(Beach)Housekeeping:
This is the second discussion of Beach Read. Read on whether or not you’re reading the book, and I’ll see you next week for the final installment.
Last week Ayo Edebiri posted a screenshot of her texts with Luca Guadagnino, director of forthcoming Ayo Edebiri vehicle After The Hunt. He instructed Edebiri, and seemingly also Julia Roberts, to post a photo of the cast, or, whoever all these people are, in a setting that looks like a Montessori summer camp, specifically to grid. She obliged but, with Ayo Edebiri’s hilarious and topical joie de vivre we’ve all come to know and love, also posted the text from Guadagnino, captioning the carousel with “#notastory.” Guadagnino made the best movie of 2024, imbuing “Not a story!!!” with potential for future applications. I am wary to mobilize this, however, because After the Hunt does not seem like it will be the best movie of 2028.1 I will do so anyway, however, because the book Beach Read by Emily Henry is, in its way, Not a story!!!
I had been going to the same nail salon for years until a coworker recently recommended a new one that is more conveniently located. At my prior salon, they played Top 40 over a muted Netflix shuffle on the flat screens visible from every seat: conventional set up. The new salon seems identical at first, but after a few minutes you realize the ambient soundtrack is an agitating mix of what I believe to be Kazakh YouTube videos playing through the nail techs’ AirPods, acoustic Top 40 covers playing from a live YouTube stream at full volume, and, at a marginally quieter volume, Emily in Paris on a constant loop. Prior to patronizing this business, I had seen the first season of Emily in Paris 2.5 times, the second season twice, and the third once (don’t ask). Now, I would estimate I have seen the first season of Emily in Paris a full 3 times, and the third season twice, though needing my nails done never seems to coincide with the second’s private syndication.
The very second episode of Emily in Paris, which I rewatched just days ago while my hands were soaking in goo, tracks Emily’s dismay (“Ok, my head is just completely spinning!”) at non-monogamy. She has just relocated to Paris for work, and is preparing for her long-distance Chicago-based boyfriend to visit her:
She is addicted to telling any man in her vicinity that she “has a boyfriend,” so when a hot guy makes a vaguely sexual comment to her, only to quickly be revealed as already having an affair with her boss, she starts to unravel: France is different than U.S.A.! Then: she halts an active commercial shoot to explain #MeToo to the production and marketing teams, after which her boyfriend calls her and says that he is not coming to Paris, after all (unrelated). Emily is not very upset about her boyfriend’s decision, because she is already falling in love with the city of Paris–in which case, who need boyfriend! Next she is retweeted by Brigitte Macron:
To an untrained eye, the rudimentary themes and strange aesthetic of this episode are indistinguishable from those of Beach Read, which seems like it would be easy to understand as girlish fun. While Emily certainly has long hair and boy problems, however, in the episode I just described she also wears Tabis and an entirely bare midriff. “Masculin Féminin” is organized by her characteristic prudishness, but at Emily’s expense; through the course of the episode she learns, more or less, that consensual cheating is fine and Europeans are less woke than Americans but chicer for it. The series goes on to champion lightweight sexual deviousness and strange outfits, with plenty of (accidental or consensual) cheating and Kenzo (?) to go around. Emily has a new hair accessory in every scene and a rotating circle of glamorous and/or annoying friends. If she behaves embarrassingly, she makes up for it with trademark confidence and professional ingenuity. When Beach Read’s girl with long hair and boy problems gets embarrassed or remembers that her dead dad had an affair she knows nothing about, she sobs for paragraphs on end.
Emily Henry would get bent out of shape by my criticism that Beach Read is no fun. As is relentlessly explained and re-explained in the text itself, it is not supposed to be fun but artistically valuable “women’s fiction.” I, however, am a materialist, thus understanding this kind of boy-trouble-centric wish-fulfillment to be aesthetically indebted to the “women’s” texts that came before it. Putting Emily (Henry) in conversation with Emily (in Paris) is particularly productive to this end because Emily in Paris is supposed to be Sex and the City—the epitome of cultural product made for women with long hair—for a new generation.2 It is, ultimately, not, but is at least successful in following two SATC tropes: 1) effectively combining serialized and episodic narration, and 2) synthesizing harrowing drama about loneliness with an onslaught of one-liners about penises. Emily in Paris, in other words, is certainly trash about a kind of magical woman with a hot neighbor (essentially the plot of Beach Read) but it also explores themes Emily Henry doesn’t seem to know trash can explore. Emily’s foray into non-monogamy, for example, is rather nuanced and culturally informed. Like Carrie, Emily is imperfect—dumb, even—and her convictions about sex and romance are not always, if ever, embraced by the show itself. Beach Read, on the other hand, has an ideologically protestant agenda that, when mixed with its compulsive neoliberal feminism, render all the penis-centric elements extraterrestrially flat.
In my first Beach Read post I mentioned how often I put down the book to record prose that made me gasp or laugh out loud. The second 100 pages exacerbated this experience to the nth degree, nearly making me go insane. Something I didn’t mention about the first 100 pages, for example, is that the chapters are titled as if they foreshadow some sort of Easter egg contained by the following pages (“The Labradors,” “The Ride,” “The Past”), but most of the time describe something completely narratively and ambiently insignificant, or seemingly nothing really contained in the chapter, at all. More notably however, is how the premise and genre of Beach Read has transformed in these chapters from legible—I’ve seen Emily in Paris—to actually, really confusing.
"’No one gets looking for postmortem parental answers like I do. If I watched the movie 300 right now, I'd probably find a way to make it about my dad.’ He gave me a faint smile. ‘Great cinema.’”
Beach Read: Chapters 11-17
What the protagonist of Beach Read “loves” about “reading” is when “the story spins itself into a cyclone” “like a spiderweb around you.” She drinks some coffee, puts on some gangsta rap, and handles it:
“I was too distracted to write when I got home, so I put myself to better use. I twisted my hair into a topknot, put on shorts and a Todd Rundgren tank top, and went to the guest bathroom on the second floor with trash bags and boxes.”
She and Gus start to flirt more outwardly through notes:
“Once he wrote to tell me that LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATE.
YOU REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE EATING AND THE CHOCOLATE MAP IN THE LID IS FUCKING ALWAYS WRONG.
I wrote to tell him that IF YOU'RE A BIRD, I'M A BIRD.
He let me know that IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM, and I wrote back, NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST.”
January “briefly had a shrine to Sinéad O’Connor” as a teenager, and her “favorite poet” is “Jewel.” One of the many times she bursts into tears, she is embarrassed to find Gus watching her “ugly cry like Tom Hanks in Cast Away.” Emily (the one in Paris) would not know who Sinéad O’Connor is, and the audience for a Netflixized version of Sex and the City would balk at the citation of Jewel or Cast Away. When January takes Gus to a “triple feature” of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail (not The Notebook, The Holiday, The Princess Diaries, Titanic), he threatens to take her to a “six-hour-long Jonathan Franzen reading.” This whiplash between generationally outdated cultural references and acutely contemporary ones—clearly the product of Googling “male author” in the years leading up to Beach Read’s publication—is simply something to behold.
More confusing than the nature of these nouns, though, is their narrative context. The rom-com triple feature would run over 5 and a half hours long, and she only likes Meg Ryan because she used her first book advance to “buy” “like twenty” copies of Meg Ryan movies, ostensibly on DVD, for both she and her friend so they could watch them together long-distance (?). Beach Read was published in 2020, and if January is 29 years old in 2020, she would have graduated college well into being able to stream movies. In what year and universe does this book take place?
🚨🚨🚨SWIFTIE MOMENT 🚨🚨🚨
Emily Henry and January Andrews continue to namedrop TS as a kind of self-aware acknowledgement that the people who are reading Beach Read are also supposed to like Taylor Swift: this makes perfect sense. In practice, however, it is insulting. Both Emily and January fancy themselves poets, with the former producing words documented above, and the latter writing this book:
“Ellie became Eleanor. She went from being a down-on-her-luck real estate agent to a down-on-her-luck tightrope walker with a port wine stain the shape of a butterfly on her cheek, because Absurdly Specific Details. Her father became a sword swallower, her mother a bearded lady… They were part of a traveling circus.”
Combined with Beach Read’s nauseating reminders that Beach Read and its protagonist’s fake book are “serious,” the former’s jarringly asynchronous references and stilted prose shows a lack of actual engagement with Taylor Swift, who would not take any of this seriously, at all. Swift’s and Henry’s audiences might overlap because children like both of their products, but the redundant citation of Swift in Beach Read is an otherwise lazy citation of its own genre, demonstrating both a desperation for readers to believe it is real “literature” and a lack of commitment to understanding the epitome of trash-that-is-real-art: Taylor Swift.
What I understood in the first 10 chapters to be lazily scarce characterization of the two protagonists has since become altogether absent. Gus is only ever described as having a jaw, being “crumpled,” and “coldly horny.” These terms ascend (descend?) bad writing: I do not know what being crumpled and coldly horny means. She defines them, to be fair (Gus “wanted snarky banter and casual sex on top of their unfolded laundry”), but Gus is otherwise described as less of a slob and more emotional than January, who is always sweating and wearing the same pair of pants. Gus’s only other new characteristic is a phobia of vomiting and the fact that he has had the stomach flu “twice in the last 15 years,” which is a lot of times for a healthy adult to have the stomach flu. Does Augustus Everett have an underlying immunodeficiency virus?3
Characterization here shan’t be confused with “lore,” however, which Gus suddenly has too much of: he is divorced, his dad was abusive, AND his mom is DEAD. If you were keeping score, that’s 4 instances of parental trauma between January and Gus. The former has also become less of a character than an entity floating through plot points, with her only real descriptor becoming poverty (?).4 If all of this sounds like the making of some totally wicked sex scenes, you’d be wrong.
And this is how it starts. Take your shoes off in the back of my van.
Before ever kissing, almost halfway through the book, Beach Read’s romantic leads hold hands under a table. January claims that she “loves” this, but is quite satisfied to stop thinking about it, altogether, framing putting it out of her mind, literally, as pointed navigation around Gus’s supposed “emotional unavailability.” When he gives her his number, or does anything else that would indicate an interest in talking to her, she starts taking stuff to Goodwill, cleaning the bathroom, and working on her book about the circus (please!). After they start to touch and flirt, outright, she claims she is so worried about Gus hurting her feelings—despite no indication that he would do this—that having a crush on him “isn’t fun anymore.” It seems, however, like it was never fun: for January Andrews and Emily Henry, sex seems like a threat.
January’s constant internal monologue rarely mentions Gus, at all, and instead centers entirely on her father who, in case you missed it, is not only dead, but cheated on January’s mother. I at first wrote this plot point off as more lazy characterization that fulfills the parental trauma trope of wish-fulfillment literature, but after 17 chapters of prose for second-graders about non-monogamy, I am offended.
When Hannah Horvath is upset that her dad is gay, everyone is more or less like, “get over it.” In the only scene from The White Lotus that made me laugh, Steve Zahn is upset to learn his father died of AIDS because he was secretly gay. His woke teenage daughter Sydney Sweeney is annoyed by this, explaining that it is problematically gender-normative and homophobic for Steve Zahn to be upset. If I found out one of my dead parents had had an affair, I would be marginally confused for 1-5 hours about when they would have had the time or interest in doing that, but then I would not think about it any more for the rest of my life.
It is difficult for me to fathom how prudish and sexually broken you would have to be to care this much that your father, who you obsessively claim was a wonderful, loving father, had sex with someone who wasn’t your mother. The same virginal approach to monogamy is projected onto January’s realization of Gus’s prior marriage. After learning of his ex-wife who is (spoiler for next week) revealed to look like Miranda July, January cannot make it through a conversation without snapping at him or crying. She internally blames this behavior on her embarrassment for liking him so much, but the book firmly justifies her frenetic, drunken pouting. I am, once again, confused: she is the one completely psychologically wrecked by cheating!
“But even so, why did I care what he thought? I shouldn't need everyone to believe in or want the things I believed in and wanted.”
The machinations of this breakdown aren’t even worth recapping, so let’s skip to when she feels “paralyzing fear that any wrong move would ruin everything” because she and Gus’s legs are brushing each other:
“Somewhere deep in my mind, a self-preservation instinct was screaming, THOSE ARE THE EYES OF A PREDATOR, but that was exactly why nature gave predators eyes like that. So dumb little rabbits like me wouldn't stand a chance.
Don't be a dumb bunny, January!
‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ I said abruptly.”
“Ruin,” what, exactly, we can’t be sure, as it does not seem like she wants to kiss him, at all. She does, eventually, which makes “heat” “flood” “through her,” “racing like a river current baked hot by the sun,” but after making out they seemingly just drift to their respective houses, somehow, and we are given no access to their “goodnights” or January’s internal monologue. I guess it was simply bed time!
Combined with the New York Crimes best-of-the-century list that bizarrely excluded her, this section of Beach Read made me yearn for Sally Rooney. Not entirely unlike Emily in Paris, Rooney’s books unabashedly embrace boy problems to explore meaningful (class) and fun (having an affair) ideas. Emily in Paris is a product, however, and Rooney is one of the best minds of her generation. She would tell us if January shaved in preparation for the Meg Ryan triple feature, or if she was worried it would give her a UTI. Emily Henry doesn’t have to worry about those things, however, due to, I now firmly believe, being a virgin.
Join me next week to discuss the final chapters of Beach Read and learn more about Emily Henry, whose Instagram I have been waist-deep in for 2 weeks.
Let’s check in with Luca Guadagnino’s ability to edit and make wise, not gratuitous decisions about his art and career:
Darren Star created it and Patricia Field was a costume designer on seasons 1 and 2. If you’re reading this and thinking either, “we know,” or “who cares”—I am utterly desperate for Emily in Paris to remain relevant. I do not want people to forget about Emily in Paris and let it continue to be as bad as its last season. I want Emily in Paris to be good again, which it will only be if we care and talk about it. Talk to me in FRENCH talk to me in ENGLISH talk to me in your own made-up NETFLIX doesn’t matter if I understand it.
Behind the music:
She can afford vegetables but not flowers.
"I was tame, I was gentle 'til the circus life made me mean" - Taylor Swift re: Emily Henry's January Andrews' circus novel