Alice Scott is a celebrity journalist who is about to interview for the job of a lifetime. She managed to track down Margaret Ives, an heiress from the Golden Age of Hollywood who vanished from the public eye more than 20 years ago. Margaret agreed to meet with Alice to discuss them potentially working together on an authorized biography of the former media darling. But Alice discovers she’s not the only one up for the job. Hayden Anderson, a music journalist whose first book won a Pulitzer, has also been invited to interview. Margaret makes them an offer: they’ll each have a series of interviews with her over the course of a month, then pitch her their take and she’ll decide who to work with. Despite him coming off as standoff-ish and brusque, Alice & Hayden quickly develop a friendship, and then feelings. They have to navigate their budding relationship, the NDAs that Margaret had them sign, and try to find the truth behind the salacious headlines that defined most of Margaret’s life.
This was my first Emily Henry novel, and I loved it. I thought Alice and Hayden were each well-developed characters, whose romance was both emotionally fulfilling and quite hot. Margaret Ives was a tragic character, and the more you learn about her the worse you feel for her. Even the smaller characters – Jodi, Captain Cecil, her friends back home in LA – were given enough personality that they didn’t feel like only background characters, they felt like they had full lives of their own outside of this story.
For the story itself, I thought it was great. It does have The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo vibes – a former starlet tells all – but unlike Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book, the interviewers here were much more the focus than the interview subject. Alice’s sessions with Margaret – when Margaret is telling her life story – are interspersed with scenes of the two of them just chatting and working together, getting to know one another, and with scenes of Alice and Hayden as their relationship evolves. I especially appreciated the parallels between Alice & Hayden’s love story, and that of Margaret and her husband, Cosmo Sinclair. Both couples fell in love quickly and completely, and the refrain of Cosmo’s song Peggy All the Time comes up again and again throughout. I also felt that the twists in Great Big Beautiful Life were better than those in Evelyn Hugo, and that clues were laid out in a way that wasn’t obvious, but you could definitely tell with hindsight.
Great Big Beautiful Life was a book that I finished and wanted to immediately read again. I really enjoyed it, and it has me excited to read more of Emily Henry’s books. So if anyone has an opinion on which I should read next, please share!