Some novels open with a proposal and a diamond ring, then quietly warn you that the real story has not started yet. That is the trick Emily Giffin pulls in her latest release, Love You More. One minute Billie Wright is a New York fertility doctor accepting a seaside marriage proposal from a man who adores her. The next, an early morning phone call from her first love rings through her tidy, hard won life and reroutes everything she thought was settled.
The Setup: A Perfect Life, Then One Phone Call
Billie has done what small town overachievers dream of doing. She left Wisconsin at eighteen, built a thriving medical practice off Central Park, and found her footing with Dean, a steady trauma surgeon who checks every box. Her old world, the cornfields and Friday fish fries and the boy named Mick who once whispered “I love you more” in an apple orchard, sits packed away like a keepsake she rarely opens.
Then Mick calls. He has not dialed her number in almost a decade, and Billie senses before she plays the voicemail that good news rarely arrives at dawn. What follows pulls her back to the place she spent fifteen years outrunning, where the past is not a soft memory but a room she has to walk into again. This is the engine that powers Love You More by Emily Giffin, and it is a quieter, sadder, more interior engine than the flirty setup first suggests.
A Story Told in Two Timelines
The book runs on two tracks. The present day thread follows Billie as she returns home and faces choices no amount of career planning prepared her for. The second thread rewinds to her teenage years, tracing the slow build from friendship to first love with Mick, alongside the fierce, funny bond she shares with her best friend Erin. Giffin braids these timelines so that every present day scene carries the weight of who these people used to be.
It is a smart design, and when it clicks, the effect lands hard. A throwaway line from a high school phone call in Part One can ache three hundred pages later, once you understand what it cost.
What Giffin Gets Right
Readers come to this author for warmth, readability, and emotional honesty, and on those counts she delivers. A few things stand out:
- The friendship at the center. Billie and Erin feel like real women with a shared history, not props for a romance plot. Their loyalty, their small jealousies, and the way distance quietly reshapes a lifelong bond ring true on every page.
- A little sister named Maeve. Mick’s younger sister, who has Down syndrome, could have been a sentimental device. Instead she is drawn with patience and dignity, and she becomes one of the tenderest threads in the entire book.
- The Midwest versus Manhattan tension. Giffin has a sharp eye for class and belonging: rabbit ear corkscrews against waiter’s friends, laminated menus against rooftop martinis, a two dollar subway tap against a Black car. Billie’s split identity feels lived in rather than sketched.
- A profession that means something. Making Billie a fertility specialist is more than set dressing. Her work with patients hoping for a child quietly mirrors the book’s larger questions about motherhood, loss, and hope grounded in something real.
The teenage chapters, in particular, capture that specific ache of first love: the tap of a pencil in algebra, a good luck lip gloss, a braided bracelet handed back in a parking lot. Anyone who has loved someone before they knew what love would cost will feel seen here.
Where the Novel Wobbles
A four star reputation is fair, and the gap between very good and great is worth naming plainly.
First, the marketing oversells the romance. The cover copy frames a love triangle and a shattering secret, but the emotional heart of Love You More by Emily Giffin is grief and caretaking, not a steamy tug of war between two men. Readers arriving for a spicy second chance saga may feel the romance sits in the passenger seat for long stretches.
Second, the pacing is front loaded. Part One is a lovely, unhurried origin story, but it delays the present day stakes for quite a while. Some readers will savor the nostalgia; others will wish the flashbacks were trimmed so the central dilemma could breathe sooner.
Third, the resolution is tidy. Giffin is not writing tragedy, and her fans would revolt if she did, yet several knotty conflicts smooth out with a comfort that borders on convenient. Dean, especially, is written as so accommodating that he drains a little tension from a choice that should feel harder. When every character behaves generously, the stakes soften.
None of this sinks the book. It simply keeps a warm, capable novel from becoming an unforgettable one.
The Voice on the Page
Giffin writes in clean, unfussy first person, mostly present tense in the now and past tense in the flashbacks. The prose favors sensory anchors over lyrical flourish: the smell of apple blossoms, the scrape of a tailgate, eucalyptus in a clinic waiting room. Dialogue does most of the heavy lifting, and it is natural and often funny, especially from Billie’s clinic partners Greer and Lesli, who supply the sharp comic relief the heavier scenes need.
If you have read this author before, the rhythm will feel familiar in the best sense. She trusts small domestic details to carry big feeling, and she resists melodrama even when the material invites it. The recurring “I love you more” refrain, which gives the book its title, pays off with real emotional interest by the closing pages.
For Readers Who Loved This One
Emily Giffin is the number one New York Times bestselling author of twelve previous novels, and this is her thirteenth. If Love You More by Emily Giffin is your entry point, her backlist rewards the visit:
- Something Borrowed and its sequel Something Blue, the books that made her name and later inspired a film.
- Heart of the Matter, for readers who want her at her most morally complicated.
- All We Ever Wanted, a strong pick for anyone drawn to the parenting and class themes here.
- The Summer Pact, her recent novel about friendship and grief, which shares this book’s emotional wiring.
Looking beyond her own shelf, fans of Love You More by Emily Giffin will likely enjoy Taylor Jenkins Reid’s One True Loves, Rebecca Serle’s In Five Years, and Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You for that same blend of second chances, hard choices, and love measured in what it survives.
The Final Word
This is a book about the plot twists life hands us and the many shapes love takes when the map you drew at eighteen no longer matches the terrain. It is comfort reading with a lump in its throat: familiar enough to feel safe, sad enough to leave a mark. The romance is gentler than advertised and the ending arrives a shade too neatly, yet the friendship, the grief, and Billie’s quiet reckoning with home more than earn your time.
Love You More by Emily Giffin will please longtime fans, welcome newcomers, and give book clubs plenty to argue about, which is exactly what a well made women’s fiction novel should do. Bring tissues, and maybe call the friend you have known the longest when you finish.
