Avid readers or anyone who has stumbled onto “BookTok” knows of Taylor Jenkins Reid. After first jumping into book aisles in 2013 with her first novel, Forever, Interrupted, Jenkins Reid has gone on to not only become a BookTok sensation and dominate bestseller lists for years now but to also see many of her works, including The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six, being adapted for both the big and small screen.
Born and raised in Maryland, and having also spent much of her childhood in Massachusetts, Jenkins Reid moved to Los Angeles after graduating from college to pursue a career in writing. After initially working as a casting assistant and at a high school, Jenkins Rein signed with her first literary agent at 24 and published her first novel, Forever, Interrupted, in 2013. Much of her early works – After I Do (2014), Maybe In Another Life (2015), and One True Loves (2016) – focused on everyday women facing impossible scenarios. In 2017, however, Reid began to carve a name for herself in the historical fiction genre when her New York Times best-selling novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was published. The book began what would become a quartet of novels chronicling fictional famous women and their struggles with fame, with Daisy Jones & The Six following in 2019, Malibu Rising in 2021, and her most recent novel, Carrie Soto is Back, arriving in 2022. All four novels have become New York Times bestsellers, with Daisy Jones & The Six being a finalist for Book of the Month’s Book of the Year award in 2021, and have also garnered plenty of attention on BookTok.
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“I never take for granted what is happening for my books now, because I learned how this industry works at a much smaller pace,” Jenkins Reid told BuzzFeed of her success. “I don’t know – I think if my first book was a massive hit, I don’t know if I’ve had that perspective. And I love that perspective.”
Jenkins Reid’s books are now being lifted from the pages and put on screen. In March 2022, Daisy Jones & The Six debuted as an Amazon Prime Video original limited series starring Riley Keough and Sam Claflin as the lead singers of the band, Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne. The series was a hit and picked several Emmy nominations, ultimately winning for Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie – 2023 and Outstanding Period Costumes For A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie – 2023. Evelyn Hugo, meanwhile, is being adapted into a movie at Netflix, with Leslye Headland attached as director. Further information, including casting news and a release window, has not been revealed. Meanwhile, Malibu Rising is being adapted into a series at Hulu, and Carrie Soto Is Back as a TV series for Picturestart. Jenkins Reid, who co-wrote the television show Resident Advisors, is attached creatively to all of the projects.
As Jenkins Reid’s career begins to turn to the screen, she is still a dedicated author. Although she recently revealed that she currently has no plans to begin work on another novel just yet, she told Buzzfeed that she wants “to keep writing books because I love what I do.” She also indicated that she hopes the venture away from the themes of her most recent novels, telling the outlet, “I have become known for a particular type of book, and which is to say a book dealing with fame, and I would like to go back to telling stories that are big in scope. It’s actually probably more going back to what I had long done before.”
