The Women Are SMART.The MEN Are SINCERE. And the Ending Is ALWAYS HAPPY.

Emily Henry cracked the modern ROMANCE NOVEL.

- ALLISON P. DAVIS

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 post-college job doing technical writing for the city's phone-and-cable company. She'd always liked creative writing, but it seemed as plausible a career choice as her childhood dream of being a WNBA player. 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.

So she woke up early before work and started churning out a YA novel. When it was done, she Googled agents until she found Lana Popovic Harper, who agreed to represent her. Henry wrote four books in three years, teenage coming-of-age stories full of darkish magic realism. The books were well received and sold modestly, but the back-to-back pace left her feeling burned out and uninspired. "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.

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. This was 2019. Faced with another nail-biting presidential election, and aging, and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, Henry realized how little control she had over her world. "I was not doing great," she says. "I wasn't properly medicated at the time, which was part of it. 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. She had writer's block, so she decided to try her hand at something lighter.