Emily Giffin has built a career on the premise that the past never really stays past, and “Love You More” puts that theory to its toughest test yet: what happens when your old life calls you back just as your new one is finally clicking into place.
Billie is a New York physician with a thriving practice and a fresh engagement to Dean, a fellow doctor who represents the kind of stable, forward-looking future she’s spent years building for herself. Then a call comes in from Mick, her high school boyfriend back in Wisconsin, bringing news of a tragedy that pulls her home and back into a version of her life she thought she’d closed the door on. The novel moves between that present-day crisis and the past that shaped it, tracing the friendship and first love between Billie and Mick before ambition, distance, and medical school pulled them apart. As Billie splits her attention between the fiancé waiting in New York and the first love complicating things in Wisconsin, the book becomes less a love triangle than an interrogation of which version of herself she actually wants to be.
Giffin’s real strength here is in the texture of the flashbacks: the small-town Wisconsin of Billie’s adolescence feels lived-in rather than sketched, and the slow unraveling of her and Mick’s teenage relationship carries real emotional weight precisely because it isn’t rushed. The present-day sections move briskly, with the kind of down-to-earth dialogue and clean plotting that have made Giffin reliable across two decades of women’s fiction, and the book is genuinely hard to put down once Billie’s two timelines start closing in on each other. It’s less a mystery about who she’ll end up with than a character study of how a person reconciles who they were with who they’ve become, and that’s a more interesting question than the marketing copy might suggest.
Critics have generally been kind to the book, with several describing it as a nostalgia-driven page-turner that leans into twists without losing sight of its emotional core. The comparisons to classic will-they-won’t-they romantic dramas have been common, and reviewers have praised Giffin for once again delivering the kind of emotionally layered, morally gray dilemma her longtime readers come back for. The most consistent critique is that the ending resolves a little too neatly for a story built on such messy, high-stakes choices — several reviewers noted that the conflicts smooth over with a tidiness that can feel more comforting than earned, given how genuinely complicated Billie’s dilemma is for most of the book. That’s a fair knock, but it’s also true that Giffin has never been in the business of leaving readers devastated; she’s in the business of making them feel something specific and satisfying, and on that count, this one delivers.
If you’ve followed Giffin from “Something Borrowed” onward, “Love You More” is very much of a piece with her best work: warm, emotionally intelligent, and built around a question — what do we owe our past selves? — that lingers well after the last page.
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