On a cool December evening in New Orleans, the romance writer Emily Henry sat in a black S.U.V., waiting to meet her public. She’d arrived at the Prytania Theatre for the début fan screening of “People We Meet on Vacation,” a new adaptation of her best-selling book of the same name. The hundreds of people filing into the small brick theatre had no idea that she was there; Netflix, which had produced the film, wanted to keep it that way. Henry was anxious, hungry, and a little carsick. “It’ll be the first time watching it with readers,” she told me. Her blond hair was curled. Her lips were painted red. Her rings were silver. Everything sparkled a little.

Henry, a BookTok phenomenon whose works have sold more than ten million copies, talks about “the readers” like a Beatle might talk about “the fans.” She was anointed by Reese Witherspoon’s book club; five of her six romance novels have been optioned, one of them by Jennifer Lopez’s production company.

The way these particular stars have aligned might seem like a cosmic sign. Once, in a golden era anchored by the girl-next-door charms of Reese and J. Lo, rom-coms reigned at the box office. By the twenty-tens, such films began to disappear from the big screen—but Henry brought her love for the genre to her own medium. In the car, she noted that she hadn’t read any romance novels when she started writing her first, “Beach Read,” nearly a decade ago. “I was playing with the sensibility of a rom-com movie, because that was what I was more familiar with,” she told me. Later, she named a heroine “Nora,” after Nora Ephron, one of her most significant influences. “I grew up watching those over and over and over again—so I think that the arc of that was all there in my brain.” Indeed, “People We Meet on Vacation” has a distinctly “When Harry Met Sally”-esque relationship at its core: in the span of a dozen years, Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen, like Harry and Sally, go from bickering near-strangers on a long car ride to unlikely friends to—perhaps—something more.

A Netflix rep beckoned Henry out of the vehicle, and we were secreted through a tiny alley to a side door, where Brett Haley, the film’s director, and Emily Bader, the actress playing Poppy, waited. Tom Blyth, who plays Alex, sidled up a little late. As the audience settled into their seats, Haley emerged and took the stage. “Rom-coms are not only back,” he announced to the room. “They are cinema.”

These days, romance novels are widely touted as a billion-dollar industry. Hollywood has decided that it wants in on the action. A 2024 film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s hugely popular book “It Ends with Us” grossed three hundred and fifty million dollars worldwide; it was swiftly followed by another Hoover adaptation, “Regretting You,” which was also a hit. In the past several weeks, “Heated Rivalry,” a TV show based on Rachel Reid’s romance series about two hockey players falling in love, has become a sensation on HBO Max.

Whereas Hoover’s work is dark and Reid’s is horny, Henry’s novels are characterized by a wry sweetness, gently twisting familiar tropes with a self-referential, even self-satisfied, irony. Her books are also obsessed with books: what they mean to people, what they reveal about people. The protagonists of “Beach Read” are both writers. In another of her novels, literally called “Book Lovers,” a sharky New York literary agent whose boyfriends keep leaving her for small-town belles is forced by her sister to vacation in rural North Carolina, where she falls in love with another sharky New York literary type who happens to be trapped there. Henry’s characters have impossibly adorable names; they’re conversant in mass culture and hyper-conscious of what “people in books” tend to do, bantering in a way that feels descended from Ephron, albeit with an extra shade of improbability. (After reading a review that criticized her dialogue as “unrealistic,” Henry’s mother called her up, indignant, to say, “This just sounds exactly like you and your friends.”)

When Henry finally stepped out to join Haley, her fans—her readers—thrilled. She waved a little shyly, smiled at the applause, and made her way to the mike. “I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m sweating,” she said, picking at the sleeves of her button-down crop top. “I’m wearing multiple of those little sweat pad things.” It was the kind of joke that one of her heroines might make. The crowd laughed with delight. “You guys, this movie would not have gotten made if not for you all,” Henry told them. “The audience is what makes this kind of magic happen.”

Though this sort of lip service is standard at such an event, it also feels true to Henry (or EmHen), who has a fiercely reciprocal relationship to her acolytes. After the credits rolled—the name “Emily Henry” got a few extra hoots—fans spilled into the lobby in a tumble of bookstore totes and baseball caps, clutching hands, laughing, and posing for photos. Jodi Laidlaw, the manager of Blue Cypress Books, leaned against the concessions counter, a plastic glitter crown on her head. “Beach Read” had been her first Henry novel, and, she said, “it changed my life. I became a big romance reader, and there’s a direct line from that to the fifty people I know here tonight.” She’d brought many of them herself: Netflix had given her dozens of tickets to distribute to members of her romance book club, which now reaches some seven hundred people.

Laidlaw, a “recovering English major,” told me that the group began with book discussions, but soon expanded to themed activities, food drives, and crafts. (“If you make people use hot glue, they will eventually become friends,” she said.) For the release of Henry’s “Funny Story,” in 2024, they held “The Emily Henry Extended Universe Library-Inspired-Lock-In-Read-a-Thon Funny Story Release Party Extravaganza,” complete with friendship bracelets and on-site library card sign-ups. “Inherent to the work of the Western, English canon, whether or not you subscribe to it officially or consciously, is the belief that profound sadness and the weighty intellectual inquiry of it is somehow more important or more integral to the human experience than wondrous joy,” Laidlaw said. “And that is bullshit, as it turns out.”

One might argue that the best art captures the breadth of suffering and sanctity that life contains, or that literature should challenge our perceptions rather than coddle us. But Laidlaw went on to say, “One of the people here tonight just came from visiting another one of our good friends who had a baby three weeks ago, who we’ve all visited over and over again. There’s community in this room that would not exist if not for the freeing, beautiful vulnerability that we get from romance.” And it’s hard to argue with that.

As recently as five years ago, very few people had heard the name Emily Henry. She was a Y.A. novelist of modest success when, in 2020, she published “Beach Read,” which blew up on TikTok and became a Times best-seller. The book tells the story of a romance novelist whose imploding personal life leads her to move into a vacation house on the shore of Lake Michigan—conveniently situated next door to the home of a hot bachelor with a crooked smile who writes prize-winning literary fiction. In a light sendup of the enemies-to-lovers plot, the romance novelist and the Franzen-lite wunderkind end up swapping genres as a sort of dare, falling over the course of three hundred-odd pages into earnest love and even more earnest sex. Her prose never matches Ephron’s precision and verve, but she does have the same keen sense of what makes people tick. She can also be quite funny: one chapter of “Beach Read,” entitled “The Dream,” reads, in its entirety, “I dreamed about Gus Everett and woke up needing a shower.”

Unlike Ephron, Henry’s books frequently evoke the texture of suburban middle-class life—and one element of the fantasy they offer is that this milieu seems to be thriving. Familiar American brands are invoked like holy relics: Dippin’ Dots, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Dunkin’ Donuts, Jell-O, Frappuccinos. The guileless product placement, rather than placing the products, places the reader: this is where you are (anywhere), this is who you are (anyone), this is the kind of book you’re reading (a book where anyone anywhere can be worthy of love).

The morning after the screening, Henry and I met at Café Beignet, on Royal Street, in the French Quarter. Jazzy holiday music played on the radio; plastic tinsel and lights wreathed the hobbit-hole-round kitchen doors. While we talked, a bird flitted in and out of the room. “He’s just had his morning cup,” she joked. It would be easy to feel that meeting over coffee and beignets in a tinselled New Orleans café in mid-December is the height of cliché, but EmHen’s project is granting permission to revel in the things that everyone loves to love. Whereas the night before she’d been silver, that morning she was gold: gold Möbius-strip earrings, one gold chunky ring, a thin gold wedding band.

Henry has been married since she was twenty-four. She doesn’t talk about her husband publicly; as she puts it, “He didn’t sign up for this.” She does, however, allow herself to talk about her parents, who also got married young—aged seventeen and nineteen—and who raised her and her two older brothers in nondenominational Christianity in Kentucky and Ohio. She attended Hope College, a Christian liberal-arts school in Michigan, in the early twenty-tens, before returning to Ohio, where she still resides today. “Hope and optimism and the value of love are the most beautiful parts of what I took away from a religious upbringing,” she told me. “I have friends who are, like, ‘Yeah, I spent the first fourteen years of my life just terrified every night that I was going to die and go to hell.’ And that literally never occurred to me.”

But there was a dissonance between the world she’d envisioned in childhood and the one she encountered in adult life. Around the time that Henry wrote “Beach Read,” she was experiencing a moment of crisis. “I was becoming cynical,” she told me. “I was trying to write this happy love story, and so much of it became about mistrusting the world and being hurt by it and being scared of it.” In the process of writing, she developed a “neat little thesis” that now animates all her plots: “The world can be so terrifying and heartbreaking, and at the end of it lies death—but here’s what makes it all worth it.”

Henry’s characters aren’t religious, as a rule. There are occasional references to priests, to churches, to religious parents. (Alex, the Ohio-born hero of “People We Meet on Vacation,” has a father who is characterized as a sort of reformed fundamentalist Christian.) But they are deeply moral and unflaggingly well-intentioned, even if they’re sometimes too short-sighted, or too flawed, to make the proper choices. Characters “pray,” without a hint of devotion, for planes to land and for secrets to stay hidden. Most often, their worshipful entreaties are directed at one another. In “Beach Read,” Gus breathes out the word “God” upon seeing his partner’s unclothed body. “Are you praying to me, Gus?” she asks. (“His inky gaze scraped up my body to my eyes.”) “Something like that,” he replies.

In her life and in her work, Henry steeled herself against the coldness of modern society by exchanging one sort of armor for another. “I think spending years of your life writing books that are, at their core, just about people falling in love and being loved, romantically and otherwise, is kind of putting a stake in the ground,” she told me. “It is really important to remind myself that cynicism is just an opinion. It’s not a fact.” Though she acknowledges that “the experience of reading or watching romance can be innately embarrassing,” she feels that it has a role to play. “Art serves the purpose of re-creating a microcosm of human experience,” she said. “That can mean anything. It can be about expanding your mind. It can be about having new experiences. It can be about healing!”

And Henry’s books are all about healing. Her work is premised on the belief that the people in our orbits can explain who we are, why we are the way we are, who we will be. The moral arcs of our lives are determined by the way others treat us, and any brokenness that results can only be undone—can only be healed—by other people, too. Henry says that she gives each protagonist one of her own “fatal flaws” (all venial sins, at most), and thus exorcises them on the page. Poppy, a rootless travel writer wounded by the bullies of her childhood, embodies Henry’s self-described “weird girl” energy. Alex, a repressed homebody, would seem an unlikely fit on paper—but Poppy’s openness eases his reflexive anxiety, just as his stability tempers her instinct to run away. Henry circumvents the problem of other minds by devising relationships that are mutually salvific. Believing in other people is a leap of faith. They exist to save us, and we to save them, in turn.

Henry describes her present relationship to religion as “figuring it out.” At the café, she told me, “The idea of a benevolent, loving universe is really deep in me, and I do still believe in that, and I do cling to that. And if that’s not accurate . . . I don’t know . . . I won’t find out.” She glanced at me sideways, as if to underline that, yes, she was talking about the finality of death sans afterlife. “All my books are just, weirdly, wrestling with the things that I find really hard about being alive and loving,” she added. Rain fell beyond the open wall at her back. “Look how hurt we get when we put ourselves out there, and look how much it devastates us when we lose someone. I have a healthy fear of death—not just me dying but accepting that every person that I love is going to die.”

“I’m a huge dog person, which means that I experience death somewhat regularly, with the most beloved creature in my life,” she went on. “Every time that happens, you tell yourself, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t open myself up to this kind of pain. Why would I bring home this animal, just knowing that this is going to absolutely ruin life in twelve years?’ ”

Henry teared up. “I always end up doing it, because the truth is, even in the depths of your grief, you wouldn’t undo the chance to feel that. It feels like an honor.” In her fiction, too, opening oneself up to the possibility of pain is the path to pleasure. Other people may be hell, but they’re also our only chance at heaven.

In some ways, Henry is just doing on the page what all of us must eventually do: working out how to reconcile the organizing principles of our past with something better suited to our present. Sometimes that means something as big as leaving behind a faith; in other cases, it just means reassessing what makes life worth living. Part of the appeal of her books is that they make all this feel remarkably attainable.

That evening, we met at Muriel’s in Jackson Square, where we were ushered into an ornate, high-ceilinged room. The waitress told us that it was built in the seventeen-hundreds, and brought us a sheet of paper that explained the burning down, reconstruction, and subsequent haunting of the establishment, where a ghost could allegedly be found in the Seance Lounge, on the top floor. (Drinks also available for purchase!)

“I did feel like I had to, like, come out to my parents as a romance writer,” she told me as we munched on table bread and salty butter. “I was, like, I do not want anyone I’m related to to read these books at all.”

This is a telling confession, because on the spectrum of representations of sex in romance novels, Henry’s lean dramatically toward the stylized—a far cry from ripped bodices or quivering members. One gets glimpses of body parts: mouth, tattooed biceps, “flat length of stomach,” hip bones. Consummation can take several hundred pages. The emotional intensity builds until everything—and everyone—climaxes (or, as Henry might put it, “unravels”), usually at the same time.

What gets them there can be hazy. Kisses are slow, descriptive; everything beyond that is a little slippery and diffuse. Characters have abs and asses, but no genitalia. (Somehow, they do manage to get “erections,” if only as an under-the-clothes indicator of interest.) “I obviously have repression,” Henry admitted. But when it comes to sex, she said, “people’s opinions and feelings and tastes are going to vary so widely . . . I don’t know. As a reader, I can really love a book, and I can get to a sex scene, and it’s just really not for me.”

This approach seems to appeal to an increasingly abstemious generation of young people; the supply of hot, considerate men is also a balm for a heteropessimist age. Henry’s characters are at once cheerfully sex-positive (condoms abound) and so pure in their aims that doing it is almost beside the point. In literary fiction, she said, sex is “usually unpleasant,” though she saw the merits; she cited Sally Rooney’s “Normal People,” approvingly, as a realistic depiction of “the way that people’s feelings about sex can complicate the greater picture of the relationship.” Henry has set herself a different task: making us believe in an almost-too-good-to-be-true connection. “It’s hard to write compelling happiness,” she told me. “Even though, in real life, happiness is so compelling. You know how to make someone cry: build up an attachment to a character, and then make them feel anguish by hurting that character, by taking something away from that character. But to make someone feel joy, with words on a page—it’s really, really hard.” Her sex scenes are designed as a heightened, fantastical, fun-but-chaste version of a thing we’d like to be able to celebrate, unencumbered by miscommunication or unfulfilled desires. In EmHen’s fiction, one’s heart and one’s body are always perfectly aligned. And maybe that’s something like having a soul.

After dinner, we pushed back our plates. “Shall we go see this ghost?” she asked. Soon, we were venturing up a dark and winding staircase shrouded, dramatically, in black cloth. The stairway held a portrait of Jesus Christ and plastic votive candles; eerie Gregorian chants echoed from a speaker. It seemed laughable at first—but when we arrived at the top and rounded the turn into the Seance Lounge, we were put off by a sudden shift in the atmosphere. “Oh, my God. This is incredible,” Henry said. “The air changed!” We snapped a few pictures, then hastily retreated. On the way back down, Henry told me about a friend who once lived in an apartment that she believed to be inhabited by a ghost who had a crush on her. “She had all these in-depth theories,” Henry said, smiling. She mimicked her friend’s insistence on the spirit’s gentlemanly manner: “ ‘He wouldn’t come into my bedroom. He always knew that was crossing a line.’ ” She shared the anecdote without judgment or too much gravity, casually pulling a trick that her readers love her for: taking the things that haunt us and making them feel familiar, unthreatening, feasible. In EmHen’s cosmos, it seems, even the dead want nothing more than to be loved. ♦