Taylor Jenkins Reid

Taylor Jenkins Reid (born December 20, 1983, Ocean City, Maryland, United States) is a best-selling American author whose novels often feature protagonists who have achieved fame in such fields as film, music, and sports. She is known for her historical fiction, with settings in the 1950s through the 1990s. Reid has received multiple awards, and her books have sold over 21 million copies. Several of her novels have been or are being adapted into movies or miniseries, including Daisy Jones & the Six (2019), about a 1970s rock band.

Early years

Reid was born in Ocean City, Maryland, and moved with her family to Acton, Massachusetts, when she was 12. She has said she was a “Goody Two-shoes” until she became a teenager. Reid wasn’t much of a reader as a child, but that changed when she discovered Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding at age 13. “Page one and I was in!” she told The Guardian in 2019. “I could not get enough of it. It’s hard to remember now what a breath of fresh air it was when it first came out. I finished it and said, ‘Mom, take me to the bookstore.’ ” One of her literary heroes was Jay Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby.

Reid majored in media studies at Emerson College in Boston and spent a semester at the school’s Los Angeles satellite program, where she got an internship in the casting department for the TV series CSI: NY. She worked as a casting assistant on the 2006 film The Guardian, which starred Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Costner. Reid started writing part-time during this period.

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Writing career

After quitting her job in 2011, Reid wrote her first novel, Forever, Interrupted, the story of a woman whose husband dies in a bike accident nine days after their wedding. Both her agent and a manager hated the initial draft. “I remember I was bawling my eyes out and laying on my bed,” she told The New York Times in 2021. Reid hired a new agent and revamped the book, which came out in 2013. Her first few novels—Forever, Interrupted, After I Do (2014), Maybe in Another Life (2015), and One True Loves (2016)—didn’t sell well, although One True Loves was later adapted into a 2023 film starring Simu Liu and Phillipa Soo. These books focused on the romance in the protagonists’ lives.

Reid’s popularity began to soar after the publication of her fifth novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017), which was the start of her shift to writing historical fiction about women who excel in their fields. The book, about a former Hollywood star who shares her story with a journalist, was a critical and commercial success. As of 2022 Netflix was in the process of adapting the book into a film.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was followed by Daisy Jones & the Six (2019), about a popular 1970s rock band with “a Fleetwood Mac vibe,” as Reid called it. Written as an oral history, the novel won the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award for readers’ favorite historical fiction. Actress and producer Reese Witherspoon picked Daisy Jones & the Six for her namesake book club, calling it “un-put-downable. I just tore through this book and I read it twice!” Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, produced the Amazon Prime Video miniseries based on the book. The 2023 series starred Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, as the title character, and won several awards, including two Emmy Awards.

In 2021 Reid published Malibu Rising, set over 24 hours in the lives of four siblings gathered for a 1983 party in Malibu, California. This was followed by Carrie Soto Is Back (2022), about a champion tennis player who comes out of retirement in the 1990s to face a young opponent. Both books won the Goodreads Choice Award for readers’ favorite historical fiction in the years they came out. Carrie Soto Is Back is being turned into a series produced by Serena Williams. In 2025 Reid published her ninth book, Atmosphere: A Love Story, about a woman training as an astronaut in the 1980s. She also published a short story, “Evidence of the Affair,” in 2018.

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Reid told USA Today in 2018 that she has a very regimented writing style. “I start with my idea, and I know how the story begins and the story ends, but what’s in the middle I don’t know,” she said. “So for my first drafts, which can take anywhere from four weeks to eight weeks, I write a certain amount of words per day and that’s what I have to get done.” Several characters and locations have been known to appear across the Reidverse, an informal term for Reid’s novels from Evelyn Hugo on; this has inspired fans to search for hidden references in the stories.

Personal life

Reid is married to screenwriter Alex Jenkins Reid. She keeps her personal life private, but earlier in her career, some questioned why she was writing a love story about two women in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. In 2025 she discussed her bisexuality with Time magazine, saying, “I am very private. So at first, I just sort of let people assume what they were going to assume.…It has been hard at times to see people dismiss me as a straight woman, but I also didn’t tell them the whole story.”