The beloved romance author Emily Henry has taken frequent opportunities to flash her Swiftie card, and it seems her latest book, Great Big Beautiful Life, is no exception to the rule. Per a new interview with E! News, Henry says that Taylor Swift’s folklore track “the last great american dynasty” helped inspire one of the central characters in GBBL: the fictional widow and “tabloid princess” known as Margaret Ives.
“I love that song, and love the story behind it,” Henry said of “the last great american dynasty,” which Swift drew from the real-life saga of Rebekah Harkness, a mid-20th-century socialite who was born in 1915 and eventually married an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who himself died of a heart attack in 1954. “Every once in a while I find myself back on the Wikipedia page [for Harkness], just reading through,” Henry explained. “I just find those kinds of larger-than-life families really, really intriguing.”
Of course, Swift’s lyrics about Harkness weren’t Henry’s sole inspiration. She also drew tidbits from other storied families, such as the Kennedys, the Hearsts, and the Pulitzers, to inform Margaret and her Ives Media legacy. As Henry told NPR earlier this month, “Most of us don’t have our family histories preserved as thoroughly as a family like, you know, the British royals or the Kennedys, those families that are in the public eye and have been for generations...I found that to be just a really interesting concept for how we could explore our own personal sense of legacy, by looking at these larger-than-life, storied, dynastic families and tracing the way that love and grief, especially, are passed down from generation to generation, each generation sort of reacting to what it did or didn’t get and needed.”
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
In Great Big Beautiful Life, two journalists, Alice Scott and Hayden Anderson, compete for the opportunity to write Margaret’s life story into a book. But the more time they spend interviewing Margaret, the more they begin to suspect there are pieces of her history that are missing, and they must work together to complete the full picture.
Henry told E!, “There were so many different families that I pulled [inspiration] from, but mostly it was just to give a sense of history. I wanted all these characters to not be exactly anyone from the world.”
Great Big Beautiful Life is now on shelves as of Tuesday, April 22.
