Sex is messy, even on paper. In Emily Henry’s early drafts, articles of clothing – a bra, a sundress – are clumsily removed more than once. A heroine is pressed against a closet door that suddenly transmorphs into a shower wall. And human limbs end up at “anatomically improbable” angles, says the Happy Place author, usually because she’s forgotten to change their positions from whatever she was imagining a few lines back. It starts out choreographed in the mind of the American romance writer, but it’s also…breathless? Chaotic? “Mortifying,” Henry says. “You forget that a character didn’t take their shirt off, and suddenly, they’re shirtless, and a copy editor’s like, ‘When did this happen?’”
Perhaps the only area of human intimacy trickier to capture than sex is true love, but the 32-year-old author, who’s published three bestselling contemporary romance novels in the last three years, has a knack for happy endings in the style of rewatchable Nineties romcoms. In her 2020 adult fiction debut, the winkingly titled Beach Read, January Andrews, a romance writer with an ugly case of writer’s block, accidentally moves in next door to her literary nemesis, Gus, a writer of Serious Books. The pair trade barbs over the low-slung fence. They concoct a convoluted dare – each must write a book in the other’s genre by summer’s end – to ensure they’ll spend months in each other’s pockets. Four million sold books later, Henry now finds herself among BookTok’s most beloved romance writers, right alongside Colleen Hoover, and Drew Barrymore’s a fan.
