Some novels open with a marriage proposal and coast toward a tidy happy ending. Emily Giffin has always been more curious about the messy middle, the stretch where a woman has to figure out what she actually wants and who she is willing to disappoint to get it. Love You More by Emily Giffin sits comfortably in that tradition, and for longtime fans, it reads like coming home.
The Setup: One Morning, One Phone Call
Billie Wright looks like a woman who has it all sorted. At thirty-seven, she runs a thriving fertility clinic near Central Park, she wakes before dawn to enjoy a slow cup of coffee, and she has just said yes to Dean, a trauma surgeon who arranges a surprise engagement with both sets of parents waiting to celebrate. Then her phone lights up with a number she deleted years ago but still knows by heart. It belongs to Mick, her first love from Wisconsin, and his voice carries news that knocks the floor out from under her carefully ordered New York life.
That single call sends Billie back to the small town she left behind, and Love You More by Emily Giffin turns into a story about the two people we can each become: the version we built somewhere new, and the version who never really left home.
Meet Billie: A Narrator You Trust
Giffin writes Billie in first person, mostly in present tense, which lends the book an intimate, confiding quality, like a friend telling you something over a glass of wine. Billie is capable without being cold, driven without being ruthless, and self-aware enough to catch her own contradictions. Her work with fertility patients is one of the book’s understated pleasures. The clinic scenes, where she pulls hope out of frightening odds, echo the bigger questions the novel keeps circling back to. What makes a family? How much of motherhood is biology, and how much is simply showing up, again and again?
The Love Story at the Core
Two Men, Two Worlds
The romantic pull runs between Dean and Mick, and here the book is both satisfying and a touch uneven. Dean is drawn as close to ideal: handsome, brilliant, adoring, and genuinely proud of Billie’s career. Mick is the sweetheart she measured every other man against, a former football star turned orchard owner with a tender streak, especially toward his younger sister. The catch, if you want to name one, is that a love triangle needs real friction on both sides, and Dean is so accommodating that many readers will sense where Billie’s heart leans well before she says it aloud. The tension lives less in which man and more in what will she give up, which happens to be the far more interesting question.
The Braided Timeline
The novel moves between Billie’s present and her teenage years at Arrowhead High, where she and Mick fell into the kind of first love that feels like the entire universe at fifteen. These flashbacks are tender and specific, full of Friday night bleachers, whispered phone calls after midnight, and the slow ache of one person leaving for a bigger life. They also, now and then, ease the foot off the accelerator, and a few of the young-love beats will feel familiar to anyone who has read a coming-of-age romance. Even so, the past chapters do real work, showing exactly why Mick’s reappearance lands with such weight.
An Honest Verdict
What Love You More Gets Right
Emotional honesty. The friendships and family bonds feel real rather than decorative, and the grief that threads through the story is handled with genuine tenderness.
Sense of place. Wisconsin comes alive through fish fries, Packers gear, apple orchards, and stubborn small-town loyalty.
Readability. Giffin’s clean, conversational prose keeps you reading without ever calling attention to itself.
Thematic depth. The fertility subplot gives the central romance an unexpected weight, tying the love story to bigger ideas about hope and parenthood.
Dialogue. The banter between Billie and her clinic partners, Greer and Lesli, is sharp, funny, and true to life.
Where It Falls Short
No book pleases everyone, and Love You More by Emily Giffin earns its solid four-star reputation for honest reasons. A few things hold it back:
The plot resolves a little too smoothly. Obstacles that should cost more tend to sort themselves out.
Dean’s near-perfection softens the emotional stakes of Billie’s choice.
The large Wisconsin friend group can blur together, and one or two side characters never fully come into focus.
Readers who prize surprise over comfort may spot the emotional destination from a distance.
None of these are dealbreakers. They are the trade-offs of a writer who values warmth and closure over ambiguity, and plenty of readers will call that a strength, not a weakness.
The Author and Her Work
The Author Behind the Story
Part of what gives Love You More by Emily Giffin its confidence is the two decades of craft behind it. Emily Giffin graduated from Wake Forest University and the University of Virginia School of Law, then practiced litigation in Manhattan before moving to London to write full time. Her earliest manuscript was turned down by eight publishers, yet her debut, Something Borrowed, went on to become an international bestseller and a 2011 film starring Ginnifer Goodwin and Kate Hudson. Vanity Fair once described her as a modern day Jane Austen, and her focus has stayed remarkably constant across her career: female friendship, love, and the small moral choices that quietly shape a life. That experience shows in how surely she carries a big emotional premise here.
Emily Giffin’s Previous Novels
If Billie’s story is your first Giffin book, her backlist is a reliable place to keep reading:
Something Borrowed
Something Blue
Baby Proof
Love the One You’re With
Heart of the Matter
Where We Belong
The One & Only
First Comes Love
All We Ever Wanted
The Lies That Bind
Meant to Be
The Summer Pact
Where to Start
New readers can begin almost anywhere, since her novels stand alone. Something Borrowed remains the classic entry point, while The Summer Pact is the closest cousin to this book in mood and theme.
If You Loved This, Try These Next
Readers who fall for Love You More by Emily Giffin will likely enjoy these too:
Every Summer After by Carley Fortune, for lake-town first love told across two timelines
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, for a slow-burn second chance and years of history
Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah, for a decades-long female friendship at the emotional center
One Day in December by Josie Silver, for a romance built around timing and near misses
The Summer Pact by Emily Giffin, for another tale of friendship, loss, and the pull of the past
Good to Know Before You Start
This is warm, character-led women’s fiction with a strong romance thread, best enjoyed when you want emotion and heart over shock and twists. It also makes a natural pick for book clubs, thanks to its questions about home, motherhood, and the roads we choose.
Final Word
Love You More is Giffin doing what she does best: writing about ordinary women at extraordinary crossroads with warmth, wit, and real feeling. It will not surprise readers who want to be blindsided, and it does not try to. What it offers instead is a big-hearted story about first love, chosen family, and the quiet courage it takes to build a life you can actually live in. Curl up with it on a rainy afternoon and let Billie’s homecoming carry you along.