(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
You know what’s so appealing about romantic comedies?
No matter how over the top their premise might be or fantastically narrative convenient the narrative powering them might be, they provide a delightfully overpowering sense of comfort that life can be good and wonderful, and if it’s not, redeemed to the point, no matter the damage done, that it can be.
Diving into these kinds of stories is to feel a burden lift from you, and while this mostly certainly happens in Emily Henry’s latest foray into the world of unexpected and complicatedly welcome love, Funny Story, you also get a reassuring sense that what you read here actually has a halfway decent chance of happening, something that can’t be said of many rom-coms, wonderful though they are.
Henry has a real gift for mixing into just enough groundedness and raw believable humanity that you feel as if you both escaping a coldly unlovable world just outside your reading nook but also within reaching distance of something this good happening to you.
Although here’s hoping something like the plot of Funny Story doesn’t even come close to staining the sunny perfection of your existential path.
The novel pretty much begins with Daphne’s perfect fiancé Peter, a man of comfortingly set routines and uneventful surety, dumping her close to their wedding with little ceremony and truck ton of thoughtlessness after his buck’s night where he and his long-time childhood friend Petra declare their hitherto hidden but now undying love to each other.
The truth is, Miles seems like a nice guy. A really nice guy! And I imagine that what’s he’s feeling right now must be comparable to my own total emotional decimation. I could take him up on his offer, go sit in his room on an unmade bed and watch a romantic comedy while absorbing fifteen hundred grams of weed smoke via my pores. Maybe it would be nice even, to pretend for a bit that we’re friends rather than strangers trapped together in this nightmare of a breakup.
Awww sweet sentiment and yay you both but good lord your timing is terrible, your self-involved decision-making is abhorrent and your delivery not even close to hitting even remotely human KPIs.
Needless to say, but hey this is a review so we’re saying it anyway, Daphne is devastated, her only choice living location-wise, after giving up her East Coast U.S. job and moving to Waning Bay, Michigan, is to move in with, wait for this, with Petra’s similarly jilted boyfriend Miles.
You can see where this going a mile off but you know what? That’s absolutely fine because Funny Story makes brilliant use of this out-there premise, putting two very broken and hurt people together and seeing what happens.
The answer is, not a lot at first.
Both Daphne and Miles are too hurt and emotionally bruised and battered to do much more than zombie sleep walk to their jobs as a children’s librarian and a bartender at a gorgeous winery just out of town respectively, and grunt at each other, if they even manage it, as they pass in the hallway.
If you’re waiting for love to burst miraculously forth in defiance of all the romantic odds at this point, then you’ve clearly read one too many low quality rom-coms, the kind that disregard almost completely what actual, real people would do, and insist on making the would-be lovebirds fall in love anew when no person in their right mind would be contemplating that or even capable of it.
Thank goodness for the insightfulness and in-touch humanity of Henry then who imbues Funny Story with the kind of grounded emotions that make sense when two people have had their whole worlds blown apart with no instructions on how to even begin piecing them back together again.
Henry allows Daphne and Miles to grieve in their own quiet, solo ways, and while they do eventually, and tentatively begin to reach out to each other and connect and haphazardly bear their souls, it all feels very normal and pretty much how real people would react and act in that kind of horrifically awful situation.
Sure, the next part of the plot is straight from ludicrously rom-com central when they decide to depict themselves on social media as having fallen into each other’s similarly hurting arms, but Henry makes it absolutely work to a heartwarming tee as these two broken opposites discover that maybe all that pretense might actually have a viable echo in reality.
That they get to that point where the real world matches the charade is almost a given, so NOT a spoiler, but it’s how Henry gets them there that is such a gorgeously delightful and heartwarming joy, making Funny Story one of those rom-com novels that feel as grounded as it is escapist.
Helping this buoyantly witty and charming tell its welcomingly diversionary tale is the fact that Henry has an impressively good ability to craft sparklingly vivacious dialogue that leaps and zings and bounces off the page in classic rom-com superlative perfection.
He [Miles] flashes an apologetic smile, pinches my chin a little.
Even this little gesture is intensely hot to me.
The phone is still buzzing in his hand. His eyes are on me.
I clear my throat. ‘Take it,” I get out, already buttoning myself back up.
Indeed, many of the favourite passages of Funny Story come about as a result of Daphne and Miles’ repartee which in inspired, clever and very very funny when they’re at their best and haltingly, darkly insightful when they are not.
Even when they are stumbling around trying to articulate what ails or delights them, the dialogue is captivatingly, happily alive and joyfully zesty, elevating all matter of scenes with the kind of conversation we all wish we could summon at the drop of brightly yellow beanie hat.
So good is this back and forth dialoguing that it’s hard not to fall in love with these two opposites yourself, and bolstered by fulsome characterisation of people like Daphne’s caring mum, Miles’ outgoing, spontaneous sister and Ashleigh, Daphne’s divorced, single mum bestie from work, Funny Story comes sweetly and beautifully alive, a story full of wishful, fairytale romance but also a wondrously enveloping sense of community, belonging and supportive love.
Each and everyone of Henry’s books (Beach Read, Book Lovers, Happy Place) are an unalloyed joy, but there’s something about Funny Story that really warms the heart, soothes the soul and makes you laugh and grin so hard that, even though it embraces how sad, difficult and complex life can be, you feel as if anything and everything possible and that even the worst of times and things can miraculously and with fizzy chats and heartfelt admissions, be made gloriously whole again.