Best-selling romance novelist Emily Henry has just put out a new book called Great Big Beautiful Life, and Swifties may want to check it out, considering that a Taylor Swift song helped inspire one of the characters.
The book is about a man and a woman who are both competing to become the official biographer of a reclusive media heiress named Margaret Ives. Henry tells E! News that in creating the character of Margaret, who can trace her famous family back over 100 years, she took inspiration from a song on Taylor’s album folklore.
If you guessed the song is “The Last Great American Dynasty,” you’d be right. The song is about Rebekah Harkness, a wealthy socialite who, as Taylor sings, “had a marvelous time ruining everything.” Harkness is also the woman who built the mansion that Taylor now owns in Rhode Island.
“I love that song, and love the story behind it,” Henry told E! News. “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.”
Among the other families who gave Henry inspo were the Kennedys, the British Royal family and the Hearst, Pulitzer and Murdoch media dynasties. “There were so many different families that I pulled from,” she explained, “but mostly it was just to give a sense of history.”
Henry’s other books include Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation and Happy Place.
Great Big Beautiful Life isn’t the only book Taylor Swift has inspired, by the way. Author Jenny Han has said she listened to Taylor all the time while writing her The Summer I Turned Pretty series, and subsequently selected Taylor songs to appear in the TV show based on the books.
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