Emily Henry's Great Big Beautiful Life opens with facts, not romance

Great Big Beautiful Life is Emily Henry’s sixth 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.

Henry’s novels are often categorized as rom-coms due to her humor, though I think her protagonists’ highly emotional, intense backstories pull her books away from that genre and squarely into contemporary romance. Great Big Beautiful Life is different from her previous novels because it includes a significant historical fiction subplot. I’ll be exploring the way Henry balances her two plots—the romance A-plot and the historical fiction B-plot—in detail in my post on the structure of the novel as a whole, but we can see the importance of the B-plot even in the opening chapter, where it gets more page time than the A-plot.

From a plot standpoint, here’s what Henry covers in the first chapter: 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. However, especially at first, Hayden is treated as secondary—a choice that is well suited to the enemies-to-lovers trope Henry is using. In many romances, the “meet-cute” is the star of the first chapter, but in Great Big Beautiful Life, Hayden’s appearance on the last page of the scene operates as a surprise twist.

So what does Henry focus on in her opening pages if not the romance A-plot? She leads with theme, positing a claim about facts adding up to truth that the whole novel goes on to complicate. She then uses facts as a metaphor to deliver character and plot details, while layering in backstory. Let’s walk through the scene in detail now to see how it works.

Here are the first sentences:

Henry is making the same opening move Jane Austen makes in the first lines of Pride and Prejudice:

In both cases, the authors set up a universal truth that is going to be shown to be complicated, and they use subtle narrative cues to hint at that complication. In Austen’s case, she presses the supposed truth so hard that it seems extreme by the end of the second sentence: The man has property, so he must be property available to claim. This worldview is attached to Mrs. Bennet, and Austen spends the rest of the novel debunking it.

In Henry’s case, it’s the first-person narrative voice that undercuts the universal truth. The saying isn’t initially attributed to a person of prominence, just an unnamed “guy.” Most importantly, the “we’re not really supposed to . . . we’re supposed to” framing implies that our first-person narrator doubts whether strict neutrality is possible. Just as in Austen’s opening, we’re left wondering, is this true? Do facts add up to truth? Henry, like Austen, is starting with the theme of the book: Facts may not always add up to the truth. It may not be possible, or even desirable, to tell an objective or disinterested story.

As a writer, when should you consider opening with your theme rather than your protagonist? I think it can work if the central question of your novel is easy to grasp and broadly interesting or if your theme is core to your reasons for writing the book and you want readers to use it as a lens for all of the pages that follow. Either way, follow Austen and Henry’s example by establishing your theme quickly, in just a few sentences, and then introducing us to your story.

Henry cleverly transitions from “facts” as a theme to literal facts, using anaphora (repeated words, discussed in my scene study of McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore) to deliver important information about our narrator/protagonist as well as the plot:

Henry delivers a lot of information in this passage. Two things keep it from collapsing into an info dump: voice—our first-person narrator seemingly speaking to herself and, obliquely, us; and style—the anaphora connecting metaphorically to the established theme.

The second fact, in particular, accomplishes a lot. We learn our protagonist’s name, always tricky to work in naturally in first-person narration; we sense that Alice might have low self-esteem 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 recurring element of her early interactions with Hayden—he is also tall, so they often accidentally bump legs under a table—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 final 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 and walks up the path to Margaret Ives’s home, Henry delivers 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. This doubling is a clever technique any novelist can use. Your POV character’s reactions to what she’s experiencing can tell us as much about her as about the setting itself.

At this point, we’re two pages into the book, and it’s time for some tension and drama after so much exposition. Henry delivers that tension when Alice knocks on the door and 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 amid 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 important character details about Alice and Margaret. Alice is a perky optimist, while Margaret “can’t help but expect the worst from people.” Henry also returns to the opening theme 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 clear-cut 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.” 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.

In this section of the scene, Henry slips in backstory three times—Alice’s Georgia roots, Margaret’s tabloid past, and Alice’s relationship with her mother—and never stops the scene to do it. This is how to weave in backstory in a way that doesn’t weigh down the pace or plot of the story.

In the final paragraphs of the scene, Margaret opens the door to escort Alice out, and we get our meet-cute. Hayden is standing on the front steps, 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 the emotional undercurrents, 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.

The meet-cute is the closing counterweight to the opening theme and puts it to its first test. Alice sees facts in front of her: She’s not going to get the job, and this handsome man is barely willing to shake her hand. But readers can see that Alice’s version of facts is wrong—that her own psychology and assumptions are leading her to make wrong interpretations. Henry’s enemies-to-lovers trope also serves her theme, playing on the subtle distinction between being uninterested (not caring) and being disinterested (impartial). Alice assumes Hayden is uninterested in her, and we soon discover he is not. Alice believes both of them are supposed to be disinterested journalists, and, as we’ll see, Margaret’s story makes that impossible.

Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.