Taylor Jenkins Reid

The “Carrie Soto,” “Malibu Rising,” and “Daisy Jones” author discusses her unapologetic ambition.

In the nine years since her publishing debut, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s productivity has been nothing short of prolific. The critically acclaimed writer has published eight novels including her latest releases, “Carrie Soto is Back” and “Malibu Rising.” She also wrote a short story for Amazon Originals and adapted much of her work for feature films and television — including the forthcoming Reese Witherspoon–produced series “Daisy Jones & The Six,” based on Reid’s wildly popular novel.

“My brain doesn’t do well when it doesn’t have a project,” Reid explains, seated on the front porch of a Topanga Canyon home she’s currently renting while her permanent Encino residence is renovated. “My husband is always like, ‘Okay, now that this one’s over, can we relax?’ I’m like, ‘Totally, totally, totally, totally,’ and then a week later, I’m off to something else.”

But Reid wasn’t always a New York Times best-selling author. It took a big gamble for the writer to arrive where she is now. 

SLOW BURN TO SUCCESS

Reid explains that her 2013 debut novel, “Forever, Interrupted,” was released as a trade paperback, a format that doesn’t always get the support it needs to find an audience. “Everybody did their best,” she says as a rooster crows in the distance. “But nobody was talking about it. When it came out, my publisher happened to be in a direct conflict with Barnes & Noble, so my book wasn’t in any Barnes & Nobles.”

While other debut authors with sluggish sales might not get a second chance, Reid says she was fortunate to have signed a two-book deal, “which gave me a second shot at bat and so I released the next one. My editor at Simon & Schuster at the time, I give her a lot of credit because the books weren’t outselling anybody, but she stuck with me, and so my readership grew with each book.”

Even so, Reid acknowledges, “I was definitely midlist. I remember having conversations of like, ‘What do I need to do to get bigger?’ There were a lot of factors at play; genre and gender. My books at that time were really heartfelt, grounded, and low concept. They were things that were much more slice-of-life.”

THE GAME CHANGER

When the idea for “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” first came to her, she approached her editor, who discouraged the idea. “When I pitched ‘One True Loves’ to my editor at the time, I said, ‘I’ve got this one idea, which is Castaway from Helen Hunt’s point of view, and I have this other idea about an actress.’ She was like, ‘Books about actresses don’t do great, so unless it’s really calling to you, I would advise you do the other one.’ I was like, ‘If people won’t be interested in this actress thing, then maybe I don’t want to do it.’”

Reid completed “One True Loves,” a love story about a woman forced to choose between the husband she thought was dead and her current fiancé, but the author says she couldn’t get the concept for “Evelyn Hugo” out of her head. She remembers thinking, “If it’s not going to do well, then fine, but this is a book that’s calling to me. It’s growing in my mind and my relationship to it is becoming deeper and deeper. I’m seeing it more clearly. It’s what I want to do next.” 

At the time, she says, “It felt less like a smart move and more like a huge risk, but what I started to understand was that I could write this actress story in a way that was a little bit more elevated and a bit more high-concept.” She pulled inspiration from observing her contemporaries. “I looked at authors that I really admired who were doing stuff and being treated the way [I wanted to be treated]. I was like, ‘I want to have that kind of career.’ I thought, ‘Well, I think if I’m midlist right now and I want to grow bigger, I’ll bet on myself and I’ll take this wild risk.’”

She held her breath as she sent off the pitch for “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” Reid recalls saying, “I feel very strongly this is my next book. This is what I need to do. I love this book. I believe in it but I understand this is not what I’ve been doing. If you’re not into it, we can part ways and it’ll be okay. No hard feelings. If this is not the way that you see my career going with us together, that’s okay.’” 

To her surprise, she was greeted with the opposite response. “I’ve been blessed with editors who have stepped up and really supported whatever direction that I want to go in,” she says. “So far, at least with the last four books, my gut has not steered me wrong. ... Obviously, those decisions in which you bet on yourself and it works out, it makes you that much more likely to bet on yourself again.”

TOUGH DECISIONS

But it hasn’t been an easy path to following her gut. “I’ve had a number of moments in my life, career-wise, in which I’ve had to choose between the safer route that didn’t feel right and the risk of betting on myself,” she says. “I’ve made some tough decisions as a result of that. I have changed agents a few times. I have changed editors. I’ve changed publishing houses. I’ve worked with people who I immensely respect who I love to death and think have a great vision but at the end of the day, ‘Can they help me become the author that I want to be?’” 

Reid recalls being previously told, “I know you want to be number one on the New York Times list; that may not happen for you. Let’s think about what are other goals that we can have.” Instead of settling, she made a tough call and instead switched agents while writing “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” Her current agent fully believed in Reid’s goals. “[She] wasn’t satisfied with what I had,” she says, adding her current agent agreed, “You should be higher on this list. You should be selling more books.”

Reid approached a different publisher, Random House, with her completed “Daisy Jones & The Six” manuscript. “They read the ‘Daisy Jones’ manuscript and they were ready to show up in a way that I had never seen before,” she says. “[They] put power behind me that I have never had before.” Their support led to a larger audience discovering the book and for the first time in her career, Reid hit the New York Times Best Sellers list.

“There is definitely a part of me that has been hungry to feel like I belong in this space,” she says, “and to feel like what I’m doing has any sort of significance.”

Thanks to the success of “Daisy Jones,” Reid says she now has that. “There are enough people that have bought that book and liked that book,” she says. “I feel comfortable in this space thinking people may care what I have to say. It does remove some level of handwringing. It makes me stand a little bit taller in a way that feels refreshing, but that was my sixth book. I wrote five books before that. I know how the business works now in a way that I didn’t before and I know how much luck goes into this process.”

Reid says it’s taken time for her to acknowledge to herself what’s always been in her head and in her heart. “It’s been a process of me reckoning with the full scope of my ambition,” she says, “of not being afraid of it and not feeling like I need to tiptoe quite as much.” In fact, Reid’s current agent pushes her to think even bigger. “My agent now is like, ‘We should always be going higher,’” she says. “It’s incredible, but it’s also a lot of pressure, you know? But that’s the sword of ambition. If I want to be read more widely that is more pressure. That’s something that I’m choosing to engage in.”

MALIBU RISING

Reid’s seventh book, “Malibu Rising,” was released in 2021. It follows a famous, dysfunctional Hollywood family over the course of one life-changing night.

Reid knew she wanted to write about eighties surf culture, but largely she was eager to explore a specific theme — which was “anytime you have a kid who has to step up and become an adult really fast,” who does that person become in their adulthood? Reid says she wanted to write about “a woman who can weather anything, who can consistently step up and take care of everything, but who needs to learn to let chips fall as opposed to picking them all up or holding them all up herself. This is getting really into the weeds, but…

“Taylor Swift has this lyric that I think is maybe her best,” she says, “and that’s a high bar because she’s so good. It was from many, many albums ago: ‘You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter.’ That is what Nina is in some way; she is a careless man’s careful daughter, which is something that I’ve wanted to explore for a long time.”

Reid stopped short of saying Swift’s lyric inspired the character. “I’m just drawn to that and that resonates with me and so I see it wherever it is,” she says, sharing she also drew inspiration from shows like “Shameless” and “Party of Five.” “Because I’m so drawn to that [idea] and have been for such a long time, I could tell you any moment in pop culture that resonates with that. It’s a storyline that I’ve wanted engage with for years. When I finished the first draft, I was bawling. I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve excised this.’”

The book’s theme also inspired Reid to revisit a character fans might recognize from both “Evelyn Hugo” and “Daisy Jones,” Mick Riva, a famous singer once married to Evelyn Hugo. Reid says she figured, “Who better to be her father than this guy who is a complete cad and has never cleaned up a mess in his life?”

WRITE WHAT YOU…NOPE

While Mark Twain once said, “Write what you know,” Reid prefers to avoid drawing too much from her personal life. “My life doesn’t only belong to me,” she says. “My life is my interactions with other people and maybe at some point in my life, I’ll find more ease with the fact that if I write about myself it necessitates that I’m writing about people who haven’t really asked to be written about. But for right now, I need to not write about myself in order to not feel like I’m exposing other people’s dirty laundry. I feel very much like an open book for myself, but my life is also my husband’s life; it’s my daughter’s life; it’s my mother’s; my brother’s, you know? And so right now, at least, I feel conflicted and so everything has layers and layers removed. There’s a lot in ‘Malibu Rising’ that is about emotionally things that I want to explore — not a single thing in that book is drawn directly from my life.”

Something author Jill Santopolo once told Reid resonated. “I was moderating for her at an event,” she says. “I asked, ‘How much do you write about your life?’ She said, ‘A lot of it is emotionally true. None of it is literally true.’ I liked that. There are parts of ‘Daisy Jones’ that are emotionally true to things that I’ve gone through. Is it literally true? No.”

Reid does, however, acknowledge that her “worldview is seeping through each one of these books.” She adds, “If you take ‘Evelyn Hugo,’ ‘Daisy Jones,’ and ‘Malibu Rising’ and you put them all together, you can pull out a pretty good indication of the full scope of how I think about the world and where my heart is.”

Reid’s writing process usually begins with a place and ideas that she wants to explore. From there, she conceptualizes the character. “It becomes who’s the person that I’m going to create in order to explore this idea and this space,” she says. “Daisy Jones was definitely a creation in order to serve the larger idea of the story. How do I make this woman feel larger than life and feel like this icon — so that I can get into these other things?”

“Malibu Rising” was an exception to that approach. “Nina, who is the lead character in ‘Malibu,’ is a little bit different because I knew exactly the person that I wanted to put in this space,” she says. “It was so much fun that I don’t think I was looking back being like, ‘What am I excavating here?’ It was beach, surfers, sexy, eighties, Hollywood, and only later on am I like, ‘Geez. I sat down and asked myself these complicated questions about relationships between parents and children,’ which when I started that book my kid was one and a half and so it’s like, ‘Of course, I’m asking myself what parents owe their children because I’m asking myself that every day when I’m raising her.’ Am I raising her right? What do I want her to take from me? What do I not want to give her? I’m thinking about that all the time. I don’t want [my daughter] Lilah to pick up certain things from me. I want those to end with me, you know?”

GROWING UP

Reid always knew she was destined for Los Angeles, the city she often writes about in her novels. “I’ve always been driven in that once I make up my mind that I want something, I’m going to go after it,” says Reid, who grew up on the East Coast in Massachusetts. “From the first time anybody asked me what I wanted to be, it was like, ‘I want to go to Los Angeles.’ My mom staved that off in a smart way by pushing me to go to Emerson College, a film and TV school in Boston, where we’re from. I remember when it was time to go to college, I didn’t even know what I wanted to study, but I was like, ‘UCLA, USC, let’s get all these pamphlets from everywhere in California.’ I remember the pamphlet came for UCLA and she sort of looked at it and I could see the heartbreak in her eyes and I was like, ‘I can stay in Boston for a little while longer.’”

Reid majored in media studies, which included film and television theory courses. She minored in hearing and deafness. “There was a period of time in my sophomore year where I was like, ‘I don’t even know what I want to do in Hollywood, so why am I chasing this thing? I’m paying so much money for this education,’” Reid says. “I was putting myself through school, so it was like, ‘What is my goal? I need something practical. I’ve always loved sign language.’ When I was young, I had a babysitter whose daughter was deaf and so she taught all the kids that she worked with sign language. I was really into it, so I was like, ‘Maybe I could be a translator.’ I took all these speech therapy classes and got into it and then I had this moment where I was like, ‘I haven’t come to a film and television school to not pursue my dream of dreams.’”

SOUL SEARCHING

While in the college library, Reid stumbled upon a book about Hollywood. Each chapter focused on a role that made somebody famous and who was originally supposed to play the part. “I devoured this book,” she says. “I felt like, ‘I see the specific thing I’m interested in. I’m interested in finding the perfect person to bring a character to life.’”

When Reid moved to Los Angeles, she initially interned in the casting department of the TV show “CSI: New York.” “I met lifelong friends there,” she says, sharing that the internship helped her land a casting assistant job at Finn Hiller Casting, which has cast a number of blockbuster projects including “The Avengers,” “Iron Man 2,” and “Thor.” She remained there for three years. “Casting was everything that I thought it would be,” she says. “I got to meet famous people and go to premieres and the work was interesting. I did love it, but I had this feeling like, ‘It’s not quite where I’m supposed to be. It’s not exactly right.’”

She says she later realized, “Nobody is going to show up and hand you the thing that you secretly want in the back of your head, which is for a long time what I was hoping would happen for me. Even in college, I think what I wanted on some level was to be in command of the story, but that wasn’t something I was going to seek out. I was going to put myself in the room and see if somebody saw something in me, but it doesn’t work that way.” 

Eventually, Reid realized she was more interested in creating characters than she was casting them. Reid dabbled in writing for television and film before starting a short story. She developed the story into a novella, which helped her land her first agent at 24. “The novella didn’t sell,” she says, “but I got a lot of encouraging rejections. It was like, ‘We don’t want this, but if she has something else, we’ll read it. So I went back to the drawing board and was like, ‘I’m going to write another book. This time full length.’” 

She credits her husband Alex Reid, a screenwriter, with supporting her dream. “I told him what I wanted to do,” she says, explaining he encouraged her to quit her day job. “I took two months off and I wrote my debut novel. During that time, Alex was the one who paid the bills and I wrote. There were a lot of ups and downs in that process of finally selling that book, but in summer of 2013, my debut came out and I’ve been writing since.”

THE MEET-CUTE

Like Reid’s other work, her debut novel, “Forever, Interrupted,” is a work of fiction. However, she has one thing in common with its lead character: She also eloped.  

How did she and her husband first meet thirteen years ago?

“I feel like I always tell it. Do you want to tell it?” she asks Alex, who is seated next to her on the front porch. 

“I hope it’s the same story,” he jokes. “We met through a mutual friend at Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood.”

“Very romantic,” she teases.

They met in a group setting. “We didn’t really think anything of each other,” Alex says. “Later in the evening, when Taylor got up, our mutual friend says to me, ‘Hey Alex, Taylor’s been asking about you all night,’ which was a total lie, but of course the minute that happened suddenly a switch goes off and I’m like, ‘Oh really?’ And then I got up to go to the bar and he said the same thing to her: ‘My buddy Alex has been asking about you all night.’ Again, a total lie.”

“We’re just ego-driven enough that it worked,” she laughs.

“I was just desperate enough where I’m like, ‘Somebody is interested? I should totally marry them in the next four months,’ which I did.” He laughs. “But we hit it off. We started talking that night and then I think I messaged her a few days later — pretty direct — of just like, ‘Hey, let’s go out.’ We had an amazing first date and really connected. Within a couple of weeks, I was basically living at her place. Then, within four and a half months, we were married. And now here we are almost thirteen years later, which is crazy.”

“With a kid and a dog,” she adds. “And a mortgage.”

HOW (AND WHY) THEY WORK

They’re both writers, but with varying interests.

“We’re different in terms of how we approach writing,” she explains. “Alex is good at structure and understanding how to play within genre.” She addresses him: “You’re a craftsman. You can build the house. You don’t actually care what house it is or who it’s for; you just enjoy the process of building the house and any house that Alex made will be perfectly built whereas I am more of, I guess, an architect. I have a vision and I can do that vision. I feel passionate and strongly about it. Everything must be exactly right, but I can only do that thing that I’m interested in. Alex can function within any genre. He can take on any voice whereas I have a much more limited, but intense relationship to it and so I’m deeply neurotic, but I feel like you’re not that neurotic.”

“Taylor is like a sniper,” he says. “She takes a very long time.”

“A very long time?” she interjects.

“Like to set it up. To set up what you’re doing. She’ll spend a year or two years writing one thing and writing a hundred thousand words, which sounds like hell to me. She will just focus on this one thing. For me, it’s much more of a buckshot thing of like, ‘Cool. You want to do a kids thing? We want to do a thriller? Great.’ I care much more about figuring out [how to put my own unique spin on genre projects]. All of these stories have existed for forever. [I like figuring out] ‘What’s a new way to do it?’” He looks at his wife. “Versus you — you have this story in your heart that you have to tell, and I’m like, ‘Who’s going to pay me?’” 

They laugh.

“Alex is the first person to read anything that I write,” she says. “I always know his notes are going to make it tighter, smarter, stronger, deeper because he’s looking at it structurally. He’ll understand it as how it’s participating within the genre that it’s in and how it can engage with that more and be strengthened by it and I feel like when I read your stuff, which I don’t do as much anymore because you handle all of it on your own so much, but I do feel like I’m able to help you make the character stronger.” 

LOCKDOWN LIFE

Juggling two busy careers with a toddler during a pandemic wasn’t easy, but the Reids eventually found their rhythm by splitting the day in half. “At the very beginning of COVID what we decided was, ‘I’ll do the mornings and Alex will do the afternoons,’” she says. “So we would each have half a day to get work done. It was intense and tiring, but I did write a book and Alex did finish two movies.”

Reid’s mother-in-law would take their daughter for the day when they had simultaneous deadlines. However, Reid also credits her husband with making her career a priority. “I’m raising a kid with someone who puts my career first,” she says, “and so that means that I can advocate for what I need and say, ‘You know what, in order to hit this deadline, I need to watch Lilah less today. I need to work after dinner,’ and then have that need met. I don’t know how to raise a kid while at the same time taking care of everything. There are so many people who do have to do that. For me to pretend that I’m doing that is disingenuous. I have a lot of help.”

WHAT’S NEXT

Reid’s “Daisy Jones & The Six” television series was supposed to start production the second week of April 2020, but the pandemic put the project on hold. It’s since resumed production. “They’ve been wonderful about including me and picking my brain and making me feel very listened to, but they don’t need me,” she says. “With that project, I picked the exact right writers to go to and I’m thrilled.” 

Reid also recently released “Carrie Soto is Back.” “[It’s] very much about, ‘At what point do you lay your ambition down?’” she says, “and I don’t know [the answer] quite yet, but it is what’s in my head all the time. There’s always something in hindsight that I look back and realize I was processing while writing a book. This one has been clear. It’s where I’m at in my life and it’s questions that I’m asking myself.”

While Reid knows what her next idea is, she’s decided to take a brief break from novels. “I’m not going to write for a little while,” she says. “I have so many friends who don’t believe me but this time is different because I do feel like my first four books — they work as a set — and these four, including the one that I’m finishing now — they work as a set.” She shares, “My next one, I’m going off into a new direction and I want to make sure I’ve thought it through and I know what that direction is. I want to let it marinate.”

BLIND AMBITION

“In my investigation of ambition, I’ve made peace with the question of how to handle the intensity of my ambition,” she says. “Or as a woman, how to navigate this world and when do I reveal how ambitious I am? That’s dust that has settled inside me. The question now is, ‘At what point is enough enough? At what point can you be satisfied?’ The definition of ambition is hunger, right? If I’m just going to be ambitious for the sake of ambition to just cycle through and keep going and stay on the hamster wheel — that’s not a goal that I want for myself.”

“So the question is, ‘When is it time to get off the ride?’” she continues. “Go home, sleep, and come back to the amusement park in a few days. There are a lot of questions that I need to answer for myself, so I’m hoping that what that means is that I may work on a screenplay or two or do some stuff with Alex, but I’m not going to write a book for a little while.”

HOW SHE LIVES…

“We’re renovating our house in Encino,” Reid explains. “We decided, ‘Let’s go stay somewhere we’ve always wanted to stay.’ Alex and I do a lot of romanticizing about the life of Malibu and Topanga, so we settled on Topanga. There has definitely been at least a few times where we’ve looked at each other and been like, ‘Should we just move to Topanga?’ Being in the canyon is so peaceful and beautiful. The way of life in Topanga is not long term for me just because you are so far from so many things, but I did want to indulge in the idea of, ‘We’re up in the canyon with the wildlife.’ It really is as nice as I thought it would be. Alex is going hiking every single day. We’re eating dinner shooing away the lizards. It’s just a nice change of pace.”

THE TREEHOUSE

“We play with Lilah up here,” she says. “She can be loud out here and we’re not worried about bothering the neighbors and she can run around and just have fun.”

CURRENT BOOKS

“I read out here,” she says, noting she’s currently reading “Of Women and Salt” by Gabriela Garcia, “Sabrina & Corina” by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and “Red Island House” by Andrea Lee. “I’m reading multiple books at once,” she says. “It starts from necessity, like, ‘Oh, there’s a book that I need to blurb.’ I take it really seriously, so that means I’m reading a lot. I’m trying to do it at a crazy pace sometimes and have to jump around a bit. It’s something that I feel sacred about. I don’t blurb or recommend books that I haven’t read. I have a friend of mine who, if I recommend a book, she will go out and buy it. I always think about that when I’m choosing whether I’m going to blurb or recommend something.”

OF WOMEN & SALT

“It’s spectacular,” she says of Garcia’s novel. “The language is really beautiful. It’s one of those books that goes over generations of a family. You start off with the great-great-great-grandmother and her life in Cuba and now I’m up to 2016 and it’s generations later. It’s beautifully written. Lately I’m being asked to recommend books where it’s like — if people liked ‘Malibu Rising,’ what are other books that the reader might like? ‘Malibu Rising’ is about generations within a family and how trauma and joys can cross from generation to generation and we hold onto those things. It’s about how things change or don’t change from one generation to another. So I have a few books that are totally different than ‘Malibu Rising,’ but deal with that theme. ‘Homegoing’ is one of them, by Yaa Gyasi. I love it and I’m eager to finish it so I can recommend it to a thousand people.”

THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES

“This one is a cool-girl book right now,” she says, holding author Deesha Philyaw’s book ‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.’ “It’s short stories about Black women in the South and their relationship to church. The first story is this story called ‘Eula,’ which is my favorite so far. It’s beautiful.” Asked how she discovers new authors and books, Reid explains that she often gets advance reader copies from writers hoping she might help promote their book. “I’ve been super clear with my editor and with my agent that books that are written by underrepresented voices should go to the top of that list,” she says. “It’s fun when I’m reading a book that exposes me to a whole community or subset of the world that I knew nothing about.” In a similar spirit, Reid recently read “Arsenic and Adobo” by Mia P. Manansala. “It’s a cute, charming mystery. It’s all set in this Filipino community and they run this Filipino restaurant and it’s describes all these different Filipino foods that I didn’t know anything about and then there’s recipes in the back of the book and suddenly I’m like, ‘I want to try this adobo.’ You get exposed to things you weren’t exposed to before and so I do try to make that a priority when I’m reading because you get to learn something.”

HER RESEARCH

Reid only brought a few items with her to the Airbnb she’s currently renting in Topanga Canyon. “I packed things that bring me comfort,” she says. Or things she needed for work — like the two notebooks she used when researching ‘Malibu Rising’ and her next book. She uses them as a point of reference before interviews. “You have to talk about why you wrote the book,” she says, “and it can be hard to remember sometimes. I finished it such a long time ago, but things like this photo or this notebook is stuff that allows me to go back to this world. I feel like with every book lately — certainly with ‘Evelyn Hugo,’ with ‘Daisy Jones,’ with ‘Malibu,’ and the one that I’m writing now — I’m really throwing myself into those worlds. I live in that world in my brain for a set period of time and then I leave that world and I go to another world and I live in that one, but the way that my career works, it means I’m now publishing the one from two worlds ago and so I want to throw myself back into it. This notebook allows me to go back there and live in that space again.”

MALIBU RISING

“These are advance reader copies,” she says. “If you read ‘Malibu Rising,’ you’ll see there are a lot of characters that are vaguely mentioned that you can track back to other books [I’ve written]. They definitely all have a relationship to each other and they’re all sequential in time. Evelyn is sixties Hollywood. Daisy is seventies Sunset Strip. Malibu is eighties Malibu.… There are sequels within these books and there are characters that exist within all of them. Mick Riva is a character that I started in ‘Evelyn Hugo’ and then when I got to ‘Daisy Jones,’ he felt like the perfect person to put at this party to cause some trouble, and then when it came time to write about a famous family, I couldn’t get out of my mind, ‘What if this is the time where we learn who Mick Riva really is?’ So that’s what ‘Malibu Rising’ is.”

SUNGLASSES

“I never thought I’d have my name on the side of a sunglass,” Reid says with a laugh. “My Canadian publisher did these. They sent me just a few as a lark and I was like, ‘I love these so much.’ They’re really, really rad and super eighties. I’m really taken with them.”

FROM HER EDITOR

“This hand sanitizer and this candle were a gift from my editor Jen Hershey for Christmas in December,” Reid says. “She always sends the best presents. It’s like the greatest hand sanitizer on the planet. It smells so good. I don’t know why, but having these things from my editor [makes me happy]. She’s so supportive of me and I feel an intense kinship with her. I know she’s rooting for me and I know she’s going to help me to make this book the best that it can be. There’s so much in my office back home that I just left there, but I brought these with me. When I’m at a difficult point or I can’t figure out what I’m going to do [as I’m writing], I feel some safety or security in knowing Jen’s here. My relationship with my editor is one of such great trust.

“Writing is such a solitary thing. I may go upstairs and talk to Alex or ask his opinion, or Lilah may come in, but ultimately, it’s just me and this computer and I think on some level, burning this grapefruit candle — it just feels a little bit less lonely. Until I was sitting here right now, I just realized — it’s the only decorative thing I brought, which is kind of funny.”

LEROY GRANNIS

“This is a shot by a photographer named LeRoy Grannis,” she explains. “He was well known for taking shots of the beaches and the surf culture in the sixties and seventies. He has photos from a lot of different places. He didn’t just shoot Malibu or Southern California, but I came across him when I was doing research for ‘Malibu Rising.’ I became obsessed with him and also this idea of having photos in the house that represented different times in California and Los Angeles history. So this is sixties Malibu. What I love about this photo is — this is Malibu wall. If you go to Surfrider Beach, it’s been painted over, but it’s still there. Right here it says, ‘Dora is a stud,’ and that’s Miki Dora, who was recognized as one of the first cool guy surfers. He in some ways put Malibu on the scene in terms of the surf spot in all of my research. I went from being a person who had no idea what this wall said to ‘I fully understand the context of this.’”

CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS

“Alex and I bought a house that was first built in the sixties,” Reid says. “We’re redoing every single aspect of it. It’s a real fixer upper and so the first round of renovations we put hardwood floors in all of the places that you would put hardwood floors and we redid the electrical and the roof and put in a gate — all that stuff. The plan was always, ‘Move in for a little while; get a feel for it; and then start this second round of renovations,’ which is the kitchen, the bathrooms, the exterior, the windows, all of the big bulk of stuff. And then COVID hit. We finally decided at the top of this year, ‘Let’s move out and really get everything done all at once.’”

FLOOR PLANS

“I’ve always been super obsessed with home design and with the layout of homes,” she says. “When I was in college and bored in class, I would design floor plans of houses just to draw. For me, having a beautiful home has been the dream beyond the dream my whole life. This is my opportunity to make the house of my dreams. We’re not buying one that somebody else designed — even though there were so many that were so beautiful that I ached for. I felt like, ‘No. I want to make these decisions myself. I want to really express myself in this way and have my home be something that I know that I put all of this blood, sweat, and tears into.’ Going over every single tile choice, figuring out what I wanted Lilah’s bathroom to look like and then trying to incept her to love the idea. I asked her many times, ‘Don’t you love this one and this one?’ And she’d be like, ‘No. I love this one and this one.’ My kid has a lot of strong opinions.”

MADE FOR LIVING

“I went and chose every single faucet and every single piece of tile,” she explains. “All the colors of the walls, every vanity. It’s a lot of work, but I’m excited about it and I feel passionate about it. I have these moments sometimes where I’m like, ‘Oh God, have I made all the wrong decisions? Is it going to look terrible?’ And that’s why I just open up my bag of things and remind myself, ‘No. This tile I chose is gorgeous. That’s going to look good with this—’ And I go through my design book. Amber Lewis, who does ‘Made for Living,’ she’s like my design god. I just go back and I’m like, ‘No. My kitchen looks almost exactly like this Amber Lewis kitchen. It’s going to be fine.’ But these at this point feel a little bit like a security blanket for me.”

CARDS FROM HER DAUGHTER

Reid’s daughter made Mother’s Day cards that she held onto. Reid says the silver lining of this past year is that she was able to spend quality time with her daughter. “I got to see her go through such a specific developmental process,” she says. “She’s a big kid now. She’s almost five and when this started she was three and a half and she’s a different person. Watching that has been rewarding.”