Taylor Jenkins Reid: ‘I don’t want writing to be punishing anymore’

The author of ‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ is back with a moving novel set in 1980s Malibu. She tells Clémence Michallon about creative risks, how meeting Jennifer Aniston changed her career, and feeling like Forrest Gump

Taylor Jenkins Reid has just released her seventh novel, ‘Malibu Rising’ (Author photo: Deborah Feingold)

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s writing career began with Friends. She had relocated to Los Angeles from Massachusetts and was working in casting when Jennifer Aniston stopped by her office. Excited to have met the Friends star in person, Reid recounted the anecdote to her friends in an email. That email earned her “a lot of support” and made its way to a TV writer, who praised it. And just like that, Reid caught the writing bug.

“It’s little things like this that indicated to me that if I tried this, it might work and I might belong,” she says. “It gave me the confidence I needed to sit down one day and say, ‘OK, I’m going to try to write fiction.’”

Reid’s first novel, Forever, Interrupted (the tale of a young widow whose husband dies just nine days after their elopement), was submitted to publishers in the spring of 2012. After a few anxiety-filled weeks, she signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster, one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the US. As Reid established herself as a character-driven author who respects her protagonists’ integrity and lets their personalities drive the plot, so her critical and commercial success grew. She writes with heart and is a master at seemingly innocuous scenes that carry deep meaning. Nine years later, she has just released her seventh novel.

Malibu Rising, her latest, tells the story of four siblings – the offspring of Mick Riva, a famous singer who features in two of Reid’s other books (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six). The main action takes place over the course of one day, in the lead-up to and during Nina Riva’s famed annual party, while flashbacks detail the family’s history from the 1950s through to the 1980s. By telling the Rivas’ story, Reid wanted to ask “whether or not they can break free of generational patterns”. The resulting novel is a lively, eloquently written summer read, with an apparent breeziness that parts to reveal deep truths.

Malibu Rising is in the same vein as Reid’s two previous novels, Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones, in that it brings to life periods in history (Evelyn Hugo took place between the 1950s and 1980s; Daisy Jones told the story of a 1970s rock band) through the lens of fictional famous people. All three books are concerned with the topic of fame; Evelyn Hugo was a smart examination of its heroine’s sexuality, while Daisy Jones focused on a young singer finding her voice in the industry.

In her decade as a published author, Reid has let her writing evolve. Forever, Interrupted and After I Do explored the topic of marriage. Maybe in Another Life and One True Loves both featured contemporary female heroines having to make life-altering decisions shaping the course of their love lives. That knack for romance continued, but the three most recent novels differ in style, premises, and setting from the first four.

Engineering that creative shift wasn’t without risk. After finishing One True Loves, Reid felt like she had said everything she had to say on that side. “You know in Forrest Gump when he’s running across America, and one day he stops and he’s like, ‘I’m done’? It sort of felt like that,” she says. Reid had toyed with the idea of writing about a reclusive movie star in old Hollywood. She couldn’t get that story out of her head, so she did the only thing she could. She decided to write it.

“I thought that would be a one-off,” she says. “I remember handing it over [to my editor] and being like, ‘Look, this is what I want to do right now. This is where I’m at. If that’s not where you guys see my career going, I totally get it. We can just part ways.’ It was a shift, but they were really supportive.”

The bet paid off: Evelyn Hugo, in which the titular Hollywood star comes out of reclusion to share the story of her life with a magazine writer, became a New York Times bestseller and earned Reid a new generation of fans. Daisy Jones also landed on the New York Times bestsellers list, cementing this new trajectory in Reid’s career. After that, Reid found herself wondering: “Am I staying in this space? Do I have more to say, is there more that I want to do?” There was. “One thing I really wanted to analyse is a story of famous siblings with the same sort of Royal Tenenbaums vibe, but also with the lens of fame. What does that feel like when you didn’t choose it for yourself, when it was chosen for you?” This, of course, became Malibu Rising, with Mick Riva as the parent inviting the trials of fame into his family.

Reid is a writer of strong premises and vivid settings. In her latest, she brings to life the Malibu of the 1980s, infusing it with the surfing culture of the time (Nina Riva is a surfer and supermodel; her brother Jay a surfing champion). The novel opens with an ominous overview of the fires that have blazed through Malibu over the decades – “because”, Reid writes, “it is Malibu’s nature to burn”. Reid herself lives in the San Fernando Valley, and like many California residents, has had to evacuate her home due to wildfires. While the climate crisis isn’t a main theme in the novel, she made sure the fragility of that setting transpired in her writing.

“I tried to make it somewhat clear that Malibu, and specifically the Santa Monica mountains – that area of the country that a lot of us surround – is delicate,” she says. “This earth is delicate and people have to be careful. We have to treat it with respect because it will burn. Fire and water – these are neutral things. They have no sense of morality or right or wrong. They’re just going to take over what they take over.”

Due to the slow pace of publishing, Reid, like many authors, is usually well into a new project by the time one of her novels comes out. Malibu Rising is no exception, although she remains tight-lipped about her next release. “I am working on a book, and it will be done this year. I’m confident about that,” she says. “And the only thing that I’ll say about it is that I’m staying in my lane for one more go-around. I have one more thing I want to say. I want to investigate one more particular type of woman.”

When this mysterious project is over, Reid envisions herself taking a temporary step back. “I think it’s time for me to take a little bit of time off and read other people’s work and engage with the world in a different way,” she says, “and consume as opposed to create for a little while.”

This decision came in part from the pandemic, and Reid’s realisation that she doesn’t want to go back to her former way of life. She used to be “very neurotic and very punishing”, giving herself a firm set of tasks to accomplish each day. But with a young daughter to take care of and no proper childcare during the pandemic, those habits were disturbed.

“Everything just took a huge hit and I had to start from the ground up,” she says. “And here’s the biggest thing that I learnt: I can no longer define myself by some incredibly impressive amount of words written in a day, or the fact that I didn’t skip a day.”

It’s hard to imagine Reid, a lively, enthusiastic conversation partner whose warmth transcends even the stiffness of a Zoom call, being “punishing” about anything. But it’s also not hard to imagine that her string of novels (seven in nine years) came as the result of a rigorous work schedule.

Now, Reid wants to bring some ease back into her life, especially as far as work is concerned. “If it’s a year or two from now and we’re talking again and you say, ‘What’s your work process?’ –  I hope that the word ‘punishing’ doesn’t come out of my mouth anymore,” she tells me.

There is another project on the horizon still: a planned TV adaptation of Daisy Jones & the Six at Amazon Prime Video. Production was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic but is expected to pick up soon. What does it feel like, I wonder, for an author to watch the story they developed privately for years – the story they made up and championed, that belonged to them before it belonged to anyone else – become an entire team’s project?

It’s “nerve-wracking”, Reid acknowledges, but there’s also a helpful distance from the work that comes from the publication process: “The book doesn’t belong to me anymore. I wrote it. The minute that I said somebody else could publish it, it meant that it now belongs to everybody.”

Malibu Rising is out at Ballantine Books in the US and at Hutchinson in the UK