The Michigan Quartet: Final Words on Emily Henry’s Beach Read
Mason Ramsey, Shailene Woodley, & Elena Ferrante
(White)house keeping:
This is the last installment of our first bookclub, which I would describe as moderately successful. Do you want to do one for the Sally Rooney book that comes out September 24?
Twisters: The Album is the album of the summer:
Curator of Barbie soundtrack Mark Ronson should do whatever the equivalent of dropping out of the presidential race is for husbands of Gummers after hearing this:
The opening paragraph of Vulture’s profile of Emily Henry is some of the craziest non-fiction writing to come out of American journalism in the past decade:
“Soon after Emily Henry left Hope College, a small, Christian-values-lite school in a tiny town in Michigan, she found herself living back in Cincinnati, trapped in her first postcollege job doing technical writing for the city’s phone-and-cable company. She’d always liked creative writing, but it seemed as plausible a career choice as her childhood dream of being a WNBA player.”
Profiler Allison Davis says that romance burns slow “in EmHen world,” and gets EmHen to tell her she is on Zoloft. EmHen says the “joy of romance” is that dating and sex are “humiliating” and “embarrassing” (both). Most of the profile is, in fact, about how romance and the romance genre are “embarrassing” and “alienating”: what’s revolutionary about EmHen World, according to Allison Davis, is that EmHen embraces embarrassment by beginning foreplay with “aligned values” that “evolve with every step,” and by writing books that are “prudish,” because love “should” be “practical,” not “volatile.”
This interview is conducted at Emily Henry’s house in Cincinnati, where she lives with her husband—a touring musician with a mustache—whom she has been with since she was 18 years old. Davis and Henry frame this relationship as “golden-retriever-ish” and “well adjusted,” despite Henry’s addition that it is, also, “Freudian”: her “philosophy of love” came from watching her parents, and she wanted a nice husband because “her dad is such a kind, sweet man.” Would you believe that a key plot line in Beach Read is that the protagonist learns she is like her father?
I think it is interpersonally repulsive and ideologically problematic to marry a boyfriend you have at 18, and I think EmHen World is a lot more daddified than she’d like to admit. But that is besides the point, which is that Allison Davis gets pull quotes from a San Antonio BookToker and calls Normal People an “epic love story.”
This profile, like Henry’s books, reads as if it was written by an alien in a dimension other than the one I materially and discursively occupy. Sex is not embarrassing to people who have had it, and Gen Z mormonism has not ushered in a new era of radically prudish romance novels. Taylor Swift—name dropped in the article as often as in Beach Read—was made the biggest monocultural cultural producer in the Western world by younger millennials and Gen Z, and her discography is mostly about how cheating is fun. Emily Henry writes books with morals for children that she and 25-year-olds who cannot name a director of feature films due to having access to the TikTok mobile application think are for adults. And that’s okay, as long as we can all get on the same page about what’s going on, unlike Warner Bros. who failed to get in touch with the TikTok-famous Indiana sodie chain Twisters this summer.
The most interesting thing about the Vulture profile is that, despite EmHen’s cultural pervasiveness, it is the only access we have to her personal life apart from sporadic Instagram selfies:
In a way, we know more about Sally Rooney or even Elena Ferrante, because their anonymously apt command over complex works of art clearly illustrate a “type” of writer.1 Elena Greco and Alice Kelleher are also, quite obviously, self-derogatory stand-ins for Ferrante and Rooney. January Andrews is an avatar for Emily Henry, but that doesn’t tell us anything about Emily Henry except that she is strange. Based on what I can gather from the Vulture profile and her Instagram, her creative projects seem an uncertain impression of “basic girl” despite never having to worry about finding a husband in adulthood: the biggest defining characteristic of basic girls. She is utterly terrified of sexualization, but has a link to donate to the “Gaza Humanitarian Crisis” in her Instagram bio. How do we categorize this person? What cultural gap does Beach Read fill? Do I owe her an apology because of the Gaza link?2
After a character’s ex-wife turns up at his reading like Nino Sarratore (the best book of the 4!), Beach Read ends with an acknowledgment that “Behind every book that makes its way into the world is a whole village of advocates,” which reminds me of when Donald Trump wrote, “I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin.” This prose and that it serves to conclude Beach Read encapsulates what has been so fascinating about Beach Read; it is not bad, good, boring, or interesting, but merely uncanny, in language, plot, and aura. While finishing its final chapters any sense of awe wore off, transforming into numb frustration over the lack of any narrative or emotional development. The ending thudded through a series of shocking yet short-lived “reveals” that makes it hard for me to want to remember the words “Emily Henry,” at all. At the end of this post my knowledge of its existence is going to collapse like the tornados in Twisters when they shoot chemicals at them.3
Beach Read: Chapters 18-28
Throughout the final third, I continued to be confused by things I have already discussed. 1) I don’t know how old the protagonists are. Gus met his ex wife “in grad school” and they were married “2 years,” but he is “approximately 30.” What did he go to grad school for? How long was he there? 2) I don’t know what January’s ex-boyfriend did for work. Every 50-100 pages the narrator reminds us Jacques worked in the ER. In these chapters, specifically, we learn he was “passionate about the ER.” But we never learn what he did there: January seems to avoid explaining it on purpose. Gus offhandedly describes Jacques as a “doctor,” but that comment is made to seem derogatorily untrue in some way. If Jacques were a doctor, he would be—at the very most—3 years out of medical school when he and January broke up. That means he would only be 2 years into residency, which means a long term commitment to emergency medicine (he talked about it their entire relationship) would have started before he even got into medical school, which is weird. What kind of freak chooses emergency medicine as a specialist when they are 21? I am more than happy to suspend my belief, but the seemingly pointed avoidance of naming Jacques’ job title simply thrills me. 3) I don’t think Emily Henry knows how long feature films are:
“That was how we'd ended up watching, or talking through, While You Were Sleeping, A Streetcar Named Desire, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (as punishment for making me watch A Streetcar Named Desire), and Mariah Carey's Glitter (as we descended further into madness).4 And even after that, I'd been wide awake, wired… [So,] Gus had suggested we put on Rear Window…”5
There also continues to be a deluge of nouns, the craziest instance of which is when “Cary Grant-level romance shit” is used to describe a “marriage tattoo.” She also mentions The Witches of Eastwick in passing, which reminded me: a couple years ago, some girls I went to high school with—whose names no longer have object permanence to me outside the Instagram app—dressed up as the Witches of Eastwick for Halloween. At the time, I thought it was a little odd that women who haven’t engaged with culture since 2014 would know what that is, because that movie has not had very much cultural posterity and we didn’t grow up with. This passage therefore made me shudder: did they watch The Witches of Eastwick because of Beach Read? EmHen, your next weird virgin protagonist needs to be really into Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher!
Jonathan Franzen is name dropped for the second time on page 292, but cannot stand up to the other names on Gus Everett’s bookshelf: Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, William Faulkner, George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay. If anyone ever models a fictional character off me, these are the authors I want to be on my bookshelf: Brittney Cooper, Kate Elizabeth Russell, Oscar Wilde, Sam Lansky, Marquis de Sade, Emily Henry.
This is all par for the course, as is Trumpian (“He crushed me to him” is like “show me to me”) and second-grade-reading-level (“‘You’re so fucking beautiful, you’re like the sun.’”) prose. Last week I wrote about how, around halfway into Beach Read, its buttoned-up sensualism turns from silly to disheartening. This also continues through the book’s conclusion, with sloppily composed romantic encounters amounting to nothing but a creepily conservative thesis about how sex and kindness are inextricable. Most jarringly, 200 pages of January’s obsession with with her dad’s marital indiscretion are unraveled with a flippant revelation that he and January’s mother were “briefly separated” when the affair began. Not only is cheating life-ruiningly upsetting, no possible excuse can justify it!
How many special people change? How many lives are living strange?
A plot point of Beach Read that I have avoided entirely is that, when he meets January, Gus is writing a book about a real cult that imploded, burned to the ground, and killed a bunch of people. January and Gus routinely interview survivors of this cult, in scenes that read like final papers by 19-year-olds who are realizing that human beings experience grave suffering. In one of the book’s final chapters, however, the couple ventures to the cult’s untouched ruins where, ostensibly, people were burned alive, their homes razed. Before having sex in a tent atop this ashen ground—fueled my Clif bars and drenched in sweat—January muses:
“Why do bad things happen? I thought. How will it all make sense?
“But no great truth appeared to me. There was no good reason this horrible thing had happened, and no reason Gus's life had been what it was either. Dammit, R.E.M. was right: Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting.”
In affect and ideology, this is not dissimilar to when January finds a letter from her dead, cheating father that reads, “I’m afraid what the truth” [about me cheating on your mother in an arrangement that is otherwise framed as consensual and not really cheating, at all] “will do to you.” January makes everything about her, despite not knowing what she wants or believes. I’m sure Elena Ferrante’s obsession with a mean, crazy, loserish woman who is frustratingly beautiful (Lina in the Quartet, Vittoria in The Lying Life of Adults, Nina in The Lost Daughter) stems from her own life experience. I am also sure the parallel between January’s preference for nervously processing her ideas about monogamy over having a crush or embracing true empathy and Emily Henry’s compulsive justification of Beach Read’s very existence throughout—which she does in lieu of writing an actual beach read—is not a coincidence, either.
I tried to have as much fun with the final third of the book as I did with the first two, but the relentlessness of these themes depressed me. As they collapse (like the tornados in Twisters) into January’s anxious demands for condoms and Gus’s admission of being in love with her for a decade (yawn), I longed for more salacious bad-ness. And I was in luck! In 2022, Hulu pooped out a movie called Fresh that was directed by “Mimi Cave.” This movie starred one of the best working actors and one of the worst, and was extraordinarily racist.
It was about commodifying women’s bodies but centered around a white one, which non-white characters had to, ultimately, save. Writing this makes it seem, unfortunately, pretty standard in today’s landscape, but it stands out in my mind as particularly egregious in no small part because it involved Daisy Edgar Jones. At the end of Beach Read, something not dissimilar seems to happen, though it’s hard to follow what exactly is “up” with January Andrews’ friend “Shadi.” Let’s not dwell on Emily Henry’s imaginations of race, though, and instead dwell on my imaginations of Daisy Edgar Jones.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: I am producing the film adaptation of Beach Read
If this were true, I would insist on casting Daisy Edgar Jones as January Edwards. She is ~5 years younger than her character, so I would also insist on Christopher Abbott as Gus Everett, who is ~10 years older, to make fans of Beach Read confused and angry about what happens when people more than 6 months apart in age are in the same room.6 Shailene Woodley would be in it as a surprise third love interest, only to be edited out of the film before it is released. The problem is that only one of these people really needs the work, which is extraordinarily depressing. Almost as depressing as the ending of Beach Read: Gus proposes after 9 months of dating which January and Emily describe as a “Happy For Now,” because January no longer has to “worry about tomorrow.”
No!
Part of the plot of Twisters is that if you don’t shoot chemicals at tornados and instead get a job you aren’t woke.
Why At World’s End and not Dead Man’s Chest? Why not On Stranger Tides, or even Dead Man Tell No Tales?
Before Rear Window, this marathon, which they are supposed to have accomplished in an evening, would run 8 and a half hours.
This is beautiful:
Mimi Cave's next feature, Holland, Michigan: "A Midwestern schoolteacher begins to suspect that her husband’s cheating on her, so she enlists the help of a fellow teacher to catch him in the act, which leads her to discover her husband’s dark secret life." It stars Nicole Kidman, Succession Tom, and Rachel Sennott. Beach Read-core.
I need to surface my observation that during the sex scene Emily Henry via January Andrews refers to her bra as a "balconette," the equivalent of calling a car a Hyundai Sonata, for example.