I live fully up here,” she says, pointing to her head. Writing Carrie meant Reid had to get into the mindset of an elite athlete. “It means you get to achieve great things, but you also lose out on a lot of things.” “Any sport in which you intend to be truly, truly excellent requires a lack of balance in your life,” Reid says. But she is the best in the world at something.
The pursuit of excellence can often be a lonely road, as Reid shows throughout the novel. (In conversation, Reid mentions a wild excerpt from Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations as inspiration for Evelyn Hugo.) Taken together, Reid’s last four books form their own universe, with recurring characters and callbacks sprinkled throughout. The glamour of Evelyn Hugo gives way to a touching, queer love story, one that made it onto the New York Times best-seller list in 2021, four years after its initial release, thanks to TikTok-fueled word of mouth.
What it’s really about, however, is a close-knit group of siblings at a breaking point. Malibu Rising (2021), set in the 1980s California surf scene, takes place in 24 hours and is ostensibly focused on one crazy night at a wild Malibu party. The unique structure of Daisy Jones-inspired, Reid says, by Vanity Fair’s 2015 oral history of the Laurel Canyon music scene-speaks to the boldness and ambition that have become her signature. Reid had an even bigger hit with 2019’s Daisy Jones & the Six, a faux oral history of the love affairs driving a 1970s California rock band (think Fleetwood Mac and, more recently, the mysterious breakup of the Civil Wars), which boasts Reese Witherspoon’s stamp of approval and an upcoming Amazon Prime Video adaptation.
But in 2017, when Reid shifted to juicy, page-turning historical fiction with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo-about a Rita Hayworth type with Elizabeth Taylor–style marriages-she became a name brand. She’d been working steadily as a modern romance writer since publishing Forever, Interrupted in 2013. The author of eight novels, Reid has become the sort of writer whose work surrounds you the minute you enter a bookstore. And then I felt like, Well, it’s okay to say it.” “I’ve felt for a really long time that I have a lot of ambition,” says Taylor Jenkins Reid.
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