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For more than three decades, Reese Witherspoon has been many things to many people: the Oscar-winning star of Walk the Line; the pink-clad Elle Woods of Legally Blonde; the Hollywood producer who brought Gone Girl and Big Little Lies to the screen. Now, she’s adding another title to her résumé: novelist.
This month, the 49-year-old releases her first work of fiction, Gone Before Goodbye, co-written with the bestselling thriller author Harlan Coben.
Already tipped to hit the bestseller lists on publication, the book follows Maggie McCabe, a former army combat surgeon who takes a discreet medical job for an anonymous client – only for a patient to vanish under her care, setting off an international conspiracy. “I’ve never had an idea for a novel before,” Witherspoon said recently. “I’m always the actor who shows up and executes someone else’s vision. I thought, maybe it’s time to take the big leap and build the world myself.”
Witherspoon and Coben are touring the book and will appear together at the Royal Festival Hall next week as part of the London literature festival. But for Witherspoon, the move is less a pivot than a continuation – the latest chapter in a career defined by reinvention and an unerring sense of what audiences want.
Born in New Orleans and raised in Nashville, Witherspoon made her screen debut at 14 in The Man in the Moon (1991). She spent her 20s playing sharp, ambitious young women who defied expectations: Tracy Flick in Election, Woods in Legally Blonde, Melanie Carmichael in Sweet Home Alabama. Her performance as June Carter Cash in Walk the Line earned her an Academy award and confirmed her as one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars.
“She’s got that quality that men find attractive, while women would like to be her friend,” the director Alexander Payne once said. “But that’s just the foundation. Nobody else is as funny or brings such charm to things. She can do anything.”
Despite her reputation, the late 2000s were professionally tough for Witherspoon. Her film choices faltered, and the scripts coming her way were uninspiring. “There are a lot of really, really big movies about robots,” she said at the time, “and there’s not a part for a 34-year-old woman in a robot movie.”
The lack of complex roles for women prompted her to start producing her own material. In 2012, she founded Pacific Standard, later folded into her larger media company Hello Sunshine to tell stories by and about women.
The strategy paid off. Gone Girl, Wild and Big Little Lies became critical and commercial hits, each one led by complex female protagonists. Subsequent projects, such as The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere and Daisy Jones & the Six, confirmed Witherspoon’s status as a cultural power broker (when Hello Sunshine sold in 2022 for a reported $1bn, it made Witherspoon one of the richest and most powerful women in Hollywood).
In 2017, Witherspoon launched Reese’s Book Club, which now boasts millions of members and an uncanny ability to turn any selection into a bestseller – creating its own term: the Witherspoon effect. The novels she picks are mostly stories of female resilience and reinvention, and many of them later become Hello Sunshine screen projects, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem. In 2022, she wrote the first of her Busy Betty series of children’s books before announcing her pivot to adult fiction last year.
Perhaps it was inevitable Witherspoon would one day write a novel. In recent years a slew of famous names have moonlighted as novelists. Keanu Reeves collaborated with the British fantasy writer China Miéville; Hillary Clinton teamed up with the mystery novelist Louise Penny; Bill Clinton co-wrote thrillers with James Patterson. According to Nielsen BookScan data, in 2023, eight of the top 100 bestselling paperback novels, and five in the top 20, were written by celebrities.
For Witherspoon and Coben, their story began nearly a decade ago when they met at a conference – he admired her work with books and she admired his knack for plot. When she phoned him years later with an idea about a surgeon forced to become a fugitive, their collaboration took shape over a single, three-hour call. “We both knew at the end there’s no way we’re not going to do this,” Coben told USA Today. “It was just too much fun.”
The premise has a personal resonance for Witherspoon. Her father was a military doctor who served as a lieutenant in the US army reserve, her mother was a professor of nursing. “We did not want any of this to appear gimmicky,” Coben said. “Neither of us needed a résumé thing. We both agreed it had to be our best work.”
Whether it is remains to be seen. Early reviews have been encouraging – The Los Angeles Times praised the novel’s ability to “pull the reader deep”, and the book holds a four-star average on Goodreads – but Witherspoon’s name alone will guarantee attention. Coben has already mused on the cinematic quality of the story and his co-author’s suitability for the lead role.
But for now, Witherspoon’s ambitions are focused on the page. She has said she hopes Maggie McCabe can do for medicine what Elle Woods once did for law: inspire women to see themselves in professions where they are too often underestimated.
