How Taylor Swift & More Real Figures Inspired Emily Henry’s New Novel Great Big Beautiful Life (2025)

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Warning: Spoilers for the novel Great Big Beautiful Life ahead.

All along there were some invisible strings tying Taylor Swiftto Emily Henry’s latest novel.

And not just because she’s a massive Swiftie. Like its predecessors, Great Big Beautiful Life (out now) is a captivating rom-com, following Alice Scott and Hayden Anderson as they compete to become the official biographer of now-reclusive media heiress Margaret Ives. But this time, Henry adds a third central figure in the form of the beguiling 20th century tabloid queen, who holds not only the young duo’s professional fates but also their chance at a future together in her hands.

Crafting Margaret and more than a century of her storied family’s history—dating back to the Gilded Age—was no simple task for Henry, who sought inspiration in several real-life figures. Among them, socialite Rebekah Harkness, whose life and controversies Swift details in “Last Great American Dynasty.”

“I love that song, and love the story behind it,” Henry told E! News in an exclusive interview. “Every once in a while I find myself back on the Wikipedia page, just reading through. I just find those kinds of larger-than-life families really, really intriguing.”

Indeed, it’s a theme Henry explores throughout Great Big Beautiful Life, though the novelist doesn’t see this as a phenomenon unique to in the rich and the famous.

“I think the things that really fascinate us about these families in pop culture are usually just sort of larger-than-life reflections of our own personal histories,” she told E!. “In some sense, I think all of us have the feeling—or have had the feeling—that there is history that makes us and shapes us that we had nothing to do with. Things that started well before we were even a blip on the planet. Those can be good and those can be bad, and they can just shape a lot of your decision making. Knowing where you came from can really affect you for better and for worse.”

“That was the starting point for the character of Margaret,” Henry shared. “The idea of this woman who is part of this larger-than-life history that the average American would maybe be somewhat familiar with but they would have had this scandalous perception of it. They would have had this gossip rag-driven idea of who this person was.”

And that’s why it’s important for Margaret that her story—as she insists to Alice in the novel—starts decades before her birth. As Henry put it, “I was really interested in tracing, starting back in the late 1800s, how does love get passed down, and in what ways does it not get passed down in ways that we can interpret and understand?”

But as Margaret is the scion of a prolific media family, to understand the weight that brings, Henry also turned her eye to the likes of the “hugely influential” Hearsts, plus the Pulitzers—both of whom are Ives Media competitors in the book—and modern families like the Murdochs.

“We don't get this direct view into their lives in the way that maybe we would have back in like the ‘20s—they have really managed to create privacy for themselves—but we're still fascinated,” she noted, pointing to HBO’s cultural and critical sensation Succession, largely considered to be inspired by the Murdochs. “We're still aware that there's someone out there like pulling the strings of our perception.”