production company, a lifestyle brand (Draper James’s Nash-
ville outpost is a mecca for Tennessee tourism), an enormous
social media presence, and three children nd the time? She
makes it, as making time seems to be another superpower.
She told me she’d been able to spend four hours just reading the
day before. “And nobody interrupted me! To me, that’s a vacation.”
Seeing as how books were the key to so many parts of the
story, it made perfect sense for us to meet back at Parnassus
Books for this interview. It was late December and Reese had
come home to Nashville for Christmas. It’s where she grew up,
where her parents live, where her brother and sister-in-law and
two nieces live. She agreed to come to the bookstore early so
that we could talk before the shoppers arrived.
A
T EIGHT O’CLOCK in the morning, Reese With-
erspoon looks less like a movie star and more
like a pretty girl with really good hair. I use the
word girl with intention, both because we’re in
Nashville and because in her jeans and sneak-
ers she doesn’t look old enough to rent a car. After she accepts a
cup of coee from the appalling coee machine and says good
morning to all the booksellers, we begin making slow loops
around the tables and past the shelves, playing the parlor game
devoted readers can never get enough of: Have You Read This?
Witherspoon opens with Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, the
January pick for her book club. “It does such a good job explor-
ing work dynamics, race, class.”
I counter with Greek to Me by Mary Norris, which she hasn’t
read. I have it in my head that this book would make a terric
movie and the next thing I know I’m pitching her. “A copy edi-
tor at The New Yorker decides to learn ancient Greek!” I say. “It’s
like Wild but for the mind.”
She shakes her head. “Too interior.”
We stop at the new releases table to profess our mutual admi-
ration for Colson Whitehead, then Attica Locke. Witherspoon
leans over to pet the cover of Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage.
“Love,” she sighs, as if it were a picture of Marcello Mastroianni.
Witherspoon likes to read nonction in
the morning (The Moment of Lift, Sapiens,
Three Women) and iction at night (she
hugs a copy of The Secret History to her
chest and declares it one of her all-time
favorite books. She had just bought a copy
for her daughter, Ava, who is 20 .)
Then we break into a mutual rhapsody
over Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations. In
addition to being an opinion writer for
theNew York Times and the author of one
of the best books of the year, Renkl had
once been Reese’s favorite high school
English teacher here in Nashville and
remains a friend. Since we are speaking
of local authors, I try to give her a copy of Kevin Wilson’s Nothing
to See Here but she says no, she’s brought her credit card, she’ll
buy it herself, thank you very much. When I oer her the store
discount she turns that down as well.
“Why are there all these writers in Nashville now?” she asks.
“Does Lorrie Moore really teach here?”
Lorrie’s my neighbor. She teaches at Vanderbilt.
Witherspoon gapes in disbelief that I know Lorrie Moore,
much less live close to her. Then she asks if she could take
the class.Had Witherspoon been a smart, entrepreneurial actor who
igured out how to get meaningful parts at 36 by optioning
books and producing lms herself, that would have been a good
story, but that’s not the story at all. What Witherspoon did was
create a whole new playing eld in Hollywood. In making parts
for herself, she found that she wanted to make parts for other
women as well, women her age but also women who were older
and younger. She wanted to make parts for women of color,
because if she was having a tough time nding good roles, she
could see that what they were facing was considerably harder.
And what about getting more women behind the camera?
“I can remember being in pictures in which I was the only wom-
an on the set and there would be 150 men,” she says. “Maybe
there would be a couple of women in wardrobe. I remember
when I was a kid I would nd them and cling to them.”
Why weren’t there more women directors and screenwriters?
Why weren’t there women working cameras and doing sound
and editing? If she were the one making the movie then she
could hire them. She could prove that it was possible to ll a mov-
ie with all sorts of women: women of dierent races and ages,
women from the LGBTQ+ community, women who are dier-
ently abled. It’s the kind of thing the people in Hollywood say.
The dierence is that Witherspoon is actually doing it, and her
projects make money. Lots of money. She went out to nd water,
then called her friends so that together they could dig a well, lay
a pipeline, and change the landscape. That included demand-
ing equal pay for equal work, an agreement she wonfrom HBO.
“An actress came up to me at a party and said, ‘Do you know
what you’ve done?’ I had no idea what she was talking about.
The day after the HBO equal pay thing went through, they
called her agent to rewrite her contract. She was then paid twice
as much as she had been.”“I can remember
BEING IN PICTURES
in which I was the
ONLY WOMAN on
the set,” recalls
Witherspoon, “and there
would be 150 MEN.”
BLOOMSDAY
Dress by Prada;
necklaces
by COMME des
GARÇONS
MIKIMOTO; ring by
Tiffany & Co.;
bra by Fleur du Mal.
VANITY FAIR APRIL 2020 63