Atlanta-based author Emily Giffin has never met a premise she couldn’t turn into an emotional and heartfelt gut-punch, and her 13th novel, “Love You More” (on sale July 7), may be her sharpest one yet.
In what is expected to be one of the summer’s big books, the New York Times bestselling author hits her readers with a heartrending, yet hardly unfamiliar, question: What happens when the life you carefully built collides with the one you never fully closed the door to?
RELATED: Local author Emily Giffin to debut new book ‘Love You More’ at Atlanta History Center
Billie, a New York City reproductive endocrinologist, has just said yes to the perfect proposal from her own real-life McDreamy. She seems to be at the finish line of “having it all,” her small-town Wisconsin lifestyle comfortably behind her — or so it seems. Then, her phone rings with a voice from her past. It’s Mick, the first love she spent years trying to close the book on, and his urgent news is enough to send her straight back to Wisconsin and straight back into the version of herself she believed she had outgrown.
Giffin alternates the novel between past and present, and the effect is chaotic in the best way: The time spent in Billie’s adolescence traces the friendships and first love that shaped her long before medical school and NYC entered the picture, while the present-day crisis makes clear that history was never really behind her. It’s the kind of structure that turns “one more chapter before bed” into 1 a.m., three-quarters of the way through, phone flashlight on because you refuse to stop for something as trivial as a lamp.
Some readers might question whether the central conflict is believable — would a highly successful doctor consider upending her life for a high-school boyfriend she hadn’t spoken to in a decade?
For me, the complexity of Billie’s moral quandary is also what helps make it distinctly Giffin.
It isn’t the twists (though there are definitely some shocking revelations) — it’s the nostalgia that lies underneath them. Her books have always known exactly which decisions, which conversations, and which roads not taken from the past still live rent-free in our heads.
“Love You More” is her most direct meditation yet on the idea that our boldest, most heart-driven relationships rarely come wrapped in a bow. Instead, they collide with each other and end up pushing us somewhere we never planned to go.
With this novel, Giffin delivers another unconventional love story, one that digs into grief, found family, the beauty of second chances, and the particular ache of a first love that never fully goes away.
It is relatable, messy, occasionally goofy, deeply moving, sometimes all in the same paragraph. Which is, frankly, the reason we all keep coming back to her books.
