Emily Henry
© Devyn Glista / St. Blanc Studios

Comedy of the heart

Emily Henry has found her new happy place in romance

by JUDI KETTELER

When No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry sat down to write Happy Place, she thought it might be an over-the-top screwball comedic romance. She had been watching comedies of remarriage from the 1940s, like The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby and The Lady Eve—movies where the whole conceit was to get a couple back together. Henry thought she’d bring that fun, slapstick energy to her own plot about two characters falling back in love.

But as she wrote, it became less comical and more heartwarming—tinged with heartbreak. “I thought about what might happen to pull two people apart,” she tells the Connection from her home in Cincinnati. “How do they meaningfully break up, and then how do you make it possible for them to get back together so it’s not a toxic decision?”

While each draft of Happy Place relied less on belly laughs and more on heartstrings, Henry—a master of quippy, sexy banter—retained plenty of levity. With her perfectly timed sarcasm and easy comebacks, her fast-paced dialogue has been compared to Gilmore Girls, a coming-of-age television series from the 2000s. It’s the ultimate compliment, she says. “I am [in] that subset of millennials [who are] exactly the right age to have been raised by Gilmore Girls.”

Happy Place centers on the relationship of Harriet and Wyn, who have been together for eight years and are engaged. Only, they’ve broken up months before, but their close-knit group of friends doesn’t know it. When they wind up (accidentally) going on vacation together to the group’s usual summer spot in Maine, the plot thickens. Henry overlaps past with present, winding through years of Harriet and Wyn’s history as the week in Maine progresses and the tension builds.

Henry wanted to explore the dynamics among a group of friends in their early 30s; while Harriet and Wyn’s story drives the action, it’s an ensemble cast, featuring Sabrina and Parth (who are getting married) and Kimmy and Cleo (who fell in love and run a farm together). “In your 20s, you’re mostly in the same stage of life with your friends and have a lot of common ground,” she says. But once people reach their 30s, lives can start to diverge, with friends getting married or divorced, having kids or changing careers. She sees it in her own life: “I’m in this stage of life where my friends and I have different things going on.”

Out of college, Henry wrote young adult fiction and published four novels. “I wanted to write the kinds of books that I was loving as a reader,” she says. Plus, in her early 20s, she says, she wouldn’t have been able to write meaningfully about older characters. She fell into writing adult fiction–romance almost by accident. To get over a bout of writer’s block, she decided to just start writing about a character who had writer’s block. It turned into Beach Read and secured her a new base of readers. She’s found a home in romance, a genre she absolutely loves as a reader (her current favorites are novelists Kennedy Ryan, Talia Hibbert and Sonali Dev). “I am perfectly content to wake up every day and just write,” she says.

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Judi Ketteler (judiketteler.com) is an award-winning essayist and has written three nonfiction books.

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