Emily Henry stopped by Good Morning America to discuss her latest book, Great Big Beautiful Life.
Henry’s romance novel, scheduled for publication Tuesday by Berkley, follows two writers, Alice Scott and Hayden Anderson, who are competing to write the biography of an heiress and socialite, Margaret Ives. Alice and Hayden begin to like each other in spite of themselves. A critic for Kirkus called the book “both a steamy romance and a moving look at the sacrifices people make for love.”
GMA co-anchor Lara Spencer asked Henry how her new novel is different from her previous rom-coms.
“It is still a romance,” Henry said. “There is still a love story, but it is a departure. There’s a lot of intergenerational story to unfold there. The truth is, when I fell into romance, it was because I loved how that gave me an opportunity for coming-of-age stories. [With the new novel], I wanted to be able to tell a different kind of coming-of-age story. With Margaret…she’s in her 80s, and she’s looking back on her life, but she’s also trying to figure out what the end of her life is going to look like.”
Spencer asked Henry how many of her novels are currently in development as television series or films, to which Henry replied, “It’s all of them.” She also noted there was one coming sooner than the others.
“I don’t have a release date, sadly, that I can share yet, but I have seen a cut of it: That’s [the film adaptation of] People We Meet on Vacation,” she said. “They did such a beautiful job. I think the readers are going to be so thrilled, because I was so thrilled. It really feels like they took the characters and they breathed life into them in this new way. The characters are forever changed in my mind now.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
