The trade-offs of a heavy B-plot in Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life has many of the trademarks of her previous best-selling rom-coms: the humor, the first-person POV, and the reliance on popular romance tropes (in this case grumpy-sunshine and enemies-to-lovers). However, it differs from her previous novels and from most rom-coms by having a B-plot that takes up more page time than the romance itself. That B-plot has to earn its place by integrating tightly with the A-plot, especially at the climax. In this piece I’m going to explore the advantages and disadvantages of Henry’s choice—what she gives up, what she gains, and how she makes the family saga crucial to the happy-ever-after resolution of the romance plot.

I’ve already written about the opening of the novel, which introduces the heroine (journalist Alice), the B-plot (reclusive heiress Margaret Ives), and the meet cute (journalist Hayden, who is also in the running to be Margaret’s official biographer). Let’s start by looking at a snapshot of the novel. This graphic shows the page count of each chapter and whether it focuses mostly on the family saga, the romance, or a mixture of both.

The romance plot (red) takes up 141 pages (34%), the Ives family saga (blue) takes up 175 pages (42%), and the remaining 99 pages (24%) are mixed (purple). The light blue wedges marked S are “The Story” backstory inserts focused on the family saga.

The letter labels represent key romance beats, following Gwen Hayes’s eminently useful list in Romancing the Beat:

Setup

Falling in love

Retreat

Fighting for love

Notice that the family saga dominates the book, occupying 42 percent of the page time versus the romance plot’s 34 percent. My early theory was that this novel was simply longer than Henry’s previous novels, which would mean the family saga is additive rather than compressing the romance plot. But all of Henry’s previous rom-coms clock in at almost exactly the same page count, ranging from 395 to 416 pages (right around 100,000 words), so the B-plot does indeed compress the A-plot in this novel.

Let’s dig into the details of how Henry balances the romance and family saga plots by looking at where those romance beats fall and how they interact with the B-plot. I’ve identified five distinct sections of the novel (see the dark lines on the radial chart) and will discuss each one in turn:

In the first four chapters of this opening section, Henry is careful to balance the two plots, pulling us in with a combination of enticing story questions and expected romance beats. By the end of chapter one, we want to know if Alice will get the biographer job as much as we want to know if she’ll get the boy. The job question may pull us harder, in fact, because the outcome is genuinely unknown. That Alice will get the boy is a foregone conclusion—the pleasure lies in seeing how. So here we see the first advantage of the weight Henry gives to her B-plot: it stokes genuine curiosity in a genre where the ending is already known.

Henry also gives us enticing details about Margaret and the family saga in these opening chapters: Margaret is the heiress to the Ives Media fortune; her great-grandfather made his initial fortune in mining, and her grandfather made a second fortune in newspapers and built a palatial estate in Southern California. Margaret’s sister got caught up in a cult. Margaret eloped with a musician, who died a few years later in a car crash while being chased by paparazzi. After his death, Margaret became a recluse. These stories echo some we already know and seem to have a boundless appetite for: the Hearst family, with shades of the Kennedys, Elvis Presley, and the British royal family. One promise of the novel is that we will get the inside scoop on these juicy dramas alongside Alice as she draws them out of Margaret.

After the meet cute (A) in chapter one, Henry activates the grumpy-sunshine and enemies-to-lovers tropes in chapter two as Alice runs into the surly Hayden at the local bar, where “he gives the impression of a bear at a tea party, everything around him just a little too small and breakable.” He parries Alice’s attempt to charm him, making it clear that they can only be competitors for the job, not friends. This interaction represents the internal no way (B)—the internal reason the two are emotionally and psychologically incompatible. It’s a beat that stokes extra tension, helping to delay the inevitable union of the two lovers. We also get a bit of the **external no way (F)—the extrinsic reason they can’t be together—though Henry hits this beat harder in chapter ten. And then in chapter four we get what Hayes calls the adhesion beat (C), which forces Alice and Hayden into extended contact. I analyzed this chapter in detail, looking at how Henry wields dialogue, but what matters for the structure discussion is that Margaret informs Hayden and Alice that their competition is going to extend longer. She wants to spend a month being interviewed by each of them; only after they turn in competing proposals will she choose. They are going to have to spend a month running into one another on this tiny island.

After balancing both plots through chapter four, Henry wisely shifts her focus to the romance. She cues up the forced proximity trope as Alice and Hayden discover that they are staying not only at the same hotel, but also in adjacent rooms. In chapter six we see the Inkling of desire beat (D), when Hayden answers his door in only a towel. Later in the same chapter, he gets the chance to rescue Alice from the attention of a drunk guy during a fire alarm, and the two start to open up to each other over breakfast at a diner. We can see all those internal no-way walls coming down, and we get glimpses of the old wounds each of them will have to overcome to have the fulfilling romantic partnership they need and deserve.

So the first six chapters of the novel progress like most rom-coms, with only a slightly more prominent B-plot than usual. But after chapter six, Henry breaks the typical pattern and creates her own rhythm to balance the romance and family saga plots. Let’s see how it works.

One typical problem that romance writers have to solve is how to keep the tension between the lovers alive through the climax of the novel. Readers must simultaneously believe that these two people are meant to be together and that there are legitimate issues that might keep them apart. Here we see a second advantage of the weight Henry gives to her B-plot. Because it takes up quite a lot of page time, readers can focus on Margaret’s story as Alice and Hayden’s story shifts to the background. And while each one is interviewing Margaret, they can’t be spending time together, which naturally slows the progression of their relationship so Henry doesn’t skip through the romance beats too quickly.

On the other hand, one big disadvantage is that the family saga threatens to bog down the whole book. We can see this especially in chapters seven through sixteen, which focus not on Margaret’s story but on the three generations of Iveses before her. The overwhelming message of these chapters is that no one has baggage like the Ives family has baggage. The very origin story of the family fortune involves trauma and original sin: Margaret’s great-grandfather is born to a poor family; after his younger brother dies and his sister nearly starves to death, he goes West to make his fortune in the mines. When he strikes the mother lode, he inexplicably cuts out his mining partner and keeps the entire fortune for himself. His sister, who was his ostensible motivation, now wants nothing to do with him. He is an absent or judgmental father to his own son, which sets up a repeating family pattern of intergenerational trauma. The Iveses are good at nurturing wealth and bad at nurturing emotional relationships with partners or children.

It’s easy to get lost in this thicket of family relationships—I had to make a little chart for myself just to keep it straight. It’s also easy to feel bummed out. The novel has plenty of strong reviews on Goodreads but the bad ones are along these lines: I signed up for a smart, funny rom-com, not the Grand Tour of family dysfunction.

Henry deploys three mechanisms to pull readers through the thicket. First, Alice herself models the kind of attention Henry wants from her own readers: sharp, alert, even a little impatient. In the sections where Alice is interviewing Margaret, we see her almost acting like a novelist herself, looking for cause and effect, watching for clues, noting open story questions the reader will be curious about. Second, we get to see Alice as a writer in the chapters labeled “The Story.” In the first chapter, we saw Alice refer to the journalistic wisdom that there are always three versions of any story: “yours, mine, and the truth.” Henry turns this idea into both theme and tactic in these sections. Each “Story” chapter opens with “Their Version”—the tabloid take on the Ives saga—followed by “Her Version,” based on what Margaret has told Alice and revealing more about motivation and cause. Varying the ways we get the material—sometimes a scene interview and sometimes a story section—helps to hold the reader’s attention.

Finally, Alice identifies an important theme—the question of free will. Margaret is a mosaic artist and uses a labyrinthine “unicursal path”—a path with one way in and out—as a repeated motif. It gives her peace, she tells Alice, to remember her “decisions don’t make much of a difference in the end.” Henry shows Alice thinking through what this might mean for Margaret’s story about herself:

As we’ll see, Alice ends up having to grapple with this question herself at the end of the book, so this groundwork pays off at the climax.

And, of course, we do get a few romance-focused chapters and a few key romance beats in this section to pull us through. Henry does a beautiful job of controlling the slow-build heat of the enemies-to-lovers trope. Alice and Hayden share a first impulsive kiss (E) in chapter ten, followed immediately by Hayden drawing back and reminding Alice of the external no-way beat (F)—the fact that they are competing for the same job. And yet, they can’t stay away from one another, and Henry exploits that tension to full effect in the way she treats the deepening desire beat (G). The two kiss again but agree that they can’t have sex until the book contract is settled, which leads to plenty of the unconsummated yearning that romance readers prize. This beat shows a third advantage of a strong B-plot: it creates realistic-feeling obstacles for the lovers.

Wisely, Henry doesn’t stay in the family saga thicket for too long, and the midpoint of the novel—chapters seventeen through twenty-five—focuses on the romance plot. As with the opening, Henry draws on familiar romance beats in this section. We see desire deepen into something that could be love as Alice and Hayden trade stories about their family histories, uncovering the internal obstacles they must overcome to make their relationship work. The maybe this could work beat (H) comes in chapter twenty as Alice feels herself falling in love with Hayden. The scene even shifts away from Margaret’s Georgia island to Alice’s childhood home, where Hayden helps her see how her unresolved grief over her father’s death and her difficult relationship with her mother may be holding her back.

Later in this section, Henry uses a convenient tropical storm to create an effective tension-and-consummation beat. Hayden drives through the storm to check on Alice, and the two finally have sex. Immediately, however, Henry strikes the inkling of doubt beat (I) to raise the tension once more, as Hayden worries aloud about what will happen between them once Margaret picks a biographer. Is it inevitable that their competition in the B-plot will contaminate their A-plot love story?

As we saw in the previous section, the B-plot continues to work to Henry’s advantage through this stretch by giving the romance beats room to breathe. I’d argue that this section also represents a more typical balance of A-plot and B-plot in a rom-com. If, as a reader, this section was your favorite stretch, then it might be a sign that writing a weight-bearing B-plot is not the right choice for you as a writer.

We enter the final family saga chunk—chapters twenty-six through thirty-two—with all those questions about the romance still unresolved. By this point, readers are fully invested and want to see the resolution, which is what carries us through this stretch. This section of the family saga also has more inherent attractions because we are finally getting Margaret’s story. It’s more dramatic because it involves a character we’ve come to know, and the events themselves have been teased through the previous chapters. Margaret’s beloved sister Laura falls under the spell of a charismatic cult leader and must be rescued and then healed. Margaret herself falls head over heels for the famous singer Cosmo Sinclair, who dies in a car crash just four years after their wedding. Henry mostly lets Alice guide us through this saga with “The Story” sections, but cuts to Margaret herself at important moments, showing us just how intensely she still feels these events decades later.

Another version of this novel might have focused on Margaret’s story more directly, relegating those three previous generations to a chapter or even a paragraph, but that wouldn’t serve the theme of free will Henry is pursuing. This is the kind of big-picture choice writers face when developing or revising a novel. When do you prioritize pacing and when do you prioritize theme? Sometimes you can’t have both and have to choose. Neither choice is right or wrong, but they do lead to different reading experiences. As the writer, you are the only one who can decide which is the most important for your story.

Henry doesn’t neglect the romance plot altogether through this section, though it gets the smallest amount of page time we’ve seen in any section yet. In chapter twenty-six we do get the all-important midpoint of love beat (J) when Hayden tells Alice he loves her. Tension also continues to build around the question of how Margaret’s decision might affect their relationship. And a quieter mystery is taking shape, focused on a photograph of Cap’n Cecil, who up to this point has seemed to be a minor secondary figure providing local color and some laughs. We start to get the sense that our B-plot may be more tightly linked to the A-plot than we initially thought.

Given how much page time Henry gives to the B-plot, that linking is critical. Any B-plot should intersect with your A-plot, but the more page time your B-plot gets, the more significance those links need to be. We’re about to see those links snap into place in Great Big Beautiful Life.

Now let’s turn to the final four chapters, where the romance plot gets star billing once more. Here we’ll explore one of the most striking aspects of the radial chart—that crowd of romance beats in the final few chapters. In chapter thirty-three, Alice puts together puzzle pieces she’d picked up during the first section of the family saga and realizes that Hayden is, in fact, Margaret’s grandson. She confronts Margaret, who confirms it but is adamant that she will never reveal it—and that Alice can’t either.

This is the payoff of the intergenerational trauma Henry spent so much time on earlier. We’ve seen that Margaret regards her family—the wealth, the fame—as a curse and believes the only way to break the curse was to give up her daughter and, thus, also her grandson. Importantly, Alice understands it too: “I finally see the truth of her. Everything that she's inherited. Lawrence's guilt over failing the people he loved, and Gerald's anger over the love that always remained out of his reach, and Freddy's fear of not being enough for the ones who mattered most. The terror of what happens if you ask for something someone’s not able to give you.” Margaret believes that her daughter and grandchildren are better off without a relationship with her and, moreover, that this is what they would want.

Margaret’s choice in this scene also causes another domino to fall, and here is where we see the satisfying connection between the A-plot and B-plot. Because Alice can’t tell Hayden the truth, their relationship will have to end; she knows it can’t be built on a lie of this magnitude. The deepening doubt beat (K) leads rapidly to one of the more compelling third-act breakups (L) I’ve seen in a romance. This barrier is real and difficult—it’s not based on a slight misunderstanding that could be cleared up in five minutes if the lovers could just listen to one another. This is the fourth advantage of the weight Henry gives to her B-plot—and the one that makes the whole structure pay off.

That said, the compression of the final romance beats does show another disadvantage. The compounding tragedies of Margaret’s story suck up a lot of page time and a lot of emotional energy from the reader. In a novel with a smaller B-plot, some of that time and energy could go to the beats that Henry must flip through quickly in chapter thirty-four. Alice retreats (M) to her childhood home, but she still has her shield up (N), even around her mother. When she finally takes it down, after a dark night of the soul (O), she heals her relationship with her mother and her grief over her father, allowing her to wake up (P) to what she really wants from her life and be prepared when Hayden appears for the grand gesture (Q). Henry has laid the groundwork for each of these beats earlier in the novel, so they don’t feel unearned. They may, however, feel rushed for readers who want more time to luxuriate in the final romance beats and need solace from the HEA ending after the tragedy of Margaret’s story, which occupied the preceding seventy-plus pages.

In the end, it is Alice’s abilities and instincts as a writer that underpin these big plot moves. Part of her waking up involves realizing that she “wants to write about love,” starting with her parents’ story. Starting this work heals her relationship with her mother and her grief for her father. And Alice’s words and her interpretation of Margaret’s story are ultimately what changes Margaret’s mind, clearing the way for the lovers to reunite. We learned in chapter thirty-three that Margaret hoped Alice would write her biography, obscuring only the truth about her daughter and Hayden. She hoped Alice could perhaps show the fuller story of her family and especially of her husband, and, as she puts it, “right some of the wrongs of the past.” As readers, we’ve seen Alice do just this in “The Story” segments, correcting “their version” of the saga to “her version,” Margaret’s version. The “three versions of any story” device pays off here in a way we couldn’t have seen coming in chapter one. Alice’s role as the writer who can move the saga from “their version” to “her version” turns out to be the mechanism that resolves both plots.

Alice’s writing also punctures Margaret’s belief in the unicursal path. After Alice turns down the biographer job, her parting words to Margaret are “our choices do matter.” In chapter thirty-four, after the resolution with her mother, Alice writes one more bit of Margaret’s story, but this time in a letter to Margaret herself. However, in a canny move that builds suspense for the climax, we don’t see the contents of the letter until Hayden arrives at Alice’s doorstep and reads it to her. He has it because Alice’s words finally convinced Margaret to take a risk and tell Hayden—and her daughter—the truth, and that confession also clears the way for Hayden and Alice to have a happy ending.

What lessons can you take from this analysis to apply to your own writing? There’s no A-plot-to-B-plot ratio that’s perfect for every novel, only the one best suited to your story and the journey you want readers to take. We’ve seen that having a weighty B-plot comes with both advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages: A weighty B-plot can bog down the plot and pacing of your A-plot. It can alienate readers who showed up for one genre and found themselves spending more time than they bargained for in another. And it can compress the key story beats those readers were looking forward to. The advantages: A weighty B-plot can stoke real curiosity in a genre with a foregone-conclusion ending. It can slow the pacing of your A-plot so its beats don’t fire too fast. It can give your protagonists realistic plot obstacles. It can deliver a third-act complication deeply rooted in the story. And it can provide a bigger payoff, with more thematic resonance.

In Great Big Beautiful Life, we see each of those advantages and disadvantages play out. The structure of the novel requires readers to be patient and to absorb layers and layers of backstory. Henry’s choices also mean that the delicious final romance beats get less page time than they would in a traditional rom-com. But the payoff is that they feel deeper, richer, and more freighted with emotion because they are the focus of everything that has come before. The happy ending feels bigger than just one relationship—it also feels like an ending to the Ives family curse and potentially an end to the intergenerational trauma that Margaret’s choices up to this point threatened to continue, despite her own good intentions.