So, when it came to Great Big Beautiful Life, a love story that felt “earned” was paramount.
“Before I started writing, before I knew anything else about the book,” Henry explained, “I knew I wanted to be writing about two characters who absolutely could not be together. And I wanted ironclad reasons.”
Ultimately, the secret—Hayden’s mom is the biological daughter Margaret gave up after the death of her rocker husband Cosmo Sinclair—looms over the whole story like a ticking time bomb waiting for Alice’s nagging feelings about Margaret’s willful omissions to spiral into realization.
“First off, we have the reason that they’re competing for the same job,” she explained. “But I knew that by the end of the book that that would go away and there would need to be, something bigger.”
As she explained, “By adding that final twist, I knew, ‘Okay, this is a situation where this person has already fallen in love with another person, and now she has this huge secret that she could not bear to keep from him and that she knows she also can’t tell him.’ She can’t tell him—it’s not her story—and even legally, she can’t tell him because of the NDA.”
“Really, from the moment that I unlocked that twist, I felt like I knew what I was writing toward,” Henry shared. “It informed every other thing that happened in the book. Every piece of history that I chose to share about Margaret’s family came from this reveal at the end.”