Emily Giffin has spent two decades writing about the moment a woman’s carefully built life collides with the one she almost had, and “Love You More” may be her sharpest treatment of that collision yet.
Billie Baker is a reproductive endocrinologist in New York City, newly engaged to Dean and, by any reasonable measure, exactly where she’s supposed to be. Then a phone call from Mick Jones, her high-school sweetheart from small-town Wisconsin, arrives and threatens to unravel a life she thought was settled. Giffin structures the novel in two timelines, alternating between the present-day reckoning and the adolescence that shaped Billie long before medical school and Manhattan entered the picture, when Mick was the center of her world before distance and ambition pulled them apart. The dual structure lets the novel build its central question patiently: not simply whether Billie will choose Dean or Mick, but whether the life she engineered for herself was ever really the one she wanted, or the one she thought she was supposed to want.
Giffin’s real strength here is refusing to make Dean a strawman or Mick a fantasy; both men are drawn with enough specificity that Billie’s dilemma feels earned rather than manufactured for plot purposes. The Wisconsin-set flashbacks carry a genuine, unforced nostalgia, and Giffin is particularly good on the friendships that anchor Billie’s adolescence, which end up mattering as much to the emotional payoff as the romance does. The present-day sections move briskly, propelled by Billie’s medical career and the ticking-clock pressure of her engagement, without ever feeling rushed through the harder material underneath — grief, ambition, and the quiet fear that you’ve built a life around the wrong certainty.
Reviewers have generally responded warmly, praising the novel’s brisk pacing, its emotionally grounded dialogue, and Giffin’s ability to balance genuine romantic tension against deeper questions about identity and home. Several have singled this out as some of Giffin’s most mature relationship writing to date, less interested in melodrama than in the slow accumulation of choices that make up a life. The more measured takes have pointed out that longtime Giffin readers will recognize familiar terrain here — the engaged-but-unsettled heroine, the first love re-emerging at the worst possible moment — and that the ending resolves a touch more neatly than the messiness of the setup promises. But even those reviews concede the journey there is absorbing.
“Love You More” doesn’t reinvent Giffin’s signature territory so much as refine it, delivering a novel that’s genuinely hard to put down precisely because its central question — who are you when the life you built meets the life you left behind — is one most readers will recognize in some form. It’s comfort reading with real emotional teeth, and Giffin’s most confident work in years.
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