“I’ve felt for a really long time that I have a lot of ambition,” says Taylor Jenkins Reid. “And I felt like I needed to hide it. And then I felt like, Well, it’s okay to say it.”
That ambition has paid off. The author of eight novels, Reid has become the sort of writer whose work surrounds you the minute you enter a bookstore. She’d been working steadily as a modern romance writer since publishing Forever, Interrupted in 2013. 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. 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.
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. 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. What it’s really about, however, is a close-knit group of siblings at a breaking point. 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. (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.
Reid’s star has risen quickly, as her books have gotten bigger and more complex. In a Zoom call from her home in California, she owns her success, but in a thoughtful way: “Ambition has to be interrogated. It’s not just, Oh, because I’m a woman, my ambition is revolutionary and good. We have to move one step beyond and say, At what point are you going to have enough? You still have an obligation to contribute to the world, not just in a way that serves yourself.”
The elite athlete at the center of Reid’s latest book, Carrie Soto Is Back, bumps up against these questions. Her name may be familiar; she first appears in a memorable Malibu Rising cameo in which she threatens to light her lover’s clothes on fire. The new novel follows Carrie as she comes out of retirement to return to the tennis circuit at the comparatively ancient age of 37. The narrative is spiked with TV transcripts and short newspaper clips, creating an immersive experience of what it’s like to be the best in the world at something, and the curse of absolute excellence.
Reid wrote the book in 2020, though her process wasn’t quite what she’d imagined it would be. “My whole plan was that I was going to see the finals at Indian Wells”—a California tournament played in March that’s sometimes referred to as the “fifth Grand Slam”—“and I was going to bring my little notebook and start making plans.” However, the pandemic interfered. “Then it was like, Oh, that’s not happening. And also, we’re probably going to be inside for a really long time. And all of my childcare is gone.” Reid and her husband, screenwriter Alex Jenkins Reid, wound up working in shifts, alternating between their writing projects and taking care of their now six-year-old daughter. “It ended up being this really fun book that I could write to pretend that it wasn’t 2020.”