Emily Henry and Julia Whelan on finding that magnetic, impossible chemistry

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Margaret Hargrove: Hello, I'm Audible Editor Margaret Hargrove, and I'm so excited to be here today with Emily Henry and Julia Whelan, the author and narrator of Book Lovers. Emily is the New York Times best-selling author of Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation as well as several young adult novels. Julia is an award-winning narrator who has voiced more than 400 audiobooks, including Emily's recent best sellers, and is herself an author too. Welcome, Emily and Julia. Thanks for joining us at Audible.

Julia Whelan: Thank you so much.

Emily Henry: Thank you for having us.

MH: So, is this the first time you're meeting each other, seeing each other?

EH: I think so face-to-face, right? I think so.

JW: Yeah.

EH: I think so too. I couldn't be sure. As I was logging on, I was trying to figure that out because we've messaged a decent amount over the course of like five years or something.

JW: Yeah.

MH: Wow.

EH: I feel like I know Julia and we also have some friends in common, and so we're also constantly like, “Should we do a writer's retreat?”

JW: Yeah [laughs].

EH: And that hasn't happened yet, but constantly there's the undercurrent of “Should we just go to the desert together for days and throw our cellphones into the sand?”

JW: I feel like it could only end well.

EH: Yeah, totally.

MH: So how did your relationship start? If you can walk us back through your origin story of how you two came together.

JW: I got an offer from Kelly Gildea at Penguin Random House, who is an amazing, legendary audiobook producer, and luckily cast me in a lot. And she gave me one of Emily's YA novels. Was it A Million Junes?

EH: A Million Junes. Yeah.

JW: Okay. Which is still one of my favorite books and just extraordinary. We connected from that because I think I just reached out to you cold and was like, “I’ve got to tell you, I had the best four days in the booth with this. You killed me. It was so good.” So, it was just an audiobook that came my way.

EH: Yeah. And from my end, I was obviously fully aware of who Julia was. At this point, because she had—I think you had already won the Audie for Gone Girl, I believe. Is that correct? Does that sound right, by that time?

JW: No Gone Girl did not win an Audie—

EH: It didn't? Oh, my God.

JW: …not that I'm bitter about it or anything, no. Yeah.

EH: Okay. Yeah, so in my mind you had already won an Audie. You had already won my personal Audie for Gone Girl. And I knew she was a superstar, and I also am really, maybe inordinately, picky about audiobook narrators. I don't think I even had a say in that; I think Kelly was just like, "Oh, surprise. It's Julia Whelan." And I was like, "Oh, my God, thank you."

JW: Then I think what happened is you read My Oxford Year—

EH: Yep. Cried.

JW: …And reached out to me, and you were very kind about it. And then when you were getting ready to do Beach Read, you asked me to blurb Beach Read.

EH: Yeah.

JW: I got a very early bound manuscript of it. And at the time I was trying to figure out if I could make something as meta as Thank You for Listening work. And I read Beach Read and was like, "Oh, I can." She just paved a path for what I was trying to do in my head. And I was like, "Okay, I'm in." And now that was, like, four years ago at this point, I'm so slow.

EH: I have no idea either, but I will say at that point I was just, "Julia, until you die, please, please narrate all of my books." And that's the deal with the devil that she has made now.

JW: I'm in.

MH: And now, here we are with Book Lovers.

EH: Here we are.

MH: Book Lovers is exactly what its title suggests. It's a book about book lovers talking about books, which we love here at Audible, of course. The story follows literary agent Nora Stephens, a type A go-getter who gives everything she has to her career, but has been very unlucky in love. She decides to join her sister on a monthlong trip to a small town in North Carolina, but the New York literary world—specifically, the handsome yet brooding book editor Charlie Lastra—follows her.

Emily, how would you describe the love between Nora and Charlie?

EH: I think I started with the very common prompt of enemies to lovers that we just love so much as readers and writers. But I was really excited, specifically, to have two people who butt heads because they're similar instead of two people who butt heads because they're so different. I think that happens just as much in real life, when you meet someone and they're too much like you and you're like, "They're the worst!" And you're like, "Wait a second. Does that mean I'm the worst?"

So I really wanted to play with that. Two people who are really well equipped to argue super well. That's the high I'm always chasing as a writer and a reader, is two people who are perfectly suited to annoy each other, but also to banter and flirt and just have chemistry in general.

MH: Nora is something of an anti-heroine. If you've ever watched a Hallmark movie and wondered what happened to the uptight corporate girlfriend who was left by her boyfriend for the bubbly small-town protagonist, Nora is that girlfriend. And Charlie is surly and kind of rude to Nora. During their first meeting, he keeps checking his watch. Yet they feel like these beautifully flawed puzzle pieces that fit together. So, Emily, why do you think it's important to show imperfect people still deserving of love and a second chance?

EH: Oh, my gosh. I mean, for so many reasons. Firstly, that none of us is perfect. So that's pretty important if, right off the bat, you feel like all of those stories are talking about a character who's not you. And like you said, Margaret, you recognized immediately this archetype and this trope from these Hallmark movies. And I even think I removed any mention of Hallmark from the draft and my editor was like, "We need to make it more general."

Emily Henry: "I was really excited, specifically, to have two people who butt heads because they're similar instead of two people who butt heads because they're so different."

But if you've seen three of them, you know this story line so well, and I really enjoy those and think they're really fun. But when you're seeing that one story line over and over again, you do sort of get the message that inherently being so committed to your career or loving living in your major city or liking high heels even, that makes you innately less deserving of love and like you figured it out less, you don't have your priorities straight. I've just been fascinated with that character and wondered what would happen to her after the story's over.

But I also wanted to know what happened to her before the story. Like, I want to know why Miranda Priestley gets off the elevator and hurls her coat at someone. She has a reason that she is this person. I wanted to go as deep as a first-person narration would allow me, to really understand and in some ways kind of justify that this character has a reason for who she is, and that doesn't make her unlovable. It just means she needs the right kind of person to understand her.

MH: True. A friend of mine said, "There's a lid for every pot."

EH: Yes. They're not in my house. They're missing mysteriously, but they're there.

MH: Mine are also missing. So, what I love about your romances, Emily, is that they are not over the top. There's no crazy "I'm going to chase you through an airport" but then there's magically no security sort of thing going on. Book Lovers really reminds me of the quiet yet strong, beautiful ways people can love each other. So, let me ask you both, since you both write love stories, what do you think makes for a genuinely good romance?

JW: I think, having recorded a lot of romance as well, and love stories in general, you want to feel that the happily ever after is earned. You want to feel that the stakes are real. That's what I loved so much about Book Lovers, the fact that these are just two people trying to work it out as they go along and do the least amount of damage to the other person as possible.

And to me that creates an incredibly satisfying read without a gimmicky stakes situation that makes you feel like you're setting up obstacles just to be overcome. That's what I love about all of Emily's books, you really do feel that these are characters who genuinely like each other, respect each other, care for each other and want only the best for the other person. And if that means it's not them, then that's what it's got to be. And that creates a sense of real stakes to me.

EH: That's so smart. I feel like it's just like real life. Real-life dating, when you're looking at two people who are trying so hard to make it work, and it's like, you don't need those contrived situations because it is just that hard for two people to make it work.

JW: Right.

EH: Like it simply is hard.

JW: Movies and books have set up an expectation that the obstacles have to be massive. And I actually think that they're usually much smaller. They're really usually just: blending lives is complicated.

EH: Right, right, right. And yeah, you don't actually have to have been, like, posing as your twin in another country as a princess for several months and then have to get past that lie. I think that's such a constant battle. And I would be curious to hear more about your process for that, Julia, too. To feel like you are creating that situation where it feels like there is a very real chance that it might not get off the ground while, like you said, not making it feel like this mess of unnecessary obstacles that you've thrown in. I feel like that's such a hard thing.

MH: Julia, you mentioned a little earlier that after you narrated Beach Read, you felt like, "Oh, I can do a very meta theme in my book." Have you drawn any other inspiration from performing Emily's books? Any other tips or tricks you have picked up?

JW: Of course. I mean, her dialogue is impeccable. Like, we have a Nora Ephron-level of banter and character awareness. I don't have to do any acrobatics to make her dialogue flow in audio; it's there on the page.

Julia Whelan: "Movies and books have set up an expectation that the obstacles have to be massive. And I actually think that they're usually much smaller. They're really usually just: blending lives is complicated."

One of the tasks that I set myself as just a personal challenge was for People We Meet on Vacation, I decided that I was going to perform that as if I were directing the film. Like, before I did anything, I wanted to see everything. So, I really embedded myself in each scene, seeing it all just to feel what that would be like to perform the whole thing as if I were directing the film. And I can tell you, it holds up. I can tell you now, having lived in each scene and really seen it holistically and been in the room with those characters, as creepy and crazy as that sounds, it sings, it just does. She just has an ear.

EH: Thank you. That's so nice. I mean, you do too. And it makes sense because you are spending most of your waking hours honing that ear. The book is not out yet, but everybody needs to pre-order Thank You for Listening. And I did text Julia while I was reading it to be like, it is so rare nowadays—this makes me maybe sound too confident. I'm not—but it's so rare nowadays for me to be reading a romance and be like, "I should just quit. This person is so good at what they're doing that it's making me feel like, why am I bothering?"

I loved your first book. It really made me weepy, and it's just beautiful, but the humor and the wit of your new book is like, I think this goes back to what Margaret was asking about what makes really good romance. For me, it's the feeling that there's no one like this person for this other person, and no other person's going to bring out this very specific side of them. And the main characters in your newest are, I mean, it just perfectly captures that feeling of when you meet someone and have that magnetic, impossible chemistry where you're like, you can't fake this, you can't build it. You just have to click in this really rare way that's so exciting when it happens. You capture that giddiness of being like, “I feel so funny and smart because I found someone who exactly complements my mind and my sense of humor.”

MH: Julia, you touched on Emily's dialogue, which you're right, it's so, so good. And it feels so real and so authentic. I'm just curious, Emily, do you read your dialogue out loud as you write it, to get it right? Do you imagine Julia performing it? How do you nail it?

EH: I think now I somewhat am to the point of being like, “How would Julia do this?” But then there's also moments where I'm like, “Julia will figure it out. She'll make it sound good.” Maybe putting a little too much pressure on her at this point.

But yeah, I think I whisper it to myself. I know that I emote the whole time I'm writing. My husband's constantly telling me, if he's just walking through the room to get something, he'll see my face and be like—even if I'm sending an email or a text message and I'm trying to be like, "Oh, I'm so sorry you're not feeling well"—he'll walk through and I guess I just look absolutely tortured. I think that I am doing this miniature, weird, acting-it-out-without-knowing-it while I'm writing.

And I definitely can tell when the wording isn't quite working. I will say things aloud or I'll text people and be like, “Which wording is funnier? This wording or this wording?” Because you just really can't tell until you hear something aloud sometimes. I'm sure Julia and all of her colleagues have plenty of experiences where something reads great on the page, but you have a harder time trying to figure out the rhythm of it when you're actually performing it.

MH: Julia, while listening to Book Lovers, sometimes I forgot that it wasn't a full-cast performance because you do such a great job of making it feel super immersive, even as a solo narrator. You perfectly capture Nora's type A bluntness. Charlie has this very husky voice that really suits his brooding personality. How do you determine the voice and tone for the characters?

JW: A lot of it is instinctual. A lot of it is just how a character strikes me, and 30-plus years later of acting experience, I just kind of know to trust that instinct. But I also think that there's a certain constellation work that goes on where, when I'm thinking about characters that are constantly in relationship to each other, how I want to differentiate those voices.

The difference between Nora and Libby, and a lot of that is just personality-based, but it's also what I think I can sustain over the course of a book without it sounding like I'm pulling a voice or really reaching for something.

The other layer is that, as Emily keeps writing—and I kind of have this with all of the authors that I love and I've traveled with for these many years—I'm always also trying to find distinct voices for each book. So that it's not like, “Oh, that was January's voice.” I think that I went a little sharper with Nora because that's who she is and she's sharp and she's fast. And that felt right. But it was also a new heroine for Emily.

MH: Julia, I saw your tweet with the screenshot of your text thread with Emily, where you promised, and I quote, "To scorch some, um, *blanking* earbuds" with your performance, and you definitely did that. What other details do you talk about either before, after, or during the recording process?

JW: I always send pronunciation questions, if I have them, because I just want to make sure I'm always doing what the author wants. I don't have time to go back and pick up 300 things because I said a main character's name wrong.

Sometimes, if there's an accent—I think I remember asking you, “Should anyone have an accent? We are in the Carolinas, should I be doing that?” And we talked about that a little bit. So I'll just gut-check some of those things, but the Charlie thing really just came out of, you know, I wrote a book about an English professor, an English tutor. There is a serious editor kink happening [laughs] here.

If you like men with red pens, you will like this character. I love all of her heroes. But Charlie was just her hottest hero yet. So, I was like, “I'm going to lean into that then. I'm not going to hold anything back.”

EH: Yeah, it was the right time.

JW: It was the right time.

MH: Emily, have you heard the audiobook of Book Lovers? Have you heard Julia's performance?

EH: I have not heard it yet. I cannot wait. I've heard, obviously, the other two and A Million Junes, but I am so excited. Just hearing you talk about Nora having a sharp, quick voice, all of that. That's why you try so hard to get Julia Whelan. She's got the instincts, she's got the training, and she really thinks of everything in a way that I just don't think a person can fake. You have to be the rock-star audiobook narrator that Julia is.

Julia Whelan: "If you like men with red pens, you will like this character... Charlie was just her hottest hero yet. So, I was like, 'I'm going to lean into that then. I'm not going to hold anything back.'"

MH: Julia, you were recently interviewed on the Audicted podcast and you said that you often will pair a tea with the audiobook you're working on, and it's kind of a ritual for you where you'll bring it into the recording booth with you. Inquiring minds want to know: What tea were you drinking while you recorded Book Lovers?

JW: I think what I actually ended up doing was a spicy cinnamon black tea, which—

MH: That's perfect.

JW: ...has certain Christmas-y overtones. I was like, that's not this, but what I was going for was that heat and that kind of slow burn.

MH: Yes. That's a perfect pairing for Book Lovers, for sure.

EH: It's sort of Charlie in a tea, I would say, to me.

JW: Yeah. I think that's what I was going for.

MH: Emily, Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, feels like the quintessential small town: gossipy neighbors, family drama, cheesy local businesses named Poppa Squat. What was the inspiration for Sunshine Falls? Is it based on any real place you've ever visited?

EH: It was not initially based on any real place. I will say I have some friends in Asheville, some writer friends. And after I had a couple of drafts finished of the book, I did have some Asheville friends read it. And one of them was like, "Oh, this kind of sounds like this one town," and I could be misremembering, but I think the town was called Black Mountain.

And then I looked into that town some more and tweaked some details of Sunshine Falls to kind of match the architecture and feel of this real town. But I think it's just loving that, in general, in all media, just the very weird small town, and it really genuinely feels so true...

I really was, I think in some ways, just thinking about my own little corner of Cincinnati and trying to capture the affection for the weirdness of small towns and the quirks and the gossipy neighbors and all of that. Like, it's just so fascinating.

MH: Julia, did you have a favorite scene or moment from Sunshine Falls?

JW: Actually, I could not get through recording the community theater experience [laughs]. That was pushing me over the edge.

EH: Now I cannot wait to hear your recording of it.

MH: That's a good moment. So, in Book Lovers, Nora is grieving her mother's death. And I've noticed in a few of your books, Emily, that the protagonist is sometimes dealing with the loss of a parent. When writing a romance, why do you choose to also explore themes of grief and loss?

EH: With my first book, it really was that I was fixated on writer's block. I was specifically trying to be like, “Okay, what makes it hard to create?” And there are a lot of real-life things that make it so hard to create. All of that was just about throwing obstacles into January's path to make writing as hard as possible.

But since then, I think it just keeps coming up because there's something about falling in love, where I don't have any falling-in-love memory that didn't involve all that excavation of your hardest stuff. It's like, there's the fun breathless beginning, but I feel like when you really fall for someone it's so much of airing your grievances, or just sharing the things that are the hardest for you and the things that have shaped you.

Emily Henry: "That's why you try so hard to get Julia Whelan. She's got the instincts, she's got the training, and she really thinks of everything in a way that I just don't think a person can fake."

But I also think when you're falling in love, those are the things that create the very real obstacles we were talking about, where it's not that you got caught posing as your twin sister, and you don't actually know how to bake, it's that you have this hang-up from your childhood. For Nora, specifically, so much of her journey is trying to renegotiate this relationship with her sister because she filled this caretaker role at a fairly young age, early twenties.

I have a lot of friends who didn't lose a parent young but who have that same kind of bond with their sibling, just from things that were going on. And it really can be a huge obstacle, both in your relationship but also just in how you approach life, if you haven't dealt with the things that have gotten you to that point.

It just happens organically. I'm not ever trying to marry those two things. It's just, I'm trying to know these characters as well as possible, make them know each other as deep as possible. And so that usually brings up, “Okay, what's the worst thing that ever happened to you? What are you most afraid of? What are you really bad at?” That kind of thing.

JW: I have one thing to say only because Emily really got me going here, which is that the thing that occurs to me is that as you are falling in love with someone, the self-protective instincts are kicking in because you might lose it. And it's triggering memories of previous losses, and your sense of loss is proportionate to how much love you had for the person. I think that it's an enriching of the fear factor that comes in the love story, which is what's creating the risk and the stakes and the conflict of “How much am I going to let myself love someone when I've experienced loss.”

EH: Yeah. That's so smart.

MH: I know that the love story between Nora and Charlie is central to Book Lovers, but I feel like there's another love story here. And that's the relationship between Nora and her younger sister, Libby. Why did you include this subplot to explore the relationship between the sisters?

EH: So, I have older brothers and now I have sisters-in-law that I've had for some years. But I had already written about being the younger sister of older brothers. I had done that in one of my YA novels. But a lot of my really close girlfriends are older sisters. And I noticed so many similarities between them, even if their personalities are totally different. It just seems like such a specific and intense relationship, when you are an older sister to a younger sister. I just feel like nobody fights as hard and nobody has more fun together than my sister friends. It can oscillate so wildly within minutes, too, where it's like, I'm getting texts about how much you hate your sister and then 15 minutes later I'm seeing on Instagram you're doing shots in New Orleans or whatever.

And I just am fascinated by that and wanted to dive into that. In trying to get to know Nora, I was really trying to understand, why does she take her job so seriously? Why is she such a hard-ass? And I think that seemed really natural to me that she would be an older sister who's had a lot on her shoulders.

MH: Julia, did you have any favorite part about narrating the relationship between Nora and Libby?

*Warning: Spoilers Ahead*

JW: That scene when Libby is showing her the house and basically saying like, “This is going to be my life now,” is so heartbreaking because they are both coming from such a good place, but they're realizing that this part of their story is really terminating now and they have to bridge over into another path forward. And that was very fun to narrate because you can see, finally, Libby owning who she is and just wanting Nora to own who she is too. And again, from a place of love. I agree with you that that is also a love story in the same way we were talking earlier about how the first principle of love should be do no harm. And the way that Charlie and Nora approach each other is the same way that Libby and Nora approach each other. So, I agree with you. I think it's a parallel love story.

MH: That's where I started sobbing, for the record. That's the moment. From there it was downhill.

EH: Oh my gosh.

*End of Spoilers*

MH: So, Nora is a literary agent. Charlie is a book editor. There's also these book-within-a-book moments where we hear excerpts written by one of Nora's longtime clients. It all feels very meta, and I would say your insights into publishing are really fascinating and super spot-on. What appeals to you about writing such meta topics, featuring characters who are in the book publishing industry?

EH: With Beach Read, that was just the epitome of tripping into a book in every possible way. I wrote that book because I was like, “I have writer's block. How do I write something anyway? I'll just give a writer character writer's block.”

JW: I’m sorry, but I have to interject to say that Emily's version of writer's block is like, what, not being able to write for three days?

EH: Yeah. It's sickening. I think it's actually probably diagnosable.

JW: She was like, “I didn't write for 36 hours.” I go, “Oh, gosh!”

EH: It was terrible. I never want to go back there. Yeah, it really wasn't very long, but I just wanted to be writing so badly. So, it felt torturous. With this book, I think that it just is innately appealing to me because I know I understand the industry. And so it's less work that I have to do in the front end to really make sure I understand the ins and outs of something.

I also feel like I have the emotional connection, so I know how to write that and give that to the characters. It's just something I'm very familiar with. And I also knew that I was going to be writing about this type of woman who is work-obsessed, and it felt so natural. I was very eager to give her a job she loved. I didn't want it to just be, “She's work-obsessed and she has no soul.” I wanted her to love her job. And I think everybody in the book industry is kind of work-obsessed in that way. You work during the day and then you go home and you keep working and you work all weekend and the work-life balance is not—

JW: And no one is in it for the money.

EH: No one's in it for the money, and the people who are are going to leave very quickly.

MH: Very true. Well, Julia, do you want to take it? I know your new book, which is coming out in August, also has a very meta plot line. As a person who works in the publishing industry, what's the appeal of writing about it in this meta way?

JW: Well, I think I learned even from my first book that one of the things people really liked about it is that it was about poetry. People who like books like books. They like the world of books. And so I'm very happy being in this bookish space because it's my world. I kind of realized the other day, I don't really have hobbies. If I'm not reading other people's books, I'm recording them or I'm writing them. I don't really do other things.

For Thank You for Listening, I wanted to write about this weird little job that I have because it's a weird job. And it was perfect for rom-com material.

MH: True. True. Emily, you are the queen of summer. Since Beach Read was released in 2020, your romances have become required summer listening. And Julia, your new title, Thank You for Listening, comes out in August. So, while the rest of us are listening to your audiobooks this summer, what's on the top of your summer listening list?

JW: This is the very awkward part of any of these conversations where I have to admit that I don't listen to audiobooks.

EH: When would you?

JW: I don't have a commute. All I hear all day long is a voice in headphones, mine coming through at me. When I am out of the booth, I want to listen to music or a podcast or I'm watching a show. I can't have more narrative in my life. I can't do it. But that said, of the things I've narrated, Katie Cotugno's book just came out. Birds of California was a very important read for me. It kind of felt like therapy about a former child actor. Janelle Brown also wrote about former child actors [in I'll Be You]. And I got that one too. So, if you want the thriller version of that, loved that book. Nina LaCour’s Yerba Buena is coming out at the end of May. Abby Jimenez’s Part of Your World just came out a couple weeks ago. These are all just great summer listens.

Julia Whelan: "The first principle of love should be do no harm."

Oh, Linda Holmes' book, Flying Solo, is going to come out. The Angel of RomeThe Angel of Rome is a story collection that I'm co-narrating with Edoardo Ballerini, but he and Edoardo cowrote the title story, which is “The Angel of Rome,” which Audible did as an Audible Original. So you can just hear that.

The Measure, a debut novel by Nikki Erlick, which is about if everybody on the planet wakes up one day to a box and in it is a measure of string that you quickly discover is the measure of your life. Like, how long you have left to live. That's great. Yeah, it's been an embarrassment of riches lately.

EH: That's good for us.

MH: Yeah. Emily, I get a lot of book recommendations from your Instagram. I love how you will take book selfies. I love how you promote other authors’ work.

EH: It's like the thing where with social media, you spend so long trying to figure out how to use it in some professional capacity, and I feel like I was just floundering for years and suddenly I was like, “Oh yeah, I can just talk about what I'm reading and loving.”

People are always like, “Oh, that's so nice of you.” And I'm like, “It is my joy and pleasure.” My hobby is taking terrible pictures of myself in a full face of makeup and then talking about the books I'm reading.

MH: They're not terrible pictures [laughs].

EH: I take 400 pictures on rapid and then you look through and you're like, “Okay, there are three where my eyes are open and one where I'm smiling.”

MH: So, last question. Since you're both writers, if you were to collaborate and write something together, what would it be?

EH: Oh, my gosh. I kind of want to go really off the wall. It'd be a thriller, like, just totally different.

JW: Horror [laughs].

EH: Horror. Yeah. It's a horror about being trapped in your—

JW: ...but it's funny.

EH: Yeah, that’s the best kind of horror, in my opinion. Horror is kind of funny.

JW: No, she actually cowrote a book with our mutual friend [Brittany Cavallaro]. YA, and I love that book so much.

EH: Me too.

JW: Hello Girls is a fantastic book.

EH: Great narration.

JW: Oh, thank you. But the whole time I was like, “I really want to read the grown-up version of this.” Yeah. What would we—well, maybe we would have a lot of fun with a love triangle.

EH: Oh, for sure. Ooh. You know what? Now, I'm like, we’ll write a love triangle, but we write the rivals in this love triangle.

JW: That's what I'm saying.

EH: And then it's really their love story. So the friend, Brittany Cavallaro—that’s who we're always talking about—maybe the three of us get locked in the house in the desert and we write the adult version of Hello Girls. Maybe that's what happens.

JW: Maybe that's what happens. But you guys write so fast.

EH: Well, it's pure mania. It might work for you once you're, like, inside the mania. I think it's just an inescapable vortex

JW: That's true.

MH: I think that's a great story, and you heard it here first [laughs].

Well, thank you both so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure to have a chance to talk to one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite narrators at the same time. You two are the perfect pairing and make magic together every single time. Book Lovers by Emily Henry performed by Julia Whelan is available now on Audible. Thank you both so much.

JW: Thank you.

EH: Thank you, Margaret.