Where to Start with Taylor Jenkins Reid: A Reading Guide

Taylor Jenkins Reid (born 1983) is the American novelist whose books — set in Old Hollywood, the 1970s rock world, and contemporary California — have made her one of the most widely read commercial literary novelists of her generation. She is particularly skilled at writing novels in which charismatic, complex women (Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones, Nina Riva, Carrie Soto) exist at the intersection of fame, ambition, and love, and at using formal experimentation (the mock oral history of Daisy Jones, the retrospective interview of Evelyn Hugo) to tell stories about the entertainment industry and celebrity culture. Her novels have dominated bestseller lists and generated devoted reader communities; The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six have both been adapted as television series.

Where to Start: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017)

The essential Taylor Jenkins Reid — and her most emotionally complex novel. Monique Grant, an unknown journalist at a celebrity magazine, is summoned without explanation to interview the legendary Evelyn Hugo, an Old Hollywood actress who has been reclusive for decades. Evelyn, now in her late seventies, wants to tell her life story for the first time — seven marriages, one extraordinary career, and the secret that has defined everything.

Reid moves between Monique’s present (her confusion about why she has been chosen) and Evelyn’s past across five decades of Hollywood history — the 1950s studio system, the sexual dynamics of a world in which women traded beauty for opportunity, and the decades-long love story between Evelyn and Celia, the actress she loved but could never be seen with publicly. The novel is about ambition and its cost, about the relationship between public image and private truth, and about what it means to spend a lifetime protecting a love that the world refuses to recognize.

Daisy Jones and the Six (2019)

Reid’s most formally innovative novel — structured as a mock oral history, with multiple interview subjects reconstructing the story of a legendary rock band, decades after its breakup. Billy Dunne’s band (the Six) is finding its sound in late 1960s Los Angeles; Daisy Jones is a solo artist whose talent is obvious and whose life is a controlled chaos of sex, drugs, and desire. When Daisy joins the band, the combination is explosive — commercially and creatively — but the relationship between Billy and Daisy generates a tension that eventually becomes unsustainable.

The oral history format — multiple voices, occasionally contradicting each other, revealing more than any single narrator would — allows Reid to build a complex portrait of creativity and self-destruction without reducing either to simple explanation. The most formally interesting of her novels and, for many readers, the most gripping.

Malibu Rising (2021)

Reid’s most family-focused novel — set over a single day in August 1983, as the four Riva siblings prepare for their annual party in their Malibu beach house. The party grows until it fills the beach; the four siblings are circling each other, each carrying their own private crisis; and the novel periodically pulls back to tell the family’s history — their mother June, their famous surfing father Mick Riva, and the way their fame-adjacent childhood shaped all of them. The novel’s structure (one long day, with flashbacks to decades of family history) is elegantly managed, and the ending — fire, revelation, release — is powerful.

Carrie Soto Is Back (2022)

Reid’s most sports-driven novel — about Carrie Soto, a legendary tennis player who retired as the greatest of all time, and who comes out of retirement to reclaim the grand slam record that another player is about to break. The novel is about competitive greatness and its price, about the relationship between Carrie and her father/coach, and about whether a woman defined by her sport can be a full human being. Reid’s most tightly plotted novel, with a climactic final tournament that is genuinely gripping.

Reading Taylor Jenkins Reid

Reid’s fiction is built on the premise that the lives of women defined by public ambition — actresses, musicians, athletes — are worth examining with the same seriousness as the lives of men in similar positions, and that the particular constraints on their ambition (the studio system, the marriage market, the assumption that women are less serious competitors) make their stories more complex and more revealing. Begin with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo for the most emotionally layered and the most celebrated; read Daisy Jones and the Six for the most formally inventive; approach Malibu Rising and Carrie Soto Is Back for her later, more tightly structured work.