Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life: Finding Light Amidst Chaos

Emily Henry’s latest novel is a celebration of life and love, told through the eyes of one woman who has everything but the one thing they want, and another who is working toward her greatest love.

You unmake the world and build a new one.

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Henry, best known for swoony romances such as People We Meet on Vacation, Book Lovers and Beach Read, takes a different approach in her latest book, Great Big Beautiful Life. The story follows journalist and aspiring biographer Alice Scott who travels to a small coastal town in Georgia in the hopes of writing the biography of a 20th century heiress and tabloid princess. She arrives to find that she is instead being put in competition with Hayden Anderson, a recent Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer.

Fans of Henry’s other novels will find themselves right at home with the rivals-to-lovers romance between Alice and Hayden. Henry is adept at letting her characters peel back each others’ layers one by one, letting the characters build trust between each other as they build their relationship while also crafting the story along the way.

However, some might be surprised to find that this isn’t a typical Henry romance. The story’s main plot centers on Margaret Ives’s retelling of her life. Beginning with the premise of “there are always three versions to a story: yours, mine and the truth,” Alice precedes Margaret’s retelling with what has been previously published. From Alice’s perspective, we are painted a clear picture of a life that is glamorous in front of the camera but quite fraught behind the scenes. 

As Margaret recounts her family’s sordid history, she mentions that her father, Freddy, should have done anything for the people he loved. “You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.” We later learn that this becomes the anchor on which Margaret lives her own life, from how she handled her relationship with her sister, to her romance with Cosmo, and everything that came after, including the final revelation: the truth as to why she had both Alice and Hayden come to her to fight for the rights to tell her story.

Henry writes the plot twist of this novel as if it were a picture slowly coming into focus. One by one, the clues are revealed and in one line, in one mention, everything starts to make sense. Though the twist causes more chaos to ensue, the third act of the book is well spent in ensuring that all loose ends are resolved. 

Great Big Beautiful Life encapsulates how life is complex, messy, and chaotic; but it’s the people we love, the people we will unmake and rebuild the world for, that makes it great and beautiful. 

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