery young, right out of high schoolâ. Her male characters are never based solely on him. However, Miles from Funny Story has âshades of my three favourite men in the worldâ â her grandfather, her father and her husband, who are all âvery kind, steadyâ people.
Travel features prominently in several of Henryâs novels â Book Lovers takes place in fictional Sunshine Falls, North Carolina; Happy Place is set at a Maine holiday cottage with pine floorboards and white linen drapes. To Henry, travelling allows an escape from the mundanity of everyday life: âyouâre seeing who you areâ, she says, your âtriggers get triggeredâ, and you find out whether you can âenjoy things going wrong together, or if this person youâre with just becomes your perfect nightmareâ.
For a long time, Henry was a morning writer, waking up to do Wordle and Spelling Bee before writing until she had 2,000 words â âwhether that took two hours or nine hoursâ â but she now prefers to write at night. She starts with an âincoherent, way too long, pretty boringâ first draft, then takes stock of where ânothingâs happening, or the tension drops out, or thereâs too many arguments in a rowâ, before rewriting. Henry is now working on another romance, which will feature parenting as a theme; though she isnât a parent, sheâs âfascinatedâ. While she is open to writing other genres â she has written horror that âhasnât been shown to anyoneâ, as well as thrillers â she believes she will always gravitate towards love stories.
Despite becoming a romance reader relatively late, Henry now sees the genreâs hopeful endings as hugely valuable â after âa lifetime of being led to believe that these books were just no good, and finding out how completely untrue that was. Almost all of my favourite stories are love stories of some kind.â