Emily Henry, PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION

[0:49]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Emily Henry is the bestselling author of People We Meet on Vacation and also Beach Read. In fact, they are both on the bestseller list right now. And she's also written several other young adult novels. She lives and writes in Cincinnati and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. Her books have been featured in BuzzFeed, Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, The Skim, Shondaland, Betches, Bustle, and more. Hi, everybody. How are you doing? I hope everybody had a great weekend. I am really excited to be here today with Emily Henry, the bestselling author of People We Meet on Vacation. This is my book of the month copy, by the way, because yes, I am a member there too. I am really excited to talk about People We Meet on Vacation. I already interviewed Emily about Beach Read, so if you haven't listened to my podcast on moms don't have time to read books with Emily for that, you can go back and do that. And now we're going to talk about her latest book. Came a bestseller. She had multiple books on the bestseller list, which is so cool. Also included me in the acknowledgements, which was so sweet. Hey, good morning. How are you? Morning. I'm great. How are you? I'm great. You for putting me in your acknowledgements that like made my day. Showed my kids they were like hugging me. I don't know. They thought it was the coolest thing. I would imagine that happens all the time because you really are sort of like

[2:50]Emily Henry: the fairy godmother, I think is what I called you or something, guardian angel, whatever, of the book world. Like, yeah, just once once you've had the pleasure of doing a Zibby Owens interview, it's just like you will never forget it and you always feel like friends. I feel like it's just, yeah, of course you were in my acknowledgements. I'll have to say first. Well,

[3:10]Zibby Owens: thank you. It meant a lot. And I feel that same way. Feel like, yeah, not like every single person, but I would say most people, once I get to know them really well, it's hard not to want to be friends. You know, you feel like you get to know them. And then I find myself totally rooting for everybody. You know, it's great.

[3:25]Emily Henry: And then everybody's rooting for you, which is just like, yeah.

[3:29]Zibby Owens: You. That's very sweet. So I thought we could do like a sort of mini podcast if you will live about your latest book. So congratulations on people we meet on vacation.

[3:43]Emily Henry: My gosh. So much success. Are you like blown away again? I mean, you're like a superstar. This is great. I am blown away. I have like an email chain. I have a lot of email chain publishing team and every single time that an email comes into it, all of us are just like, okay, more great news. Like, how are we gonna keep celebrating this for this long? Because now it's been out for like seven or eight weeks and it's just like, yeah, it's been seven or eight weeks of celebration. You know, I don't know. It's not what I think. I think when you're setting out to publish, it's like sort of the scenario you imagine for yourself but then once you've done it to a couple of times you're like oh that doesn't happen like that's the exception that doesn't happen. Like what

[4:26]Zibby Owens: it happened like when I stopped expecting it. Well there you go. You know, it's like dating, right? Which is, you know, as soon as you stop looking. I feel like once I think when I got I had this like year of my life where I was like really trying hard to meet someone and I was like always getting dressed up and going out every weekend and being like, maybe he's at this party, maybe he's at that party. And then like the second I got into business school and I was like, oh, great. Don't have worry. I'll meet someone at business school. Then I like met someone the next day. So Oh my gosh. Wow. The next day meet is always like I feel like that is such a that's what happens. That's like such a common story where you're like, immediately

[5:01]Emily Henry: you just meet someone out of the gate. Mean, I guess it is the same thing as publishing. Yeah. It's always best to let the universe do its own thing. Totally.

[5:11]Zibby Owens: Yeah. As much as control freaks like myself don't like that. But yes, it's probably true.

[5:17]Emily Henry: For anyone who might not know what this book is about, would you mind giving a little synopsis of People We Meet on Vacation? Yeah, I would love to. Okay. So People We Meet on Vacation is the story of Alex and Poppy, who are best friends. They meet in college and they don't think that they will be friends. They have nothing in common. Poppy is this wild, chaotic, kind of a little bit of a party girl, just kind of wants to meet people and see the world. And Alex is this very buttoned up academic who just kind of wants to go to school forever, which is like me kind of dividing my personality into two people. It's like, I'm both of those things. So against all odds, they form this friendship. And over the years, the way that they stay in touch as their lives carry them off in different directions is that they take a summer trip. And so the book starts two years after their last summer trip. So, you know, there's been this rift and they're not really speaking and you don't know exactly what happened. But Poppy is in this huge rut at work and in her personal life, she just decides that the thing that's missing and the thing that will fix everything is having Alex back in her life. So she convinces him to take one more summer trip to see if they can fix their friendship. And yes, the book follows that trip in the present, but then it's also interspersed with all of their previous 10 summer trips. So you get to go back and see them getting to know each other. I think it's a lot of fun. So if you haven't read it yet, I hope you do too. I read it, but I hope you're talking to other people watching. Oh yeah, other people. Yeah. I know you're an old pro. Like that's what I'm saying, you're the best host. You can tell when you show up and you're like, you haven't read my book. These questions just aren't quite right. That has not happened with you, obviously. Thanks.

[6:52]Zibby Owens: Well, I I can't read every word of everything, but I do my best. I really do my best. But this was so great because I feel like anybody who gives up a trip to Santorini immediately

[7:02]Emily Henry: should get, you know, a medal. I totally agree. And I mean, that was really fun to write because that was basically based on my desire to go to Santorini and that I haven't been yet. Was like, I don't want to write Santorini based on Google searches. I think that will be excruciating. So I thought that that's the way to slip in a couple of the places that I want to go, but not actually send them there. I have some other moments in the book where I kind of did that where it's like these are trips I will take eventually, but I haven't. So this way I'm not writing a book from Google, which I'm not as good at as some people are.

[7:37]Zibby Owens: I have not been to Santorini either and I would love to go there. So, anyway, let me know when you're going. Yeah, we'll go to Santorini.

[7:46]Emily Henry: Santorini, I mean, now we're so close. We're so close we can taste it to all of that international travel There

[7:53]Zibby Owens: was like a whole feature. I don't know if you saw it in the New York Times over the weekend. And it was all about like the latest hotels to open in Mykonos. And like, I just was like holding it like, oh, looks so beautiful. Like everyone looks more beautiful Yeah. Than the

[8:08]Emily Henry: It's like, it really is the place in pictures that you're like, is this photoshopped? Like every single time I see a picture of somebody in Santorini, I'm like,

[8:15]Zibby Owens: there's no way or anywhere in Greece really. Yeah, pretty much. I have been to Mykonos and it's like insanely amazing. So anyway, yeah, like dream to go back ever. So this book was so amazing because I didn't realize as I started reading it that you were flashing back not flashing back, but the way that you had structured the chapters was one chapter in the present, and then you were going sort of back from ten years to until it caught up with everything. And each one was based on a trip, which, I mean, I guess I should have researched it first, but I just looked at it anyway. Going blind, I think. Yeah. It's a more fun. So but I love doing that. So you could see the progression and then it was all sort of making sense to where you were in the present. How did you come up with that structure for this book? Yeah.

[9:01]Emily Henry: So it happened really organically. Like I knew I wanted to play with structure. That's not something I'd actually ever done before. My books have always just kind of been very chronological and I write and figured out as I'm going along. But I really specifically wanted to play with structure in some way and I didn't have any ideas for that. So my editor and I like kicked her out a couple of different kind of ways to build a book thinking like they would feed into the plot because we just like did not have anything. We're just like, don't have characters, we don't have a plot, we don't have a structure, we'll figure it out. But what ended up happening was I was trying to think of settings for the book and I knew I wanted it to feel very summery and a little bit, a little bit aspirational and, you know, just kind of scratch all of those like escapist itches. And I made this list of locations that could be the setting for the book. And I realized that all of them pretty much were places that I had traveled, but not places that I had lived. And so I thought, again, kind of like knowing that there are people who are so good at research, this is no shade at them. But I thought, I'm not sure I could write any of these places convincingly as a local. And so setting a book there, like I could set a book in New Orleans, but they're basically just gonna go to Bourbon Street. Like it's not gonna be like anyone from New Orleans is gonna kind of be like these people do not live here. They're just like doing things. So yeah, I realized it was just all of these vacation destinations that I have been to. And I, at that point just was like, oh, well, if I just wrote from the point, from the perspective of a traveler and then instantly the structure just completely came to me or it was like, oh, I'll set it over the course of these vacations. I don't really know how I then figured out to do like the dual timelines with the present day storyline with the other trips kind of interspersed. I think that that was just that I knew that would be easier to build tension if there was something that it was like building toward versus just telling it in chronological order. It's like sneaking this little mystery in and, you know, it's like the mystery itself is not gonna like shock anyone, blow anyone away. But I think the getting there and understanding why it was so important, why what happened really rocked their friendship and everything that led up to it. It's not really like this one thing pulled them apart, but more of like their whole journey was kind of building and building and then they had nowhere to go. So yeah, it's just kind of like the magic experience. I don't know if you've had that magic experience when you're writing. Can just tell sometimes you're carving something from sheer rock and then sometimes you're like, oh, and then this could happen and that makes sense because of this. And it's like, how are these two

[11:41]Zibby Owens: things that are like the same job? How is this writing a book and this is writing a book? Well, it's also like reading books. I mean, experience of read, like the fact that they all are even like the same shape and words and, you know, when they're so different when you can open one up and like, you know, travel around the world or you can, you know, one minute I'm in like a contentious meeting with, you know, the boss of the travel blog and the next minute I'm like, you know, crying about, you know, I just interviewed Martha Beckley's writing about like the sexual abuse she had as a child. I'm like, you don't know what you're gonna get when you open it up. That's why when people are like reading this, reading that. I'm like, it's not even like one thing. It's like a thousand things. I mean, that's why it also is really like traveling because it's like,

[12:26]Emily Henry: I don't know. Yeah, there's just something about story that really, it just takes you out of your own life and it lets you briefly have this other entire life. And I don't know, it's interesting that not everybody really craves that and just like book people and I guess like film people, whatever. Some of us just really crave that. We're like one life is not enough. Need to be. Right. I need to feel everything. I need to be everyone.

[12:49]Zibby Owens: I never thought of it as like one life is not enough. But there is that is a funny way to look at it. Yeah. I don't know. I guess you're right. I don't know. I mean, I'm satisfied with my own life, but my life is so enriched by all the characters experiences that I don't actually live myself. It

[13:06]Emily Henry: changes you to read and that's like a really I don't know. It's a really beautiful experience.

[13:11]Zibby Owens: And I feel like this book, I felt like it was so similar in a way to When Harry Met Sally, is PS, my favorite movie of all time. With sort of like the college age meetup where you think you're like never gonna see this person again, you don't really like them and then they become like one of these central characters in your life.

[13:27]Emily Henry: Yeah. Yeah, that was, I mean, was again, you know, like, I feel like every time I write a book, there's just sort of this like, almost like a Ferris wheel of things that I'm thinking about and my brain is just sort of reaching out and grabbing them and seeing what fits together. And the When Harry Met Sally dynamic was something very early on that I knew I wanted to try. I actually was not convinced I could do it because I hadn't really I hadn't written like a friendship that evolved into something more. I don't think ever really, or, you know, not over the course of years at least. And I also, you know, the thing that I love about When Harry Met Sally, which I think I said this in, like, the behind the book essay, whatever, but I love that every time it starts, I kind of have this thing of like, am I misremembering and I don't actually like this movie as much as I think? Because Harry just drives me so, like, just batty in the beginning. I just think he's so obnoxious up front, and I just have trouble seeing Billy Crystal become the romantic lead. Then every single time, they really get me. They really get me. And I fall in love with Harry again. And I watch Sally fall in love with him, and it's like so rewarding to just see these people who It's not like the things that were annoying about them went away. It's just like they were young and they took their first impressions at face value and getting to know someone really can change every experience you've had with them in your memory. And yeah, I really, I wanted to create that dynamic except I wanted Poppy to be like a little bit of the abrasive one instead of Alex. I wanted Alex to be a little bit more staid and in control and, you know, thinking about his decisions, whereas Poppy's a little bit more like,

[15:04]Zibby Owens: Well, now I'm sort of annoyed because I did not know that you wrote a whole behind the essay, behind the book essay about it. I thought that was my own just like, know, Well, or a better compliment to me. That's a much better compliment to me because I think that, you know, there's just any time you just whisper Nora Ephron's name,

[15:25]Emily Henry: within forty minutes with me, that's a compliment. Like, she I just don't think anyone has, at least that I've discovered, I don't think anyone has done really what Nora Ephron could do, especially in just like two hours. Like how? How?

[18:02]Zibby Owens: And I love how you take us to all these different places, but yet the modern day story is like not the best, right? Like, that's what my kids say, like, this was not the best when they mean something terrible. So yeah. Like this and and how many people out there have had, like, sort of horrific Airbnb experiences and hotel rooms that they hate and how they're, like, in this one bed with the big back spasm and he's on the floor and you're like, oh my gosh. Like, because of this stupid this studio, it doesn't look like you wanted and that whole like being led astray thing which happens to all of us and yet, like, there's really not much we can do about it. Nothing.

[18:41]Emily Henry: Nothing. And it is so funny because I feel like that can make a a rig a trip obviously, But also who you're with matters so much because those things can be really horrible, but when you're traveling with the right person, after even a few minutes, sometimes you're like already laughing about it. Even while it's happening, you're like, this is the worst, but here we are and someday this will be really funny. And I think, you know, when I set out to write it, like I said, I kind of had this idea that it was gonna be glossy and aspirational and whatever. And then I started writing it and realized I just wanted to put that into, like, horrible travel nightmare scenarios. And then I realized the reason really was because when I think back on my favorite trips, there are kind of the moments with like this beautiful sheen where things just went better than you could have expected and you wandered into a restaurant and had the best meal of your life and all of that. But then you also, alongside those, really do remember those days that were just unbelievably bad and things went so wrong. And, you know, especially if you're with someone who you have a good time with, like maybe you were even at each other's throats in the moment, but now you laugh and joke about it and, you know, you recall those memories. Every couple of years, you kind of take them out and talk about them and the stories kind of grow and become outright lies gradually. But, yeah, I, like, found that that was what I was excited about writing. And I realized that's, you know, kind of how we would get to know Poppy and Alex over years was showing them in these really nice situations where they're just having a good time and things are going right. But also how are they under duress? And, you know, what does that bring out of them and how are they when they're in conflict?

[20:17]Zibby Owens: By the way, and there was at the end, well not to give away any ending, there was this sort of perhaps this will become people we meet in New York, right? Is that gonna happen? Are you gonna say? I would, okay.

[20:32]Emily Henry: I don't know. We'll see. I love so much when people are excited enough about my characters that they would like to read a sequel. But I also really would want to make sure that I think the story would have to come to me first. I don't think that I would sit down and say, Okay, I'm going to write a sequel. I'm gonna figure out what they're doing in New York. I think that maybe I would have a dream or just be, you know, daydreaming and think, oh, this is what would happen next with Alex and Poppy. And then maybe I would write that. And yeah, because I think it's so it's it's so tempting to just like stay in that story and to stay with those characters. But I also don't want to just kind of shoehorn them into situations that don't feel right and I don't want to disappoint people who really really loved them. Sometimes you read a book and characters, you know, continue and you pick up the next book in your read a series, you pick up the next book and you're like, these don't even feel like the same characters. The author's mind kind of removed itself from that world and then they tried to get back in and as a reader you're just sort of like, I don't I don't know. Would they do that? It seems like there's like we're missing a lot in between. So we'll see. All that say we'll see.

[21:33]Zibby Owens: I don't know. I think there's a lot of potential that you could do there. I mean, they also don't have to like be in New York all the time. Like you could just have a face there and you know, as a New York mom, you could also fast forward. That's kind of little New York mom scene action, which also, I don't know, I'm just saying.

[21:50]Emily Henry: I think that would be, that's sort of where my mind went when we were just talking is like, I think that would be the next big hurdle for them would be like, yeah, having kids, especially having kids in the city. Like how are you guys going to make this work? Can you do it? Yes.

[22:04]Zibby Owens: Well, happy to give you any research tips you need, but gosh, that would be so fun to see Alex and Papia's parents, have to say. I

[22:12]Emily Henry: love like, this is not related to books really. Well, is kind of because there's some, there's kind of some I can't talk too much about my next book, but there's kind of a whole little section that's just sort of about New York mom and I don't know if it got edited out, but about the New York mom, the New York kids experience because I briefly lived there for a residency and I was there with other people who, you know, we'd be on the train or whatever on the sidewalk and people would be like, oh, they'd see a mom with her kids. Can't imagine raising kids here. And I, every time was just like, there's no better place that I can imagine like raising your kids. Would just like love seeing the kids get onto the train on their school uniforms and going to the Met and just seeing like field trips to the Met. And yeah, there was like a whole thing in my next book where I was just sort of talking about that specific thing of the New York mom. So maybe that will happen.

[23:01]Zibby Owens: Well, see, it's perfect because now you can cut it out of this book and save it for Yeah. This You're already in it. Wait, you must be able to say something about the one you're working on now. A little bit. I can say a tiny bit, which is

[23:16]Emily Henry: that in my mind, I don't know that anybody reading this would pick up on it, but in my mind, it is my homage to You've Got Mail, which is my second favorite rom com. Yeah. I

[23:27]Zibby Owens: don't know what about Sleepless in Seattle? I mean I feel like we could go through all the that was one of my favorites. Yeah anything with

[23:34]Emily Henry: Meg Ryan or honestly Sandra Bullock has a couple of my favorites too. I always think about While You Were Sleeping is like a Christmas movie and yeah, they're all so good.

[23:44]Zibby Owens: Interesting. So how

[23:46]Emily Henry: deep into this next book are you? I am so deep. I'm neck deep. I actually am about to emerge, would say. I just turned in kind of like my final real edit. So we'll be going to copy edits and proofreads next. And hopefully we won't notice that we did anything really like the characters don't change their names halfway through and have totally different backstories. Yeah, I think, I mean, right now the plan is for it to come out next summer as long as nothing weird happens. We were on a tight deadline. My editor is coming up on maternity leave. So we were like, okay, we have to finish this. The baby is going to be here. So yeah, I've been fully immersed in that book since last fall. And I'm going to take a little time off and then I'm going to write another book. Amazing.

[24:31]Zibby Owens: So is that so are you trying to know that's not going to add up to one every summer, You're going to have to do is it every like is it every summer? It is summer. I think I mean that's the goal but we'll see you know life stuff can happen and

[24:45]Emily Henry: sometimes there are years where it's like, Oh, I wrote four books this year. And then there are years where it was like pulling teeth to write half of one. So it all just depends on what my brain does. Every fall I get this burst and I think my agent knows to expect it now where I send an email and I'm like, one book a year is not enough for me. I need to be doing a lot more because I just get this burst of creative energy and become sort of manic and I'm like, I can write three more books before the end of the year. Then by spring every year, I'm like, Oh God, I have a year off. So we'll see.

[25:18]Zibby Owens: Is there anything you're going to do creatively essentially with the locations from this book or from like, I like, I wanted to start, like, a moms don't have time. Well, I did start, I guess, I should say. I had started this moms don't have time to travel Yeah. Little community and Instagram, and I'm sort of having on hold because, like, I can't do everything I wanna do anymore. But I feel like there's so much potential with travel and branding that's not being done yet. And I feel like this book could sort of I don't know. Like, you could send people on tours, and you could you could organize them. Like and also, was this a fictitious like, you could create the blog. I can't remember what's it called rest and relaxation or something. Like, are you going to start something?

[26:00]Emily Henry: Gosh, I hadn't gotten that far. I hadn't gotten that far in my thoughts. I think the biggest takeaway that I had, this is such a boring adult sentence that would have meant nothing to me ten years ago, but the farthest that I had gotten is just being like, oh yeah, I can write off my vacations. And that's about as far as I've gotten, which is like, I can travel and just choose places I want to go and go stay for a month and write a book about it. That's kind of all I really learned from Poppy. Learned some other things from Poppy, but from that book, I think it was just this big realization of, I do want to be seeing more and traveling more and it's just a great excuse to do that and to research. I think when we were trying to kind of plan publicity, I do remember we talked about all these fun things of like writing some fictional blog posts. Then of course, then I was just on deadline forever. I like, I am sorry. I will not be promoting this book. I hope that that's okay. And my team is incredible and they did a fantastic job. But yeah, I think maybe you just are a little bit more of a big picture thinker than I am. No.

[27:09]Zibby Owens: I mean, I think it would actually be really neat if you almost crowd sourced it. Right? So you didn't have to do it all yourself. But all your fans, right, you have, like, 8,000,000 fans. I just made that number. You have a zillion fans for this book now who are really passionate about it and who travel a lot, and travel is coming back. So you could do this blog and have everybody, like, I don't know, you could have everybody do a little write up of it and then it becomes like a, don't know. Anyway, whatever. Got enough on your plate.

[27:39]Emily Henry: I love that. I mean, and the idea too of somebody telling you what to read in a certain location would be really fun too. Being like go here and read this book while you're there. Somebody is planning your trip for you and that sounds great.

[27:54]Zibby Owens: That's true. I should do an article of what to read in different places. Well, maybe I'll do that later today. Yeah. Tell me what to read in Mykonos. That's what we'll do. I could tell you what I read when I was in Mykonos, but that was like, what did I read? That was a couple was it two years ago or three years ago that I went there? But I took pictures of like my huge stack of books that I brought. I'm gonna have to remember. But that was just like read every book. That's fun. But I always have like ebooks every week. Right. You know, it's whatever happened then. Awesome. So where do you write? Where like, where is your go to spot? What do you where what's your process like? Do you write all day? Tell me how you're managing this. Yeah,

[28:33]Emily Henry: when I'm drafting, think I'm giving myself a million kinds of arthritis and carpal tunnel because I draft usually like lying flat on the couch with my head kind of like curpped up and my laptop on my tummy. And yeah, every time my husband walks through, he's like, you okay? What is this? And I'll move around throughout the day. I've got kind of, you know, like an elevated desk that I'll use and I just kind of move around whenever I get stuck because I think, I don't know if you've found this with your writing too, but I feel like sometimes a change in location will just jog something loose. So yeah, when I'm drafting, I like to wake up and not do anything before I write if possible, because as soon as I start answering emails or doing phone calls or whatever, it just uses a little bit of my willpower, I think. I have a daily word goal of 2,000 words. And I write until I get that. Sometimes if it's going really well, I might write twice as much. Sometimes I might be like a 100 words under. And the other thing is like, sometimes that takes me an hour and a half and sometimes it takes me nine hours depending on what my headspace is and what I have figured out so far. And I'm so, so, so lucky to be able to do it, to work that way and to be able to have this be my full time job. But it is kind of funny because I used to have a different full time job and I kind of feel like, do I get any more done than I did when I had a full time job? I'm definitely happier, but do I get any more done? Because yeah, I think it's, I don't really know. It's just the way that I have figured out works for me is having that word goal and not letting myself off the hook. Again, if it's going really well, I could be done with that in an hour and a half and have a full day ahead of me. And when that happens, I actually tend to burn myself out on accident because I think, well, it's only been an hour and a half, you know, might as well keep working until 5PM. And then by the next day, I'm just like a desiccated sponge. But yeah, mean, there are times the best feeling in the world for me is when I do want to write for a full day. And it doesn't happen all that often that I just feel like I watch the sun go down in the sky and realize I haven't gotten up to turn on the lights in my office or whatever, but it's the best feeling I think when you just kind of get lost.

[30:45]Zibby Owens: That's awesome. And you've been like such a great, you know, literary citizen as Courtney mom calls it. But I feel like you've been posting a lot more about different books that you've loved reading. What have you read lately that you wanna shout out about? Anything?

[31:00]Emily Henry: Do you get so daunted when people ask you this because I know it's the worst question because I usually just pick whatever on my desk right then. That's basically what I typically do, which I am in a hotel room right now. But one that I have right in front of me that I'm reading currently is On a Night Like This by Lindsay Kalk. And it's sort of women's fiction, sort of a rom com. Just love there's like a very particular subgenre, I feel like, of British women's fiction writers that are just like my happiest place to be. And I don't know what unites them and makes it feel different than an American women's fiction writer. I guess maybe some of just like the slang and whatever, but there's this like kind of bouncy, jouncy feeling. Think about, yeah, Lindsey Kelk is one of the ones that comes to mind and Ari McFarlane and Page Toon. I don't know, just a few people who really just like make me happy. I also just read a few weeks ago, The Other Black Girl, which I thought was really good, really gripping. I also am a Book of the Month subscriber and I think one of my favorite things about them is that they always pick things that are paced really well. That's true. Almost anything you choose for the month, if you open it, you're going to finish it within the next couple of days. And so that is kind of how I do a lot of narrowing the field. I read Laura Dave's The Guest List and I loved that. I thought that was really fantastic. And I'm not like a big thriller mystery reader, but I loved that. And coming out soon, Suzanne Parks' So We Meet Again, is her I think it's her sophomore adult women's fiction rom com. It's about a woman who leaves her Wall Street job and moves back to her Nashville Korean church community with her parents and kind of has to figure out what she's doing next if she's not going to be a banker. It's just, it'll make you very hungry, but it's also just warm and nice. And there's like, I don't know, it's just, it's very, very fun. And I think that comes out in August. So we're very close to that. Perfect. So you did an excellent job. So

[33:02]Zibby Owens: last question today, any advice for aspiring authors? Yeah, I mean, can't

[33:08]Emily Henry: remember now. So this might be the same thing I said when we did your podcast last year, but I think there are a couple of things that I think are really important. One, if you haven't been able to finish a book and you want to be writing books, then I would say finish it no matter how bad it is. That's how I use that word goal as my motivation. Because I'll write 2,000 words every day and then I'll have to cut 15,000 words of that later because nothing even happened. But I sat down and I committed myself to the time and I gave myself the space to figure it out. So I think finishing things, if you haven't finished a book, you are capable. And just let it be bad, that's okay, and you can fix it all later. But make yourself finish it no matter how horrible, because it will just feel really good. The other thing I think, think it's really important to write the thing that you really do want to read. And everybody says that, but I think that sometimes people get in their heads trying to figure out what the market wants or what works for other authors and what makes a successful book. And when I wrote Beach Read, I didn't think anybody would ever be reading that. And even when we went to sell it, we were like, okay, so it's a rom com, but also like there's a grieving girl whose father has died. Like they're researching a cult where everyone died in a fire and we didn't really know or I didn't really ever think that anyone else would want that book. I just knew I wanted it. You know, sometimes you write the book you wanted and it sells a thousand copies and then you get the email that they're pulping it, which has also happened with one of my books. And then sometimes you write the book you want and it's a New York Times bestseller, but you just don't have control over anything but the work. And so you should always make what you actually want to make because you cannot anticipate the market. You cannot control anything other than what you write. Awesome. Excellent advice. Very wise. Thank you.

[34:57]Zibby Owens: Great. Well, Emily, congratulations. Keep writing. This whole Instagram live people have been like, I love you. This is the best book ever. So just keep it up. This is fantastic. You got a good thing going here. Keep it up. Thanks so much for having me Zvi and someday we will do this in person. Feel short. Yeah, me too. Crazy. All right. Okay. Have fun on your trip and keep expensing your vacation. We'll see where you go. Thanks everyone for showing up. Yeah. Thank you everybody. Bye.

[35:40]Zibby Owens: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.