Great Big Beautiful Life

Great Big Beautiful Life is a romance and a multigenerational reckoning with image, truth, and legacy. Henry’s literary ambition in merging a Kennedy-esque mythology with intimate familial emotion marks a departure from her earlier romantic comedies. Henry was inspired to write a story about a complicated mother/daughter relationship and then expanded the idea into a sprawling family narrative that explores the concept of legacy and what gets passed down knowingly or unknowingly from previous generations.

Through the intimacy of Alice and Angie’s fraught relationship to the century-long Ives dynasty, Henry examines what happens when parents don’t meet children’s emotional needs and explores the connections between emotional inheritance and legacy. Through two family stories, Henry reveals how each generation has struggled to access and accept its truth and how, with great love, also comes great grief when someone is lost. As the characters excavate personal and familial histories, they come closer to a kind of honesty that had long eluded them. By merging romance, mystery, and family saga, Great Big Beautiful Life breaks genre boundaries. Henry’s choice to move beyond the confines of the typical romantic comedy allows her to ask more ambitious questions about identity, inheritance, and how we seek to define ourselves outside the shadows of those who came before.