(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Watching a writer’s journey is often a gloriously fascinating thing.
Going from an impressive debut to successive novels that build upon actual realisation and beguiling promise, many writers go from strength-to-strength, honing their talent and their gift for evocative wordsmithing into something that leaves you breathless with how good storytelling can be.
It’s a compulsively wonderful thing to watch and while it can be a slow and meandering undertaking, a journey of degrees rather than vaulting leaps, sometimes a writer surprises you in the best possible way and catapults themselves forward in ways that leave you awash with admiration.
Take the latest novel from Emily Henry, Great Big Beautiful Life, which sees the author take her undeniable gift for crafting grounded but heart-lifting romantic comedies (rom-coms) that reawaken a belief in love true love and the many beautiful places it can take you and elevate into something even more profoundly moving.
Now, as a fan of rom-coms, and a true believer one at that, I don’t think for a second that rom-coms as a genre need any kind of elevating; it is perfect and wondrously good genre in and of itself and frankly, the literary snobs out there who push it and a number of other “lesser” genres (their opinion, certainly not mine) down the list of acceptable forms of storytelling, need to take a good hard look at the way in which they are denying themselves some truly invigorating narratives.
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But every genre can benefit from a new approach, from switching up the formula and seeing where it can go, and rom-coms are no different.
What Henry has done with Great Big Beautiful Life is take the standard tropes and cliches of the genre, which in her more than capable hands, feel fresh, new and wholly original, and invest them with intensely human, emotionally evocative meaning, in effect combining a grand life epic with a love story to powerfully readable effect.
On the surface, and certainly the backcover blurb gives every indication that Great Big Beautiful Life will be business-as-usual, with two people, two writers in fact, coming together to compete to write the biography of one of the most enigmatic figures of the twentieth century, Margaret Ives, now a reclusive artist living on a small resort off Georgia but once the mid-century darling of Hollywood and the American press who married a rival to Elvis.
It is by any measure a plum job, and one that already practising but ambitious journalist Alice Scott, staff writer for The Scratch, is keen to land; it could be the making of her career, cement her as a writer of renown, and finally, just finally, get her mother to admit that maybe her daughter has chosen the right profession after all.
But there’s a catch, a hugely impressive and very successful one in the form of Hayden Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who already has one massively successful bio of a much-lover music artist under his belt and who is suave, handsome and clearly the one that Margaret will pick.
But Alice, who is bright, upbeat and endlessly optimistic about life, and a huge believer in the very best of life manifesting well in advance and over and above anything more negative, refuses to give up and commits to spending the time with the very enigmatic and yet mischievously thoughtful Margaret that it will take to understand who she is and formulate a winning proposal for her biography.
If the competitive aspect of this potential gig isn’t enough – they each have a month to get to know Margaret after which she’ll pick one of them to pen the book that will tell her story, one long denied the world which only has tabloid takes to go on – every time they are around each other, trying not to share what Margaret has given them (they have NDAs and aren’t supposed to be telling each other anything), there’s an undeniable chemistry that increasingly cannot be denied.
But it’s no easy road to love, just as the unfurling of Margaret’s story of love and grief, hope and despair set against 150 years of intriguing family history is painful and evasive, and one step forward often becomes ten or so back.
Great Big Beautiful Life becomes an immersively compelling story of not just true love finally its home, but of a deeply burdened woman, borne of regret and hopes dashed, finally finding a hitherto measure of peace and possibly even a way forward not laden with great sadness.
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Henry was always an impressively talented writer who found a way to give a much-loved but trope-heavy genre a renewed sense of vigour, fun and emotional resonance.
But Great Big Beautiful Life takes things a seismic step up, investing a playful and longing story of unexpected love and connection with the weight of familial history and the burdens that three people have carried to varying but considerable delays throughout their lives.
Each of the main characters in this emotionally weighty novel walk into this new chapter of this lives with cares aplenty, a legion of fears and a hunger for newness but equally an uncertainty about how to make this need for something new, for healing and change to become something tangible and real.
So, while Alice and Hayden have instant rapport and a fizzy, sparkling chemistry with witty banter and cute moments all over the place, they are also bringing some hefty issues from the past into the equation, and while you could say this is true of most any romcom, it feels far more impactful on their path to true love than a standard romcom would feature.