So when it came to Big big beautiful life, A love story that felt “earned” was of the utmost importance.
“Before I started writing, before I knew anything else about the book,” explained Henry, “I knew I wanted to write about two characters who absolutely couldn’t be together. And I wanted iron -clad reasons.”
In the end, the secret – Hayden’s mother is the biological daughter Margaret gave up after the death of her rocker Make Cosmo Sinclair – all over the story as a ticking time bomb waiting for Alice’s nagging feelings about Margaret’s deliberate omissions to spiral to realize.
“First of all, we have the reason why they compete for the same job,” she explained. “But I knew that at the end of the book it would disappear and it would have to be, slightly bigger.”
As she explained, “By adding the last turn I knew,” okay, this is a situation where this person has already in love with another person, and now she has this huge secret that she could not bear to stay away from him and that she knows she can’t tell him either. “She can’t tell him – it’s not her story – and even legally she can’t tell him because of NDA.”
“Really, from the moment I unlocked that twist, I felt I knew what I was writing,” shared Henry. “It informed all other things that happened in the book. Every story I chose to share about Margaret’s family came from this disclosure at the end.”
