When a writer gets as popular as Emily Henry has, I tend to get curious enough to give them a try, whether or not the books themselves hold any appeal to me. Henry’s book are everywhere lately, and her newest has just come out, already affixed with the sticker signifying the approval of the Oprah of the 2020s, Reese Witherspoon.
I didn’t expect to like Great Big Beautiful Life, but I did sort of think I’d see the appeal, at least. Instead, I suffered through a dreadfully dull, painfully unoriginal “romance” without any heat or chemistry. Alice is a celebrity blogger who thinks she’s finally landed the book subject of her dreams. She’s tracked down Margaret Ives, a woman now in her 80s who was a tabloid sensation for most of the twentieth century. An heiress with a party-girl reputation and the widow of a rock-and-roll icon, she’s like a Kennedy sister and Priscilla Presley combined into one person.
There’s a catch, of course. And his name is Hayden Anderson, prize-winning music journalist and a best-selling author. Unbeknownst to Alice, he’s also been circling Margaret’s story, and the ex-heiress has decided to pit the two writers against each other. Reluctant to tell her story, she wants to be sure she can trust the writer she’ll end up working with. She proposes to sit for interviews with each of them separately for a month and then make her decision. This leaves Alice and Hayden stranded in her quiet Georgia coast community, with little to do with their time off except run into each other and try to ignore the apparently smoldering chemistry between them.
It’s a little hard to buy this love story, considering Hayden’s entire personality consists of stoically growling answers to personal questions, while Alice is an unbearable romcom heroine cliche, bubbly and hopeful, with a nebulously defined career in media and a gaggle of supportive, diverse friends to bounce her concerns about Hayden off of.
Margaret’s life story, the one that’s supposed to be so worthy of being told it has writers fighting over it, is an embarrassing mishmash of familiar soap opera storylines and family melodramas that have been done much better by other writers. Rich family, controlling parents, shameful secrets, etc.
Near the end, Henry herself seems to have noticed how boring her book has gotten, and starts lobbing Hail Mary passes hoping something will stick. There are sudden revelations and coincidences that would make Charles Dickens roll his eyes.
It doesn’t work, though. The ramp up in emotions comes too late to make what comes before anymore interesting. Reading Great Big Beautiful Life was supposed to be about seeing what all those millions of readers saw in Emily Henry. On that count, the jury is still out.