Emily Henry's Great Big Beautiful Life Opens With Facts, Not Romance

Great Big Beautiful Life is Emily Henry’s fifth novel in a row to hit the bestseller lists—a remarkable track record. Starting with the publication of Beach Read in 2020, she’s released one bestselling novel every year (before Beach Read, she’d previously published four YA titles). Henry has some talents that are hard to replicate, like her humor, but I think all novelists can learn from the way she marshals plot structure, character arcs, and tropes to create eminently successful commercial fiction. Even if you don’t want to write commercial fiction, knowing exactly how it works is important—just as it’s helpful to know how to write a complete sentence before you start throwing fragments into your prose. 

Let’s take a tour through the opening chapter of Great Big Beautiful Life to see how it works. From a plot standpoint, here’s what Henry covers: Journalist Alice arrives at the home of reclusive heiress Margaret Grace Ives, hoping to secure the rights to write her life story. After a brief conversation, Margaret dismisses Alice to consider the proposal—just as Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Hayden Anderson arrives for his own appointment. Alice is “ninety-nine percent sure” she’s just lost her dream job.

It’s a great premise with three big story questions to pull us in: Will Alice get her dream job? Why did Margaret become a recluse? And how will the relationship between Alice and Hayden play out? Because this is a romance novel, we know that relationship will be central. But what makes Great Big Beautiful Life a little bit different, even from Henry’s previous books, is that the “B plot”—Margaret’s story—gets more page time and prominence than the romance plot, especially in the first half of the novel.

When we move further into the novel, we start to encounter chapters titled “The Story” that center exclusively on Margaret’s history, and many other chapters of the novel focus on the evolving relationship between Margaret and Alice. Especially at first, Hayden is treated as secondary—a structure that is well-suited to the enemies-to-lovers trope Henry is using. 

In many romance novels, the “meet cute” is the star of the first chapter, but in Great Big Beautiful Life, Hayden’s appearance on the last page operates as a surprise twist. So let’s see what Henry is up to instead in these opening pages.

Here are the first sentences: 

We don’t have a protagonist yet, or even a clearly defined narrator, though we do get some hints via the journalism reference, the first person “we”, and the casual voice (“the guy”, “not really”). Henry is making the same opening move Jane Austen makes in the first lines of Pride and Prejudice: setting up a universal truth that is going to be shown to be complicated. In other words, she’s starting with the theme of the book: Do facts add up to truth? Should journalists take sides?

Next, Henry cleverly transitions from “facts” as a theme to literal facts, using anaphora (a literary technique of repeating words, which we also saw in McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore) to deliver some key information about our narrator/protagonist as well as the plot:

Henry accomplishes quite a bit in just the first two sentences of this passage: We know our protagonist’s name, always tricky to work in naturally in first-person narration, we sense that Alice might have some self-esteem issues thanks to the “not much else” phrase, and we get our first story question: What’s up with that not-boyfriend? 

As a reader, or maybe more specifically as an editor-reader, I thought the height detail wasn’t compelling. Do we really care how tall she is, especially on page one of the novel? However, Henry does go on to make Alice’s height a key element of her early interactions with Hayden, so there is a reason it is here.

One of the pleasures of Henry’s work is her self-aware deployment of tropes, and the next fact showcases that technique: This is the life-is-about-to-change moment that always kicks off the hero’s journey! Think Pip encountering Magwitch in the graveyard, Gandalf arriving at Bilbo Baggins’s door, or the Bennet family learning that Mr. Bingley has moved to the neighborhood. 

When Alice finally gets out of the car, we get some setting details that do double-duty as backstory information. The heat of a Georgia summer is familiar to Alice, and when she sees live oaks she still thinks “Home” even after eleven years of living in Los Angeles.

After Alice knocks on the door, Henry very wisely introduces our first bit of external tension when the woman who opens it is distinctly unwelcoming—so much so that Alice wonders if she is at the wrong house or the victim of some prank. Henry is also smart to use the beat of tension when Alice is still standing in the doorway to stitch in some backstory facts about Margaret: “The Tabloid Princess. Known as such both because she was the heiress to the Ives media empire and because of those years when her own celebrity status earned her near-constant attention from the paparazzi and gossip columnists.”

Alice is finally ushered into a sitting room, where we get more setting details amidst the continuing tension of whether this is actually Margaret’s home since there are no visible traces of the Ives family. Once Margaret enters the room, and that bit of tension is resolved, Henry shifts to the productive tension of Alice’s emotions. She is a bit starstruck, then intensely curious about why Margaret disappeared, and finally eager to win the job of hearing and then telling Margaret’s story.

Over the course of this conversation, Henry weaves in a couple key character details about Alice and Margaret. Alice is a perky optimist, while Margaret “can’t help but expect the worst from people.” Henry also rings the gong of the theme that started the chapter when Margaret asks Alice, “What if I don’t want it to be my version of the story? . . . What if I want the whole awful truth? What if I’m done living with my version of events, where I’m always the hero, and I want to sit down and see things in black and white for once?” These questions make us more curious about the story itself, hint that “the truth” and “facts” aren’t going to be quite as clearcut as Alice might expect them to be, and promise that Margaret’s past-tense story will have an effect on the present-tense story we are reading. What will happen, in other words, when Margaret sees her story in black and white?

When the doorbell rings and the characters are on the move again, Henry tucks in an important little bit of backstory about Alice. She thanks Margaret for giving her a chance and silently adds her thanks that “I finally have something work related to tell my mom that won't make her eyes glaze over with disinterest.” Remember this technique! It’s a brief but telling phrase, Henry doesn’t dwell on it, and she positions it as the characters are in motion and we have the sense that the scene is ending. This is how to weave in backstory in a way that doesn’t weigh down the pace or plot of the story.

And then Margaret opens the door to escort Alice out, and we get our meet cute. Hayden is standing there and Alice recognizes him right away, simultaneously realizing that her chances of getting this job she so desperately wants are much lower than she hoped. While Alice herself is focused on that emotional undercurrent of the scene, Henry leads us through some of the expected initial moments of an enemies-to-lovers plot. The plot, of course, sets up Alice and Hayden as competitors, but Henry also deploys a grumpy-sunshine trope that is a common addition to the enemies-to-lovers trope. We’ve already learned via the preceding scene that Alice is a perky optimist, and now Hayden is coded as the grump, described as “hulking, dark-eyed, hawk-nosed,” and seeming reluctant to recognize Alice’s existence.