Emily Henry knows how to write the perfect man. He’s not the smoldering, damaged, semi-toxic Adonis type that once turned every romance novel into a parade of predictability. Henry’s heroes are softer—gruff on the outside, maybe shaped by childhood trauma, but they’re in therapy. They respect you, your career, your goals. They introduce you to their mom. They don’t just crave passion; they want partnership. It’s these men that have helped build a literary empire.
At 35, Emily Henry has become the kind of publishing juggernaut most writers only dream of. Since her first adult romance, 2020’s Beach Read, went viral on then nascent BookTok, she’s published nearly a book a year, each landing on the New York Times bestseller list.
Her novels follow a winning formula: women who don’t need a man but would like one, love interests they don’t have to tame but whom they can help evolve, and plenty of millennial-coded pop culture references. These books are sold as romance, but really they’re stories about the modern experience of being a woman, where love is just one part of the story.
Now her work is moving off the page. On January 9, the film adaptation of her second adult novel, People We Meet on Vacation, arrives on Netflix, starring Tom Blyth and Emily Bader, with a stacked supporting cast that includes Molly Shannon, Alan Ruck, and Lukas Gage. It’s the first of several adaptations that will bring Henry’s stories to both film and television, cementing her place as one of publishing’s—and now Hollywood’s—most influential voices.
To be clear, Henry didn’t invent the Romance 2.0 universe, a genre that hinges more on humanity than bodice ripping, but she has always connected with the work of authors like Helen Hoang and Jasmine Guillory, both of whom helped shape her vision.
“I really loved both of those authors’ books,” she says. “They were these warm, inviting, happy stories, but they still had some level of grit or real-life texture to them. So they didn’t feel just escapist or just a fantasy. They felt like stories about real women.”
Before breaking through with her take on romance writing, Henry was already working full-time as a novelist, with three young adult books under her belt; she published her first YA novel, The Love That Split the World, in 2016. But she’d started to feel restless, she says and by age 30 was interested in exploring the stage of life she found herself currently in.
“In your late 20s and early 30s, you start realizing that everything that you had sort of planned out is behind you,” she says. “You get through high school and college, you get the job, and then you’re like, Now what? For the first 20 years of your life, you’re on a track. I felt like nobody in my life told me that. Around time I turned 30, I felt like I was changing so immensely.”
The draft that eventually became Beach Read was an expression of those feelings. But when she brought it to her agent, Henry says, it didn’t feel like an overnight success—it was slow growth.
“It felt like things were picking up, we were getting different press, sales were good…but it didn’t feel like abruptly I arrived in some way,” she says. “It was a nice gradual feeling of stability, really. I think it’s every writer’s dream.”
Cut to today, and her books have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, with nearly each one being adapted for either television or film. Beach Read is becoming a movie (which has fans clamoring for an Ayo Edibiri and Paul Mescal pairing) as is 2024’s Funny Story, which Henry wrote the screenplay for after “finally feeling ready” to try her hand at the form. A Netflix series of 2023’s Happy Place is also in development.
This will be the first year since 2020 that Henry won’t release a novel, but she assures fans that “the brainstorming calls are happening,” with a release slated for 2027. From there, she imagines her literary—and cinematic—world continuing to expand.
“I still love romance and comedy,” she says. “I still want to write all of those things, but I definitely want to be free to push into other areas, because this isn’t even where I started. It’s not my only passion. I read thrillers. I read horror. I read literary fiction. I read everything, and I want to write everything.”
In this wide-ranging conversation for Glamour’s In Frame interview series, Henry discusses how she captures the unique experience of modern women, keeping her personal life private, how TikTok and fanfiction are reshaping publishing, what she’s planning to do that scares her, and more.
Glamour: Your books resonate because they feel grounded in the modern experience of womanhood. But you started out in young adult literature. What made you interested in writing for teenagers at first?
Emily Henry: I think I fell into YA because of the question of: What are you connecting with? At that time young adult novels were the place where there were books about female main characters who were feeling big emotions and experiencing love—romantic love and friend love—and navigating a world that felt familiar. That was all interesting to me. It felt like a category of fiction that didn’t judge girls and women for their emotions.
I’ve always loved a coming-of-age story, and that was what I liked about writing YA—being able to write a character going through this transformative time and changing and becoming more themselves. But also, I was only 25 years old when my first book came out. So if I was going to write a coming-of-age, what did I know about other than the teenager coming-of-age?
How had you changed as a writer by the time you wrote Beach Read in 2020?
I was around 30 and had a slightly different viewpoint. When I wrote Beach Read, it was during some downtime. I don’t think I had a book under contract, but I knew I was going to try and sell something soon in the YA world. I had a little pocket of time, and I was feeling overrun and down, and I really wanted to be immersed in a bright, sunny, warm love story. So I decided to write this book entirely for myself and did just a very quick draft and set it aside for a couple of years before I showed it to anyone. I really had no designs on publishing it. It was something I did for fun. Then there started to be this boom in romance a little bit.
Obviously, Beach Read changed your career significantly. What was that like to experience?
It was like that metaphor of putting the frog in the boiling water, where I didn’t notice it happening and that it had happened. I remember when the second book came out, People We Meet on Vacation, that it debuted at number one. It didn’t stay up there, but that was really shocking to me. It dipped down a little bit, and a few weeks went by, maybe a couple months even. Then we saw this big spike in sales later in the summer, which doesn’t typically happen. Everybody was running around trying to figure it out, and that was when we found out about somebody’s video on BookTok.
Let’s talk about BookTok. Do you think it has changed the industry?
Definitely. It has also changed the way books are marketed, which I think is a trickle-down effect. I think the way TikTok talks about books came from the fanfiction world.
Right, there’s a lot of fanfiction DNA in BookTok, where books are described based on tropes or categories, like “friends to lovers” or “forced proximity.” It’s tricky because people refer to novels in that way in marketing now, as you say. Do you find yourself doing that too?
I find myself using the shorthand sometimes because I know it’s easy and people understand it. But the thing about the tropes is they really don’t matter without character. The thing with fanfic is that the character, to some extent, is prebuilt. Their world is prebuilt. You already love that character if you’re going to choose to read fanfiction about them. So you can think to yourself, I want to see these characters I love in this really specific situation. I want to see them where one of them is sick and the other one’s taking care of them. I want to see them where there‘s only one bed.
Sometimes if I’m pitching a book, I will say it’s “friends to lovers.” Sometimes I will develop that a little bit more and be like, “These two people who grew up together.” But no, that's not how any of the writers that I know think about their work.
One theme I’ve noticed in your books is that places—especially small towns in the Midwest—are usually characters in the story as well. Are you inspired by locations?
For sure. When you know where you want a story to unfold, it gives a mood or a tone to the story itself, which then gives you ideas about who these characters would be. I take a lot of inspiration from that. The other one that happens to me more regularly is seeing common tropes or scenarios from the media and tipping them just slightly on their side.
Book Lovers is a good example. It’s like the classic Hallmark Christmas movie. A city girl goes to a small town, and she falls in love and changes her ways. I enjoy watching those movies every winter, but also it is innately funny to me that that is such a codified thing that we believe in and buy into. I really wanted to see what would happen if I took a character like that, put her in this situation, and had her kind of refuse to back down and not become the small-town sweetheart. Sometimes it’s taking something that has been done before that I love and just thinking of a slightly different angle for it.
Your books are extremely popular, but there’s a widespread cultural POV right now where people are saying heterosexual dating is terrible. Yet the men in your books always have a very nice core. So do you think a man that goes to therapy and respects your feelings is now sexier than a bodice ripper?
Yeah, I do. Maybe not for everyone, but for me, yes, that is definitely sexier. One just has longevity that the other doesn’t necessarily have. I mean, they’re both great, don’t get me wrong. I also only know how to write the kind of books that I know how to write. The idea of writing a more morally gray male lead—I don’t think I could pull it off, honestly. I don’t think I know how to string that instrument.
There’s also this debate after The Summer I Turned Pretty finale: Are women only attracted to men written by women?
I hear that a lot, but I don’t think it’s that simple. One of the most popular quotes from any of my books is from Beach Read, and it’s not the writing that makes it popular. It’s the idea. The male lead says to the female lead, “When I watch you sleep, I feel overwhelmed that you exist.” It’s a kind of love where it’s like, your partner is asleep next to you and you just cannot believe that they’re there.
I wrote that line because that’s a feeling that I’ve experienced. I have felt that extreme overwhelm where I can’t believe that I get to know this person, and here they are asleep just totally at peace and trusting me. And if I can feel that, men can feel that too.
I’ve had that same thought, but way darker. When I was dating my husband, one time I was like, “Isn’t it crazy we just sleep in the same bed every night and I could just kill you in your sleep?”
I knew you were going there. That’s the Gone Girl in you. That was one of the things that was interesting about Gone Girl [the 2012 best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn], the idea of intimacy where it’s like, you’re so close to this person, but you’ll never know what’s in their head. I find that really exciting. That’s also why I haven’t, at this point, written from a male point of view. That’s partly because I like that weird puzzle of how we exist as humans, that you can’t ever know what’s going on inside of someone’s head and that you can still be so deeply connected to them even though you’re trapped inside of your own bodies. That’s so weird and magical.
You’ve published a book a year since 2020. Have you faced writer’s block or burnout?
I’ve faced a lot of burnout. The first time I got COVID was the worst because as I recovered, I was trying to finish edits on Funny Story. I didn’t have aphasia, but I could not concentrate on the words. Nothing made sense to me. Burnout is natural. I took this past year off from writing books, which was huge. I did write some screenplays and short stories, but I took the year off from books. Hopefully that means I’ll be a bit less burnt out for the next year.
You’ve been with your partner a long time and have written about all different kinds of relationships. How do you get inspired?
On the one hand, when you’re building characters and they can be so different, but they all still represent parts of me in a way. With relationships, it’s similar. You can be in one relationship for a really long time, but obviously that relationship changes and grows. But also, I have a lot of friends I’m around. It’s a running joke with some who are still dating and hating it. They’re like, “I’m glad that my life can be helpful for you.”
With [People We Meet on Vacation’s] Alex and Poppy, for example, that was inspired by When Harry Met Sally. I loved their dynamic and thought it would be fun to swap the male and female dynamic…. I feel like I’m more in that vein where my partner and I get each other because we’re so similar. That’s like [Book Lovers’] Charlie and Nora, who are two peas in a pod.
You keep your home life with your partner private and have been successful at not revealing much about your romantic life. Has that been a challenge?
I accomplish it by not talking about it. It’s weird. When we were coming of age and becoming writers, the internet was not what it was. There was never a moment that it even crossed my mind that anyone would care about who I am. I hoped people would read my books, but I never knew anything about the writers who were writing the books I loved other than when their next book was coming out.
But now authors are somewhat expected to be influencers.
It’s definitely a different age, because now with social media, you’re expected to be visible and accessible on some level. But most of the people in this industry didn’t really know that that was going to be part of the bargain when they got into it.
I saw you said previously that you have no interest in being a celebrity.
I don’t want to be a celebrity, and I don’t know many writers who do. Most of us want to just write our books and read. I mean, my readers are wonderful. When they do see me out in public, I’ve never had anyone be inappropriate or cross any boundaries. But it’s definitely not natural. I’ve mostly dealt with it by continuing to live in the Midwest. I’m a homebody. It doesn’t really affect my day-to-day life.
Speaking of celebrity, let’s talk about Hollywood. How much input did you have on the People We Meet on Vacation film?
The director, Brett Haley, really kept me in the loop. I know a lot of people who’ve had no input at all on their adaptations, and I was really lucky that Brett wanted to know what the readers wanted. Whenever there’d have to be changes made, he would come to me and ask, “Are the readers going to be okay with this?” So that was my role, an extra gut check, and I tried to really just fight for the things that I thought would matter most to fans. The things the fans will want to see, we got most of them in some form. Things had to be truncated or moved around, but a lot of the favorite moments have made it in.
What was it like seeing the film for the first time?
My stomach was in knots starting it because I’d seen a lot of the dailies. I had been on set a couple of times. I knew things were working, but you still don’t know. By the end of the movie I had a good cry, and I felt such immense relief. I left it thinking the readers are going to like it. That was my number one anxiety. I already have the book. It’s fine if they make a movie that I don’t personally love—which I do love, to be clear—but that wasn’t really what was at stake. It was all these people who I didn’t want to be disappointed. I feel pretty confident that the vast majority of the readership is going to love it.
You’re entering a new phase of your career, working on screen adaptations alongside writing. What are some of your goals?
What I really hope to do is keep publishing books. I love writing. That’s not going to change. But with the Hollywood piece of things, my long-term goal that I am trying to figure out is how I can become an advocate for other writers in this space. I would love to be producing, and I’m really passionate about rewarding artists for their work. I have a hard time with the fact that during the writers’ strike and the actors’ strike, I realized that these people who are making the stuff that we’re all consuming ravenously are not really getting a fair piece of the pie. That feels just so wrong to me…that’s a big goal for me, is to try and figure out a way to create more space for people to come in.
How do you want to challenge yourself in the next five years?
I think I need to write something that I’m unsure if my existing readers will like. That’s the scariest thing. I want to do something speculative or something darker. That’s going to be hard for me as a people pleaser to accept that you don’t get control over how people are going to feel about anything, especially when you’re making a departure. But you’ve got to grow.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. The post has been updated to remove spoilers.
Photographer: Colette Aboussouan @coletteaphoto
Stylist: Eliza Yerry @elizayerry
Hair: Netty Jordan @nettyjordan
Makeup: Deanna Melluso @deannamelluso