January and Augustus have “will they or won’t they” arguments about the merits of romance that seem to address a body of invisible, internalized critics whom Henry foresaw dismissing her novel as trash.
It’s a standard romance, but embedded in the enemies-to-lovers, small-town, and opposites-attract tropes is a not-so-subtle manifesto dressed up as smoldering banter. Naturally, they fall in love (and finish their books). Too broke to pay rent, she moves into the lake house he left her on the shores of Lake Michigan, where she is reunited with her college nemesis, Augustus Everett, a successful “serious literary writer” who also can’t write his next book, about survivors of a local death cult. In the story she eventually produced, January Andrews, a millennial romance writer who can’t write, is unlucky in love and grieving the death of her father. “It was just my secret little thing I would go into my office and write,” she says. She had writer’s block, so she decided to try her hand at something lighter.
I was just so stressed out and anxious.” She’d always preferred darker stories and sci-fi to explore existential questions, but suddenly she couldn’t bear the darkness. “I wasn’t properly medicated at the time, which was part of it. Faced with another nail-biting presidential election, and aging, and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, Henry realized how little control she had over her world. She was also approaching 30 and found herself wrestling with the bumps and lumps of a second coming of age, one that was a lot less optimistic than her first. “I didn’t have much more to say about teenagers at that point,” she explains, settling into her writing couch at her home in Cincinnati, legs crossed, elbows on knees in the position of eternal adolescence. The books were well received and sold modestly, but the back-to-back pace left her feeling burned out and uninspired. Henry wrote four books in three years, teenage coming-of-age stories full of darkish magic realism. When it was done, she Googled agents until she found Lana Popovic Harper, who agreed to represent her. So she woke up early before work and started churning out a YA novel. However, she discovered while spending her days writing company manuals and handbooks for set-top boxes that nothing makes the creative spirit bloom more than a mind-numbing job.
She’d always liked creative writing, but it seemed as plausible a career choice as her childhood dream of being a WNBA player. Soon after Emily Henry left Hope College, a small, Christian-values-lite school in a tiny town in Michigan, she found herself living back in Cincinnati, trapped in her first postcollege job doing technical writing for the city’s phone-and-cable company.
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