Quotation Study: Great Big Beautiful Life, Emily Henry

On Emily Henry changing genre...

This is not necessarily a review—I just love analysing and unpacking quotes, sometimes even individual words within them. However, as a general rule, if I underline lots of quotes, it’s usually a highly rated book!

These are studies of quotes within certain novels—either unpacking larger themes or simply exploring how each quote makes me feel on its own. I like applying quotes to my life, using them to articulate feelings I’ve never known how to describe. So, welcome to Quotation Studies.

There’s no rhyme or reason here. Just thoughts sprawled out onto a page. It’s me enjoying language as a former literature student who misses the act of unpacking words.

This Weeks Focus: Great Big Beautiful Life, Emily Henry

I've seen some mixed reviews of this novel — many readers seemed to expect more romance. But I never picked up Emily Henry for the romance alone. I return to her work because I believe she’s growing into a truly compelling literary fiction writer.

I did wonder whether Henry was taking a straw from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo with the framing of a celebrity biography — the writing of a life, curated and mythologised. But I’m not complaining. I love that kind of narrative structure: the interplay between past and present, truth and myth.

I enjoyed the mystery element in this novel. It added narrative momentum, but I found the ending too neat — too eager to tie things up in a bow. Literary fiction is anything but a tidy ending — because life is not tidy.

Anyway, this isn’t a full review and I’m not sure if I want to write one. For now it’s just a quotation study.

While the novel has its fair share of sweet, sappy moments, I found myself more drawn to its deeper ideas about regeneration — about building a new life from the ruins of the old.

You could say this book marks Henry’s step into a new genre. I found it coincidentally meta-textual. She’s been slowly drifting from commercial romance into something more reflective, more literary. Of course, that shift may lose her some fans — but it may also earn her new ones.

“There’s an old saying about stories, and how there are always three versions of them: yours, mine, and the truth.”

The novel opens with this literary truism, which immediately sets a more philosophical tone. I loved this as an opening gesture. It foregrounds the idea that stories — especially those framed as biography or memory — are inherently unstable. There’s always a tension between the narrator’s version, the subject’s version, and the actual, elusive truth.

This felt like a strong, self-aware start — one that hinted at metafictional ambition. But I was a little disappointed that the novel didn’t develop this idea more deeply. It’s introduced, then largely abandoned. There was so much potential here — the concept of competing narratives, of subjective truths — but it felt underexplored, as if the novel rested too heavily on that one clever line without committing to the messiness it promises.

“I find myself thinking that maybe every bit of heartbreak in life can be rearranged and used for something beautiful, that it doesn't really matter whether I chose this path or I was born onto it, so long as I stop and appreciate the path itself.”

Heartbreak runs through this novel — romantic, familial, and even professional. But heartbreak doesn’t always have to be about love. It’s the ache of disappointment. It’s what you feel when your plans fall apart, when your expectations aren’t met — whether that’s in a relationship or at a petrol station running out of fuel on a long drive. Disappointment can be quiet or gutting, but it’s always a reminder of what we hoped for.

This quote reflects that idea of transformation: that our pain, our wrong turns, can be reassembled into something meaningful. There’s a quiet resilience to this line — the sense that even if we didn’t choose the path we’re on, we can still find beauty in it.

“With writing, you could always add more. More, more, more until you got to the heart of a thing, and after that, you could chip away the excess.”

This metaphor struck me as deeply true — both about writing and about life. Writing is an iterative process. You throw everything onto the page, and then the real work begins: chiseling away at the noise to find what matters. I used to overwrite everything in university — 1,000 or 2,000 words over the limit, always. But it was through editing — the ruthless cutting of the beautiful but irrelevant — that the real clarity came.

I think that’s what Henry is doing with her novels lately. She’s refining. Killing her darlings, both literally and generically. The romance is still there, but it’s more subdued, more organic. It feels less like the centrepiece and more like a natural by-product of character growth. It’s literary fiction’s version of romance — still emotionally rich, but less performative.

“It occurs to me then that in my effort to be positive, optimistic, and understanding, I might've made myself into an unreliable narrator of sorts, someone who can't easily be trusted not to sugarcoat things.”

This struck me as a potentially metatextual moment. Is Henry gesturing toward her own earlier works? The ones full of likable characters and optimistic arcs? Has she come to see those voices as unreliable — too neat, too hopeful, too sanitized?

It’s not that those books weren’t authentic, but perhaps they reflected a younger optimism. A belief in tidy endings. In this novel, Henry seems more interested in the ways we lie to ourselves — how optimism can be a form of self-deception. There’s a maturity here that suggests a shift in her worldview, and in her voice.

Though perhaps I’m overanalysing—death of the author and all that, right?