57 pages • 1 hour read
Emily HenryPeople We Meet on Vacation
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Updating When Harry Met Sally for the Millennial Generation
Henry’s premise was to update When Harry Met Sally for the millennial generation. Like People We Meet on Vacation, the 1989 movie features opposite-sex protagonists who appear to have nothing in common, and yet following a carpool ride home, embark on a decade-long friendship steeped in sexual tension. In the movie, numerous obstacles arise to delay the eventual happy ending. This narrative trope is appealing to consumers, who have the satisfaction of watching characters change over time, the slow chemistry build, and the rewarding romantic outcome. Arguably, the idea of friends becoming lovers after a decade of getting to know each other is also alluring because it is so rare in real life—especially amongst a millennial generation known for its need for instant gratification, restlessness, and shifting loyalties. Still, while the narrative trope is unrealistically romantic, it taps into more common experiences such as putting off the expression of romantic feelings towards a friend and pulling away from intense intimacy due to the fear of loss.
Though Henry imitates elements of When Harry Met Sally’s narrative structure and spotlights a heterosexual romance, her characters express a more modern understanding of gender. Director Rob Reiner, cited in Nicholas Barber’s BBC article of July 12, 2019, Why When Harry Met Sally is the Greatest Romcom of All Time, says the film began as a conversation between himself and screenwriter Nora Ephron about the different ways men and women approach relationships. Reiner argues “the whole idea behind this film was to really examine how men and women bump up against each other during the dating dance that they usually do.” Thus, while Harry and Sally are distinct characters with idiosyncratic tics, they also represent generalizations about men and women.
While in 1989, the movie’s frankness, especially on the taboo issue of how women experience sex, was groundbreaking; in the current era of political correctness, it would be unacceptable to have a white, cisgender middle-class man and woman as representative of an entire demographic. Thus, while little is known about Harry and Sally’s backgrounds and where their opinions have come from, Henry builds rich biographies of Poppy and Alex. It is easy to trace Alex’s risk aversion to his childhood loss of his mother and Poppy’s rejection of Linfield to high school bullying. Their attitudes are less a result of gender than temperaments and lived experience; they speak for themselves rather than for a particular demographic. Moreover, Henry eradicates the notion of gendered personality traits by making outspoken, responsibility-evading Poppy more like Harry and fastidious, health-conscious Alex more like Sally. Whereas book and animal-loving Alex is likely to instantly appeal to readers of romance novels, brash, funny Poppy can be annoying and goes against the expectation that women have to be likeable. She is, like Harry, is the one who must grow on the reader and be given the chance to improve the first impression she gives.
Finally, Henry’s novel updates When Harry Met Sally by showing that the monogamous heterosexual romance at its center takes place amidst a panoply of different relationship styles. At work and on their travels, Alex and Poppy meet and befriend same-sex couples and those in less monogamous dynamics. For example, David and Thad’s same-sex wedding is the incident bringing Poppy and Alex to Palm Springs. Although the novel’s ending, like that of When Harry Met Sally, is the romance staple of the boy ending up with the girl, it is important for Henry to show that this takes place in a context where others are writing different sorts of happy endings.
Millennials in Love: Delaying Resolution as Part of Delaying Adulthood
One reason why a narrative delaying romantic resolution works so well in a millennial context is that millennial existence is characterized by postponing the traditional milestones of adulthood. While supporting characters in the novel such as Jason Stanley and Alex’s younger brothers marry young and settle in a specific location, both Poppy and Alex take the millennial route of delaying marriage, childbearing, and homeownership. While some postponement is inevitable owing to low-paid professions and living in an expensive city, some of this is a matter of choice. Instead of seeking to settle with a partner who gets to know her, Poppy prefers to go on vacation—literally in her profession and metaphorically in her relationships with a series of arty, fun-loving men who prioritize experimentation and play over commitment. While she is with Trey, for example, Poppy is happy for him to get on with the teenage habit of hanging out with his skater friends while she enacts her own extension of adolescence with Rachel, as they read in the park and take pictures of their food for Instagram.
However, through all her experiments in vacationing, Poppy comes to learn that the trips with Alex mean the most to her. While studious Alex seeks to build a stable future—both in his relationship and career—he tells Poppy, “you can have my summer breaks. I’ll keep those wide open for you, and we’ll go anywhere you want, that we can afford” (95). Here, Alex, who likes to think he is in control of his life, leaves a window open for Poppy, not imagining these breaks with her could sabotage his original vision for his life.
While the sexual tension between Alex and Poppy builds with each Summer Trip, it is diffused through a kind of child’s play, where they do camp-style activities like hiking, boating, and taking pictures in funny costumes. Elements such as alcohol and periodically sharing a bed force vulnerability and physical intimacy, causing them to understand the relationship could turn sexual. Their mutual fear of ruining a good friendship by tipping it into a romantic involvement that could fail in the style of their relationships with others stops them. The drunken kiss in Croatia seems to prove their hypothesis when it results in a two-year estrangement. Poppy and Alex behave childishly when they run away from the kiss, each fearing that a real conversation about it will be the final nail in the coffin for the friendship they treasure. In her Shondaland interview, Henry writes that like Poppy, she was:
[N]ever willing to risk a friendship that meant a lot to me. The tricky thing for Alex and Poppy is they’ve gotten to this point in their lives where they really can’t healthily mean quite as much to each other as they have, if they’re going to be involved with other people, and that’s what kind of forces them to make a decision.
Still, Henry shows that without risking rejection and loss, there is no satisfaction as neither Alex nor Poppy are happy when they are apart or pretending the sexual tension between them does not exist. Poppy—who initially believes that the old platonic friendship must be salvaged at all costs—uses the first days of the Palm Springs trip to try to convince Alex nothing has changed. She tries to resurrect the chirpy, fun-loving Poppy from past Summer Trips and “to have enough uncomplicated, unconfusing fun that when we get home, he doesn’t need another two-year break from me” (203). She continues her campaign even though nature is against her—both in terms of raging hormones and the scorching temperatures of Palm Springs.
Alex, who is suffering from physical back pain as well as sexual repression, finds that their rental apartment’s failing air conditioning makes going along with Poppy’s pretense impossible. When he insists they are different people than before and does not want to go back to their platonic friendship, he makes a first important step towards the honesty that will turn their relationship more mature.
While giving into the sexual tension and admitting they are in love is an important step toward a stable relationship, they cannot fully graduate into coupledom until they have dealt with the issues that stop them from being more mature versions of themselves as individuals. Without this, they will not be able to handle the practicalities of a relationship like compromising on a place to live. Poppy must head back to New York and Alex to Linfield, until they work on their personal insecurities and fears. Poppy fully enters the world of adult risk when she faces her fear of rejection and tells Alex “I’d give up anything, risk anything for you […] Even my own heart” (350). While Poppy talks of giving Alex her “own heart,” she also implies she would give up the facade keeping her away from him and Linfield.
While Alex and Poppy resolve their issues enough to embark on a mature, committed relationship with each other, there is still a millennial streak of experimentation in their testing of different places to live. This is an alternative to the old patriarchal model where propertyless Poppy would have automatically given up her city life for Alex.
The Limits of a Dream Life
Aside from Alex and Poppy’s love story, a key theme of the novel is Poppy’s dissatisfaction with the life she worked so hard to build. Poppy appears to have effected a complete transformation from small-town misfit to a travel writer and social media influencer. In both her career and public image, she has everything she has ever wanted yet she claims, “now I just miss wanting something” (21).
This feeling of unhappiness despite success is close to Henry’s heart, as she had a similar experience following the writing of the 2020 bestseller Beach Read. In her Shondaland interview, Henry says, “I’d been in the publishing world for a while, and I spent the first couple years of that feeling like I was constantly striving, dreaming. Once I started meeting those goals, I was left with this strange emptiness. It’s kind of like that birthday or Christmas feeling as a kid—like you have all this buildup, and then it’s just over, and you are more or less the same as before, and so is your life.”
Of Poppy, Henry writes, “so much of the book is about her untangling her identity from this one path she’s spent most of her life on and accepting herself fully rather than hiding behind this facade she’s built.” Poppy’s inability to accept that the path she decided on a long time ago no longer serves her is partly rooted in guilt that she is lucky compared to her peers who studied hard and achieved little success. By contrast, Poppy rebelled against the system by dropping out of college and building her career through her blog and social media following. While her best friend and fellow influencer offers the platitude “it’s the journey, not the destination”(22), and advises that the cure for Poppy’s unhappiness is to get more goals, Poppy realizes she has not been happy since Alex left her life.
While Poppy misses her vacations with Alex, she also misses that she can be herself around him. This is in contrast to most other things in the life she built for herself, which looks impressive but is unaligned with what she truly values. Poppy is conscious that the less appealing part of her job—the social media posts—are more valuable to Rest + Relaxation magazine than the blog-writing she loves. She is conscious of a dependence on popularity when she notes that her following on Instagram doubled when the photogenic Rachel began to follow her. Moreover, while her life is full of perks such as expenses-paid vacations—subject to Rest + Relaxation magazine’s conditions—her actual salary is in insubstantial to the point that her self-funded trips have to be on a shoestring budget similar to her college days. This shows that she has less financial stability and autonomy than is immediately implied.
The cracks in Poppy’s dream life are also seen in her relationships with a series of men whose primary virtue is being non-Linfield types. She uses her relationships with Julian, Guillermo, and Trey as means of escaping herself and delaying entering a committed relationship with Alex—the man who knows her and cares for her. This is a self-protective measure on Poppy’s part, as she struggles with self-acceptance and believes her true self would drive someone away. Instead, she only shows a carefully curated part of herself to the men she dates in New York: the charming, bohemian world traveler with few emotional needs. The survival of Poppy’s relationships depends on her not having needs, which is why she is terrified at the thought of being pregnant with Trey’s child on the Tuscany holiday. When Alex asks her what she wants, she is unsure of how an unplanned pregnancy would fit into her plan and imagines it would destroy everything she built in New York. She imagines falling back on Alex, who would always be there for her and moving into an apartment in Indiana next to him and Sarah. When the pregnancy test comes back negative, Poppy cries and is “not sure if it’s relief or something more complicated than that” (283). Arguably, the more complicated part of Poppy’s feeling is that she realizes she has needs for stability and the possibility of having children without feeling it would scare away her partner. Here, Poppy’s instinct tells her that part of her is seeking a more grounded life—even if she has not figured out the details.
While Poppy thinks she has found something real with Alex on the Palm Springs vacation, he insists she must figure out how to make their love work before she returns to him. Alex, who is offended when Poppy confesses that she planned her trip because she was unhappy with her routine, says “I’m not a vacation from your real life […] I’m not a novelty experience. I’m someone who’s been in love with you for a decade, and you should have never kissed me if you didn’t know you wanted this, all the way” (315). While Poppy thinks she does want the “this” Alex mentions, “part of me has no idea what that means” (315), as she is unsure of whether the practical details of what she wants for her future are the same as Alex’s. When Alex will not allow her to escape into him, Poppy has to face up to herself and discover what she really wants.
When Poppy returns to New York, she replaces dreaming with being grounded, and even in her job, replaces flying to faraway destinations with weekend stayaways in local areas. She stops running away from her problems, by starting therapy and sitting with the discomfort. A chance encounter with Jason Stanley forces her to pick up the self she left behind in Linfield and see the whole truth of what she was escaping. When she accepts her truth, she figures out she no longer wants or needs to run away from her Linfield self.
In this place of stillness, Poppy becomes clear about her needs, in both her career and home life. She knows she wants to make a home with Alex—potentially in Linfield—and that the more authentic and up-to-date version of her writing lies in discovering new things about her home city rather than luxuriating in far-flung, expensive vacations. She finds that a more stable life with Alex, where whimsical adventures are infrequent treats rather than the norm, suits her better.
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