Funny Story

When Everything Falls Apart at Once

Emily Henry’s fifth novel arrives with a premise that could have been lifted from a television pitch: a woman is left by her fiance two weeks before their wedding, discovers he has fallen for someone else, and ends up living with that someone else’s ex-boyfriend. The setup is farce, and Henry knows it — the title promises that the mess, in retrospect, will be funny, and she mostly delivers.

Daphne Vincent has organized her entire life around her relationship with Peter, following him to a small Michigan town where she knows almost no one. Miles Nowak, the man she ends up rooming with, has been similarly uprooted by Peter’s new love interest stealing his girlfriend. Their mutual bewilderment at being in each other’s lives at all is the novel’s funniest and most efficient engine.

Social Anxiety as Honest Characterization

Henry is careful to make Daphne more than a woman waiting to discover her own strength. Her social anxiety is specific — the exhausting calculation that goes into navigating unfamiliar social situations, the relief of environments where the rules are clear, the particular difficulty of being social when you’d rather disappear. Miles’s steadiness and genuine warmth provide a form of safety that Daphne hasn’t had from Peter, and watching her recognize the difference is one of the novel’s quiet pleasures.

Miles himself is something of a departure from Henry’s typical love interests. He is not brooding or difficult or emotionally unavailable; he is simply good, in a way that the novel treats as romantic rather than boring. Henry seems interested in arguing that goodness is as attractive as complexity, and she makes the case.

Lighter in Touch

Funny Story is the most straightforwardly fun of Henry’s books — less emotionally ambitious than People We Meet on Vacation, less formally clever than Book Lovers. The emotional stakes are genuinely lower, which makes it the most accessible entry point into her work for readers new to her.

What it lacks in depth it compensates for in warmth, and the best moments — Daphne and Miles’s shared mortification at their situation, their gradual building of a shared life from the wreckage — are as pleasurable as anything Henry has written.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Henry’s most purely fun novel, lighter in emotional ambition than her earlier work but executed with her signature wit and warmth.