The Gospel According to Emily Henry
“I’m a huge dog person, which means that I experience death somewhat regularly, with the most beloved creature in my life,” she went on. “Every time that happens, you tell yourself, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t open myself up to this kind of pain. Why would I bring home this animal, just knowing that this is going to absolutely ruin life in twelve years?’ ”
Henry teared up. “I always end up doing it, because the truth is, even in the depths of your grief, you wouldn’t undo the chance to feel that. It feels like an honor.” In her fiction, too, opening oneself up to the possibility of pain is the path to pleasure. Other people may be hell, but they’re also our only chance at heaven.
In some ways, Henry is just doing on the page what all of us must eventually do: working out how to reconcile the organizing principles of our past with something better suited to our present. Sometimes that means something as big as leaving behind a faith; in other cases, it just means reassessing what makes life worth living. Part of the appeal of her books is that they make all this feel remarkably attainable.
That evening, we met at Muriel’s in Jackson Square, where we were ushered into an ornate, high-ceilinged room. The waitress told us that it was built in the seventeen-hundreds, and brought us a sheet of paper that explained the burning down, reconstruction, and subsequent haunting of the establishment, where a ghost could allegedly be found in the Seance Lounge, on the top floor. (Drinks also available for purchase!)
“I did feel like I had to, like, come out to my parents as a romance writer,” she told me as we munched on table bread and salty butter. “I was, like, I do not want anyone I’m related to to read these books at all.”
This is a telling confession, because on the spectrum of representations of sex in romance novels, Henry’s lean dramatically toward the stylized—a far cry from ripped bodices or quivering members. One gets glimpses of body parts: mouth, tattooed biceps, “flat length of stomach,” hip bones. Consummation can take several hundred pages. The emotional intensity builds until everything—and everyone—climaxes (or, as Henry might put it, “unravels”), usually at the same time.
What gets them there can be hazy. Kisses are slow, descriptive; everything beyond that is a little slippery and diffuse. Characters have abs and asses, but no genitalia. (Somehow, they do manage to get “erections,” if only as an under-the-clothes indicator of interest.) “I obviously have repression,” Henry admitted. But when it comes to sex, she said, “people’s opinions and feelings and tastes are going to vary so widely . . . I don’t know. As a reader, I can really love a book, and I can get to a sex scene, and it’s just really not for me.”
This approach seems to appeal to an increasingly abstemious generation of young people; the supply of hot, considerate men is also a balm for a heteropessimist age. Henry’s characters are at once cheerfully sex-positive (condoms abound) and so pure in their aims that doing it is almost beside the point. In literary fiction, she said, sex is “usually unpleasant,” though she saw the merits; she cited Sally Rooney’s “Normal People,” approvingly, as a realistic depiction of “the way that people’s feelings about sex can complicate the greater picture of the relationship.” Henry has set herself a different task: making us believe in an almost-too-good-to-be-true connection. “It’s hard to write compelling happiness,” she told me. “Even though, in real life, happiness is so compelling. You know how to make someone cry: build up an attachment to a character, and then make them feel anguish by hurting that character, by taking something away from that character. But to make someone feel joy, with words on a page—it’s really, really hard.” Her sex scenes are designed as a heightened, fantastical, fun-but-chaste version of a thing we’d like to be able to celebrate, unencumbered by miscommunication or unfulfilled desires. In EmHen’s fiction, one’s heart and one’s body are always perfectly aligned. And maybe that’s something like having a soul.
