Reese Witherspoon may be a famous, award-winning actress; however, she’s also a writer who is releasing her first novel. While talking about her new endeavor, she revealed how she wants her book to be like her beloved movie, “Legally Blonde.”
“Your whole life, what is your metric for happiness, or what is the result you’re looking for?” Witherspoon asked during a panel discussion, “Inside the Writers’ Room: Mastering Fearless Storytelling,” on October 11 in Los Angeles, according to People.
Discussing her upcoming release, “Gone Before Goodbye,” co-written with bestselling author Harlan Coben, she continued, “In everything I’ve ever done, I want to touch people. So I’m less worried about critics. I really don’t care about their thoughts, feelings or opinions, because half of the stuff I’ve done is not well reviewed. But it means something, and it landed for some reason. It was important to me. For some reason, it’s in my life.”
Witherspoon also talked about the story’s main character, Maggie McCabe, “an Army combat surgeon who becomes entangled in a dark conspiracy,” per People.
“My biggest goal for this book is to make as many little girls as possible want to be surgeons as Elle Woods [from ‘Legally Blonde’] did for lawyers,” Reese explained. “That would be cool. So yeah, that’s probably the metric for my success. Med school rates went way up. Something very noble.”
Reese Has Had This Idea for Years
GettyWhile some fans may just be learning about Reese’s first novel, this is something she’s been thinking about for a while now.
“I had this idea for a long time,” she said during the panel. “I had it for probably two-and-a-half years during the pandemic. I was kind of cooking on it. I kept reading stories. It was all leading me towards this character that I wanted to create.”
However, she admitted, “And then meanwhile I was like, ‘Well, but I don’t know how to write a novel. I don’t know how to structure it. I know how to make a movie and I know how to create a character.’ I had ideas, but I was like, ‘I [need] a partner, somebody who is great at what they do. That’s always been a winning formula for me.”
That’s why she teamed up with Harlan, who recalled, “One day Reese Witherspoon called me, and there’s no way to say that without sounding braggy. There’s just no [other] way to say that! I love collaborating on TV, and I told Reese that right away: ‘I’m not that guy. I’m not the collaborate-on-novels guy.’ But Reese, we had a meeting and she started telling me the idea and I’m like, ‘Oh damn, that’s good.’”
Reese’s Parents inspired the Story’s Main Character
GettyReese writing a story featuring a surgeon may seem random at first; however, it turns out that she based the character on two people she knows very well: Her parents. Reese’s dad was a surgeon who served in the army, while her mom was a nurse.
“The first five years of my life, I lived on a military base in Germany, and everybody who filtered in and out of our house was another doctor,” Reese explained. “And all they would talk about was medical jargon. So I was really, really little sitting at the dinner table listening to my dad and his friends and my mom and her friends talk about really gnarly surgeries.”
“Gone Before Goodbye” comes out on October 14.
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