Funny Story by Emily Henry
Funny Story by Emily Henry is a top-notch opposites-attract romance full of the witty banter and emotional nuance the author is known for. Before this, Happy Place by Emily Henry had been my favorite book of hers, but this easily jumps to the top of that list. Henry’s writing manages to bridge the gap between comedic and healing in a way that is hard to describe. I laughed out loud many times in this book, mostly at the banter between Daphne and Miles, the two main characters. I also cried multiple times, mostly in scenes relating to Daphne’s closeness with her mom. Really, Emily Henry outdid herself with this one! Read on for more of my thoughts on Funny Story by Emily Henry, along with my favorite quotes from the book:
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About the Author, Emily Henry
Emily Henry is a bestselling romance and young adult author. Based in Cincinnati, Henry keeps her private life pretty well under wraps. Her first YA novel, The Love That Split the World, was published in 2016. Beach Read, her first non-YA novel, was published in 2020. Since Beach Read, she has published a new book each year, with Funny Story as her most recent, released in April 2024. Three of her books (including Book Lovers!) are currently in development to be made into films.
Plot Summary
Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.
Which is how Daphne begins her new story: Stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.
Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?
But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…right?
My Thoughts on Funny Story
5/5 Stars
Funny Story by Emily Henry was released on April 23 — conveniently coinciding with Taylor Swift’s new album release, which made for a fun reading experience (the overlap of Taylor Swift fans and Emily Henry fans is vast).
Of the three novels by the author that I have read so far, this is far and away my favorite. And that is saying something, because I absolutely adore both Happy Place and Book Lovers.
This novel starts out with a jilted marriage, with protagonist Daphne’s fiancé leaving her for his childhood best friend. Daphne winds up moving in with said best friend’s similarly-jilted partner, Miles. What starts as a count down of getting out of the small (but beautiful) town of Waning Bay, Michigan, turns into a story of Daphne finding herself outside of her relationships (both romantic and familial). Equal parts entertainment and therapy session, Funny Story made me laugh and cry in comparable measure.
Also, the way that Henry ends the novel was just *chef’s kiss* perfect that I about lost my mind when I read the last page. So good.
Favorite Quotes from Funny Story by Emily Henry
- “You can’t force a person to show up, but you can learn a lesson when they don’t.”
- “It’s easy to be loved by the ones who’ve never seen you fuck up. The ones you’ve never had to apologize to, and who still think all your ‘quirks’ are charming.”
- “I love talking to people I already know, but when I meet someone new, half the time my mind goes blank, and the other half of the time, I make a joke that absolutely no one realizes is a joke, or I ask something way too personal.”
- “This is my problem. I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It’s depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture in my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back.
You can’t until someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.” - “Sometimes complaining about stuff, just having someone to emphasize with you, takes the sting out of it.”
- “The first we was my mom and me, then it was Sadie and me, then Peter. I’ve always cleaved to the people I love, tried to orient my orbit around them. Maybe, I realize, I’ve been trying to make myself un-leave-able. But it hasn’t worked.”
- “For reasons I don’t completely understand, I feel like I could cry.”
- “The same universe that dispassionately takes things away can bring you things you weren’t imaginative enough to dream up.”
- “I’m a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who’s too scared to hope.”
- “Life, I’d learned, is a revolving door. Most things that come into it only stay awhile.”
- “Life’s short enough without us talking ourselves out of hope and trying to dodge every bad feeling. Sometimes you have to push through the discomfort, instead of running.”
- “I was never the one just having fun. I was the one anticipating consequences.”
- “But no one person can be everything we need.”
- “And it shouldn’t matter…. But I want him to say it. I want to push as hard as possible against all the bruises in my heart, until it changes me. Until I learn to stop fucking everything up.”
- “Flags so red, they veered toward maroon.”
- “I want to know myself, to test my edges and see where I stop and the rest of the world begins.”
- “This is as close as I get to life on the edge: a milky tea and a near-white rug.”
- “And I’m not sure why I wasted all that time and energy, because when I think about family—that thing I’d always longed for—it’s never been a Norman Rockwell painting that I picture. It’s me and Mom, on the couch, eating microwaved corn dogs while Dial M for Murder plays on TV. It’s running out from the library at night to her car, a greasy box of Little Caesars pizza in the passenger seat, her joking, I thought we’d do Italian. It’s being pulled away from watching the frost melt on the living room window to make stovetop hot cocoa from a packet, and that last tight hug at the end of the airport security line, and packing up cardboard boxes, knowing I’ll always have what I need, no matter how much I leave behind.”
- “I don’t think there’s a right way to feel,’ I say. ‘And you can’t control it, anyway. Feelings are like weather. They just happen, and then they pass.”
- “Hell, I’m old enough to have a daughter named Renesmee on one of those U-5 soccer teams where the kids take turns kicking the ball the wrong way, then sitting down midfield to take off their shoes”
- “All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don’t get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers.
Those are the moments that make a life.
Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house.” - “This is how time works. The things you wait months for blink past, like the flash of a strobe, huge swaths lost in the dark beats between.”
- “I feel a bittersweetness that this moment can’t last, that time will pull us along soon. But for the first time in a while, I’m excited about the unknown. I’m looking forward to the surprises.”
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Where to Buy Funny Story by Emily Henry
Funny Story by Emily Henry is available for sale from Amazon and Bookshop.org. Be sure to subscribe to Emily Henry’s newsletter here for more details on her books and recommendations. You can find some bonus content for her books on her website here as well.
This post is a part of my What to Read series, where I share themed reading lists and book guides based on genre, time period, theme, or author.
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