Happy Place is the fourth swoon-worthy rom com from New York and Sunday Times bestselling TikTok sensation, Emily Henry. Emily chats here about friendships that inspired those in the book and why she chose to set the book in the US state of Maine.
HAPPY PLACE combines the fake-dating and second-chance romance tropes. What did you enjoy about writing a love story with these tropes?
For a long time, I think tropes got a bad rap. And then using them as the starting or focal point of a story became really popular. Now I see it going back the other way a bit, because as we all know, tropes in themselves don’t really matter. The characters make them matter. So whenever I start a story by thinking about trope, I’m really just looking for whether that trope presents me with at least one lead character. In this case, as soon as I started thinking about fake dating, I thought about a real couple finding themselves in a situation where they had to keep performing their relationship after it had ended.
I loved the challenge of trying to find a use of this trope that would feel somewhat realistic and plausible, and I also really enjoyed the challenge of seeing whether I could bring a couple back together after they’d fallen apart to a point where they really thought there was no saving what they had.
Harriet and Wyn have a lot of history together. Tell us about where their relationship stands at the start of the novel.
At the start of the novel, they’re not really speaking. They were dating long-distance when they finally broke up, so it’s been pretty easy to cut each other completely from their lives. The extent of their recent communication was a cordial yet terse email exchange where they agreed Harriet would be the one to go on the trip, and tell everyone their relationship is over.
In addition to providing readers with an irresistible love story, HAPPY PLACE explores the intricate dynamics of friendships that withstand years and time apart. What inspired you to give friendships such an important role in a romance novel?
I feel so lucky to have a lot of friends around me who I’ve been close to since high school, and one I’ve been close to since the fifth grade. When you’re friends that long, it’s really interesting, because you can look back on all of your different phases, and it hardly makes any sense that your friendship still works, because you’re entirely different people from when you met. And those past versions of yourselves made sense as friends, just as these current versions do. But there are also plenty of growing pains, and plenty of relationships can’t withstand those transformations.
Harriet’s and Wyn’s complicated romantic relationship is knit tightly into their complicated friendships with this group of people. They’ve all known each other since college, and even though they’re far flung across the country, this breakup is really the first time the friendships will be put to the test. There’s no way this story works without that. Those are the stakes, for Harriet and Wyn. Once they admit they’ve broken up, it’s going to change everything for this group of people, and they both have their individual fears of what that might look like.
“For friendships to last across seasons of life, there has to be a kind of flexibility and true acceptance that’s not necessarily easy to find or create.”
The characters in HAPPY PLACE have been friends for years, but over time their lives have changed and their friendships have changed as a result. Have you ever experienced changes in your own friendships? Did you use those experiences to write HAPPY PLACE?
Oh, definitely! It’s really wild, to look at a close group of friends from a certain time in your life and realize you’re all in totally different places now. And you’ll come together for reunions or weddings or whatever, and pick right back up in that liminal space, but then you all go back to your lives. In your early thirties, I think, is when this first becomes especially visible.
You’ve got friends with kids old enough to be in school, friends who are single, friends on second marriages, friends who are trying to open businesses, friends who’ve just decided to go back to school, and everything in between and beyond those. For friendships to last across seasons of life, there has to be a kind of flexibility and true acceptance that’s not necessarily easy to find or create. I’m always fascinated by those moments of change or transformation. I’m always writing coming of age stories, and this one is very much about that particular moment of transformation, when a relationship of any kind has to either grow or let go.
Did any of your personal friendships inspire the ones in the book?
Definitely. No one is exactly a person from my real life, but I always sprinkle little details in. One of my best friends from high school is now a lawyer in New York, whose partner is also a lawyer, like Sabrina and Parth. Another one of my closest friends is a painter-slash-farmer with vegetable tattoos on her knuckles, like Cleo. Cleo also has this incredible gift for saying no, and one of my best friends is very much that way. She has no issue telling people how she feels and what she wants (or doesn’t want), and that’s something I really admire about her. And Kimmy is definitely an amalgam of several close friends. Beyond that, there are so many little details from own college experience sprinkled through the book.
Harriet often goes out of her way to please others, and Wyn can be reluctant to open up about himself and his feelings. Their perceptions of themselves have big effects on their relationship, and they have to work through them in order to move forward. Why did you decide to write a love story with characters like them?
I’m pretty much always writing through something I’m trying to work out. I knew eventually I’d have to write a book about people pleasing because, unfortunately, it’s been such a huge driver in my own life and something I am constantly working to let go of. You’d think that tendency would make relationships go smoothly, and in casual relationships, that might be the case, but in intimate ones, it’s such a huge roadblock to not be honest about what you want or need.
When you’re used to people-pleasing, it’s often hard to even figure out what you want or need, because you’re so used to looking outward for clues as to what you should be doing. It can often feel like your primary need is to just keep the peace, but a lot of times ‘keeping the peace’ is just code for avoidance, and avoiding problems often leads to more problems. I think Harriet is an exceptionally relatable character, but she’s also going to be a very frustrating one. We like our characters to have agency, to do the thing that will obviously, from our point of view, fix things. In real life, conflict is so, so, so hard for many of us, but when you see it all written out in a scene, and the solution to a problem seems so obviously to be just talk about, that’s hard for us as readers.
So having a character like Harriet felt important, because I and so many others are her, and I wanted an empathetic look at that type of person that also underscored the way these tendencies backfire.
“Partly why I chose to set the book in Maine was because I wanted an excuse to take a research trip.”
Harriet is a neurosurgery resident who also dabbles in pottery. Did you do any research on this profession and hobby before writing and if so, did anything surprise you?
Oh, yes. I did a lot of research, but still included very little of the neurosurgery aspects in the book, because frankly, I knew I wasn’t even close to expert enough to be confident I was discussing it accurately, but also because a huge part of Harriet’s story is that she spends a lot of time trying not to think about work. She’s got her life divided in a way, and that compartmentalization was important for her arc.
Since I had never once in my life considered being a neurosurgeon, pretty much all the information I gathered surprised me on some level. But probably the most helpful research I did was actually reading message boards for surgical residents, where I could see what they complain about. One common complaint among residents was that so many residents would be assisting on a surgery that they couldn’t even see what was going on, let alone actually do anything. They’d talk about the irritation of going through the whole scrub-in process for nothing. The complaints from these message boards inspired some bits of Harriet’s story.
Maine is a beautiful setting, and you do such a great job of transporting readers there. Tell us about your decision to set the book here. Do you have any personal connections to Maine?
Before this book, most of my personal connection to Maine was actually just through story. I love how big of a character the Maine settings are in Stephen King stories, and I—like Harriet—really love the Maine setting of Murder, She Wrote, even if it was actually filmed in California. My mom’s family was from New England, so she had a lot of love and nostalgia for Maine, but I’d actually never been there.
That’s partly why I chose it. I wanted an excuse to take a research trip. My editor is also from Maine, so I knew she’d help me catch anything inaccurate, which I’m always very concerned with. I really dislike when you’re reading a book and you get jarred out of the story just because of something small that doesn’t match up with your knowledge of a place. It’s also why I’m prone to using fictional cities: so I can take my favorite parts of several close together settings and combine them, without disrupting someone’s reading experience with anachronisms.
Without giving anything away, what was one of your favorite scenes to write?
I really enjoyed writing the first morning at the Maine house, when Harriet wakes up. I’m not even sure why, but that one stands out to me.
If you had to pick your ‘happy place’ what would it be?
Honestly, I really, really, really love being at home. That was the first thing that came to mind, and I feel so lucky that that’s true. But beyond that, Lake Michigan is my happy place. Something about being there wakes me up, and makes me feel truly present in a way that I don’t always.
Happy Place by Emily Henry is out now. READ AN EXTRACT >>
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