Taylor Jenkins Reid interview 2022 - YOU Magazine Fashion Beauty Celebrity Health Life Relationships Horoscopes Food Interiors Travel Sign in Welcome!Log into your account Forgot your password? Password recovery Recover your password Search Sign in Welcome! Log into your account Forgot your password? Get help Password recovery Recover your password A password will be e-mailed to you. YOU Magazine Fashion Beauty Celebrity Health Life Relationships Horoscopes Food Interiors Travel Home Life Taylor Jenkins Reid Bestsellers big names and burning ambition By You Magazine - September 11, 2022 With millions of her novels sold worldwide and four of them set to be TV and film blockbusters, author Taylor Jenkins Reid is queen of the screen adaptation. Not bad for someone whose first book nearly made her quit writing. MAIN PHOTOGRAPH: PHILIP CHEUNG There can’t be many people who Reese Witherspoon would interrupt her holiday for. But the actress whose production company Hello Sunshine has been behind book-to-big screen successes Gone Girl and Where the Crawdads Sing – was so entranced by Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 novel Daisy Jones & the Six that she needed to get her on the phone. Immediately. ‘I was at breakfast with her executive and Reese rang her so she could talk to me,’ recalls 38-year-old Reid. ‘She was calling from her vacation to tell me that she loved the book.’ So taken was Witherspoon with this story of a dysfunctional 70s rock band – inspired by the Fleetwood Mac videos Reid remembers watching as a teenager – that Reid ‘had her listening to Rumours and singing the songs’. Reid’s novels – addictive explorations of fame and excess – have dominated The New York Times bestseller lists. Her eight novels have been published in 36 languages with millions of copies sold. And on TikTok she’s inescapable: videos with the hashtag #thesevenhusbandsofevelynhugo – referring to her 2017 book – have had more than 200 million views. Think of her as the Jackie Collins for Gen Z. Meanwhile, four of her books are in the process of being adapted for film or TV, with Reid taking production roles on all projects. Daisy Jones is due to arrive on Amazon Prime Video soon with Elvis’s granddaughter Riley Keough in the title role. Reid says she’s been fascinated by celebrities and fame for as long as she can remember. Growing up in Massachusetts on the US east coast in the early 90s, on a pop-culture diet of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and reruns of 50s sitcom I Love Lucy, she recalls: ‘When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d say, “I’m going to LA.” I couldn’t articulate why. I just knew I wanted to work in Hollywood.’ After graduating from college in Boston, Reid moved to Los Angeles where her first job was an internship on the TV show CSI: NY. She eventually worked as an assistant to two casting directors. By 24, she had met Alex – now her husband – in a bar through mutual friends. In what sounds like a plot from one of her novels, the couple eloped four months later. ‘Everyone assumed I was pregnant, because why would you do that?’ she says. ‘For romance! We were young and crazy.’ After deciding that casting wasn’t her grand passion, she began ‘writing small things for fun in the evenings. ‘The people around me were really supportive,’ she remembers. ‘If I sent anything to anyone, they would want to read more. I sat down and tried my hand at fiction and that was it. I was, like, “I’ve found it.”’ Alex then agreed to support her, paying the bills for two months so that she could write her debut novel, Forever, Interrupted. But her first agent wasn’t so keen. ‘I remember getting an email and realising that she didn’t like it,’ Reid says. ‘I thought, “Shall I just quit? Do I not know what I’m doing?” At that point the only thing I had that made me think I had the right to call myself a writer was an agent.’ They parted ways and she was left without representation. ‘It was brutal.’ Determined not to be put off entirely, Reid started cold-calling anyone she could, eventually finding another agent and signing a deal with publishing giants Simon & Schuster, aged 28. She followed up her debut with three other works of contemporary fiction, After I Do (2014), Maybe in Another Life (2015) and One True Loves (2016). Her first four books enjoyed middling success but, with a growing readership, Reid was hungry for a major breakthrough. Her strategy? ‘I was like, “If I’m walking into a bookstore, what is the book that I’m immediately going to pick up?” And I realised what I hadn’t been doing was atmosphere. I thought, “I’m going to transport you to a time and place, a world you can lose yourself in.”’ With The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – a journey through the scandal-ridden life of an ageing Hollywood recluse – Reid did just that. It was inspired by a Vanity Fair article she stumbled across about Ava Gardner’s multiple marriages. ‘Until that book [Evelyn Hugo], my trajectory felt a little random. Once I wrote it, I looked back and thought, “This is who I am, this is who I’ve always been, this is what it was leading towards.”’ While Reid was writing her seventh novel Malibu Rising, she decided that a character who makes a brief cameo should return in another story. This became the premise of her latest novel Carrie Soto is Back. Carrie is a retired tennis pro with a tumultuous relationship with the press (loosely inspired by that of Serena Williams and other female sports stars). ‘Carrie just can’t bring herself to perform a version of herself in front of the camera to court public opinion,’ she explains. The release of Carrie Soto is Back marks the end of an era for Reid because she’s done with writing about fame. ‘I have said what I’m here to say,’ she explains, adding that she doesn’t yet know what themes are coming next. ‘I might fall on my face,’ she says. ‘It’s a little trepidatious.’ Whatever she writes next, it will be from her beloved office, ‘unapologetically feminine in a way that feels like my space,’ and large enough – with a sofa, TV and dining area – for Reid to spend the whole day comfortably. ‘I don’t write anywhere else,’ she says. ‘I’m at my desk with my iced tea.’ Reid’s screenwriter husband Alex with their daughter Lilah, six She does acknowledge that, despite this routine, her life has changed since having daughter Lilah, now six. ‘My life used to be very leisurely. I would wake up and have this whole thing where I needed to consume media before I created media. I would get up and read for a few hours or watch TV, eat a little lunch and then work from maybe noon to 8.30pm. I can’t do that now. I’m up at 7.30am. I get my kid out of the door and I know that I have until 6pm, maybe, and once she’s home that’s my time with my daughter. I’m sure when she’s a teen and wants nothing to do with me I’ll go back to writing late into the night.’ Speaking of teens, Reid is delighted her books are now reaching a whole new generation of fans on TikTok. ‘Harry Styles put it best when he said: “How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future.” That’s sort of how I feel.’ She does, however, struggle with social media herself. ‘I’m on Instagram but I think it distracts from what I want to be doing, which is writing. I get very fatigued of myself,’ she muses, before elaborating. ‘When you feel like every time you turn around there you are… it’s just not a feeling I really like. My books are only one part of the whole of me so it can sometimes be a little claustrophobic. It’s like there is a mirror I’m constantly having to look in, but it’s only showing that side of me.’ Recently she got a taste of the phenomenon she has long been exploring. ‘My daughter wanted to go into a bookstore,’ she cringes. ‘Suddenly there were teenage girls coming up to me, wanting to take my photo – and I had mayo from a McChicken sandwich on my leg.’ Although she is happy taking breaks to publicise her books or help produce a screen adaptation, novel writing will always be where her heart is. ‘If I could be a hobbit in my cave all day and just write and never come out I would do that,’ she smiles. ‘But the film and TV work does give a sense of balance. And having time away from doing what you do? It only makes it sweeter.’ TAYLOR’ S TALES ON SCREEN Daisy Jones & The Six Dropping on Prime Video soon – filming for the series wrapped in May – this adaptation of Reid’s 2019 novel stars Riley Keough, Sam Claflin, Suki Waterhouse and Sebastian Chacon as members of a 70s rock band. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Netflix announced in March that it would be turning this book into a film. Not many details have been released, but we do know that Liz Tigelaar, the woman behind the successful adaptation of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, is writing the screenplay. Malibu Rising Another upcoming project on Liz Tigelaar’s CV is the TV adaptation of Reid’s seventh novel. While the cast is yet to be revealed, Disney-owned streaming service Hulu bought the rights to the book before it was published last year, so we can only speculate that it will be released on Disney+ in the UK. One True Loves Although it has no release date yet, Reid and her husband Alex, who’s a screenwriter, wrote the script for the adaptation of her 2016 novel. Shot last year, the film is directed by Andy Fickman and counts Hamilton‘s Phillipa Soo, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings star Simu Liu and Elvis’s Luke Bracey among its cast members. Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid is published by Hutchinson Heinemann, £16.99. 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