“In your late twenties and early thirties 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 it. 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, keeps 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?
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