Excerpt from Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter One

Chapter One

There's an old saying about stories, and how there are always three versions of them: yours, mine, and the truth. The guy who first said it worked in the film business, but it holds true for journalism too.

We're not really supposed to take sides. We're supposed to deal in facts. Facts add up to truth.

Fact: Robert Evans—producer, studio exec, and actor, who coined that catchy mantra about the truth—was married seven times.

Fact: I, Alice Scott—staff writer for The Scratch, aspiring biographer, not much else—am not even officially the girlfriend of the man I've been dating for seven months.

Fact: At five feet and nine inches tall, Robert Evans was the exact same height as I am.

Fact: My entire life is quite possibly about to change, and instead of sprinting up the walkway to the quaint picket fence separating me from a lifelong dream, I'm sitting in my rental car, blasting air-conditioning and reading the IMDb page of a man whose name I'd never heard three minutes ago, because his quote about stories popped into my head and also because I'm stalling.

I'm more excited than nervous, but there are still a great deal of nerves vibrating through me. With one last deep breath, I turn off the car and pop the door open.

Immediately the dense midday heat of a Georgia summer hits me from all sides, a familiar and deeply loved sensation that's only improved by the salty sea breeze sweeping in off the water surrounding Little Crescent Island.

I double-check that I have my notebook, voice recorder, and pens, then bump the door shut and stoop to check my rapidly dampening bangs in the side mirror.

I try to school my grin into an expression of neutrality. It's important that I play this cool.

Fact: I have never played it cool in my life.

I open the gate, my sandals slapping the stone walkway as I follow its curve around a wall of foliage: black needlerush and cabbage palm, prickly pear and glasswort, and—my favorite—live oak.

Eleven years in Los Angeles, but every time I see a Georgian live oak, I still think, Home.

A charming turquoise house on wooden stilts comes into view, and I climb a handful of worn wooden steps to reach its hot-pink front door, every inch of which has been hand-painted with white swirls.

I'm rewarded with a suitably eccentric doorbell. I mean, it looks like a normal doorbell, but when I hit it, it sounds like wind blowing through chimes.

I'm still mid–preparatory breath when the door swings open and a short, gray-haired woman in a faded flannel shirt and jeans scowls out at me.

"Hi!" I stick my hand out. "I'm Alice. Scott."

She stares back, her eyes pale blue and hair cropped short and coarse.

"With The Scratch?" I add, in case that jogs anything.

She doesn't move, doesn't even blink.

"I mean, not with The Scratch. I'm on staff there, but I'm here about the book?"

Her expression remains placid. For a second, I'm forced to contemplate the possibility that all of this has been an elaborate ruse, perhaps orchestrated by this woman's middle-aged son, from his computer in her basement, where he spends his days shooting off emails and phone calls to gullible writers like me, pitching his voice upward and adding a light shake to pass himself off as a woman in her eighties.

It wouldn't even be the first time.

I clear my throat and refresh my smile. "I'm sorry. Are you Margaret?"

She doesn't look like her, but then again, the last pictures I've seen of the woman I'm supposed to be meeting were easily three decades old. So for all I know, this could be the once-glamorous, nearly legendary (at least to a certain subset of people, including me) Margaret Grace Ives.

The Tabloid Princess. Known as such both because she was the heiress to the Ives media empire and because of those years when her own celebrity status earned her near-constant attention from the paparazzi and gossip columnists.

Excerpted from Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry. Copyright © 2025 by Emily Henry. Excerpted by permission of Berkley Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.