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Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books found a huge audience on TikTok, but that’s not the whole story. She talks to Susie Goldsbrough about labels and her success with Gen Z.

In March 2021, the novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid was sitting at home in Los Angeles when she got an email from her agent telling her that her fifth book, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, had just hit the New York Times bestseller list. She was thrilled, elated, but mostly just – surprised. Evelyn Hugo had been out since 2017. “Everyone started scrambling, just going, ‘How did that happen?’ And nobody had any answers. Nobody could figure it out. And then my manager calls me and says, ‘Have you looked your book up on TikTok?’”

It turned out that Evelyn Hugo had been airlifted into the charts by Gen Z’s favourite social media mega-platform, on which users share short video clips. Enthusiastic, often teary vlogstyle endorsements from readers who had come across the book by chance had spread through “BookTok” (the areas of TikTok devoted to book recommendations) like spilt coffee, adding up to mega sales. Posts tagged with the title on TikTok have 133.5 million views and counting. There is a curiously old-fashioned uality to this kind of success: as Jenkins Reid says, “it is the most wordof-mouth way I have seen a book blow up”.

It has emerged on a global scale only in the past two years, but the power of BookTok is already mighty. Among booksellers, it is widely believed to be the force behind an upswing in fiction sales in general (in New Zealand, they rose 17% between 2020 and 2021) and among young readers in particular. Bookshops are suddenly thronged “with teenagers and young adults” in scenes not seen since “JK Rowling and Harry Potter”, according to UK chain Waterstones’ managing director James aunt in an interview with The Bookseller.

Of course, the pandemic has played a role – people stuck at home with time on their hands – but the dominance of fantasy, romance and YA titles in the charts makes the role of TikTok ever harder to ignore. Book reviews tend towards the cool and appraising, whereas BookTok is all passion and enthusiasm, which is perhaps why it appeals so much to teenagers.

Although she’s on TikTok, Jenkins Reid never looks at BookTok. “I’m just on there trying to zone out. I don’t want to be criticised or complimented,” she says. However, she is “immensely thankful” for the massive success it has brought. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

went on to spend more than a year in the bestseller list. It still pops back in often, along with her more recent titles, 2019’s Daisy Jones & the Six and 2021’s Malibu Rising, both of which are also big on BookTok and being adapted for the small screen (Daisy Jones by Reese Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine, Malibu Rising by Hulu). Evelyn Hugo is being made into a film for Netflix by Liz Tigelaar, creator of Little Fires Everywhere.

The secret to Jenkins Reid’s popularity is the deft way she blends glamour and ordinary life. Her past three novels shoot you up with a sugar-hit of pop culture (something that perhaps particularly appeals to TikTok’s age demographic) – old Hollywood, coke-snorting rock stars, scandalous celebrity affairs – and then settle you comfortably down into capacious, human stories about problems both real and familiar. The bikini model has her heart broken, the pop star misses his children: they are escapist and relatable – and that, it turns out, is the jackpot.

“I really want to tell fun, transportive stories that when you read the back cover you think, ‘Wow, I’m going to have a blast with this,’” she tells me over a video call from her Los Angeles home. “But while I have a reader’s attention, I’m going to talk about stuff that matters to me. Fun is not antithetical to substance. I completely reject the idea that one negates the other.”

Jenkins Reid, 38, grew up in Acton, Massachusetts, on a diet of pop culture: watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and dreaming of sunny Los Angeles. “The minute I heard there was a place where it didn’t snow, I was like, ‘What are we doing here?’” The fact that her novels are so bathed in sunshine feels like no coincidence.

She isn’t one of those novelists who always knew they wanted to write – her childhood fantasies were all of Hollywood, not Heathcliff. But one Thanksgiving weekend, while studying film and TV at Emerson College, she borrowed John Irving’s The World According to Garp from her room-mate for something to do on the train home and “devoured it. I just lost myself.” Walking across campus the next week, missing the book, she found she “could hear John Irving’s voice, narrating what I was doing. Books have an ability to get into your head and live there in a way that I had not understood until that moment.”

She moved to LA just before graduating but was disappointed by the city of her fantasies. “I was living in a tiny apartment in a not great area of town, across from a 7-Eleven, and my view was of a dumpster. I didn’t know anybody.” She had bought, wholeheartedly, into “the myth” of the city but as it turned out, “it was nothing like it seemed in the movies”.

Yet on her first day working as a casting agent for Sarah Finn and Randi Hiller (the casting directors behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe), sitting at “a little countertop that wasn’t made to be a desk”, she looked out of her window and saw the Hollywood sign. “I thought, there is a little bit of that myth that’s true.” It is a tension that lives in her writing and is key to its appeal; the fantasy Hollywood with its sex, drugs and glamour, and the disappointments of real life.

She worked in casting for the next four years, reading lines with actors, hobnobbing with

Bookshops are suddenly thronged “with teenagers and young adults” in scenes not seen since “JK Rowling and Harry Potter”, according to UK chain Waterstones’ managing director James Daunt in an interview with The Bookseller.

celebrities, but had the sense that she was in the wrong job. “I had started writing little things a long email to a group of friends I hadn’t seen in a few years about something cra y that had happened in A or some famous person I had met.” They encouraged her to try fiction, so she wrote a ,000-word short story, which a friend passed on to a literary agent who offered to represent her. She was 2 .

She quit her job and in 2013 her first novel, Forever, Interrupted, about an impulse marriage and its tragic aftermath, was published. Three more followed over three years, each dealing with contemporary romance, and achieving what The New York Times has called “middling commercial success”. ood enough for many novelists, perhaps. Not for Jenkins Reid.

ith The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, she tried something different. It’s the story of an ageing Hollywood grande dame dishing the dirt on her glamorous career and movie star marriages to a green young journalist. Perhaps Jenkins Reid was exorcising something of her own long love affair with Hollywood. She had a good feeling about the book, compounded by a nagging frustration with the way her novels were being publicised and positioned, a desire to “get these books into more readers’ hands”.

For five years she had been dreaming of making the New York Times bestseller list. And although in 2017 Simon Schuster pushed Evelyn Hugo harder than any of her previous novels – it was her first to come out in hardback – it didn’t make the list on publication weekend. She wanted more.

First, she changed agents – to Theresa Park, who represents authors such as Nicholas Sparks – and started writing a novel outside contract, an “oral history” of a fictional 70s rock band. “It was a risk I took on myself,” she says. “But I thought, ‘I’m going to write this book and then let’s just go see who wants it.’ Say to a publisher, ‘Here’s what the book is, now are you willing to show up and really support it ’”

Random House was. It bought the rights to what became Daisy Jones & the Six and in 201 it made its debut at No 3 on the New York Times list. Malibu Rising, about a family of celebrity surfers in 0s alibu followed in the summer of 2021. So far, it has sold more than 3,000 copies 71,000 including audio and e-books) in the UK and remained in the Sunday Times Top Ten for 12 weeks.

But the way her books are talked about clearly still frustrates her. The paperback of Malibu Rising – with its sunset-pink and Bombay Sapphire-blue colour scheme, and picture of a surfer chick flicking out her wavy locks – screams “beach read”, but she dislikes the term.

“These labels we use to help readers understand and to navigate books – I have no problem with them, if they’re not used as a euphemism for an insult. But a lot of the time, they are. hen you use the term ‘beach read’, most of the time you’re not saying it’s a book that would be interesting to read on a beach. ou’re saying it doesn’t have a lot of significance.”

She lays part of the blame on the way publishers, critics and readers alike condescend to stories about romance. “Falling in love, finding the person that you’re going to spend your life with, feeling desire for another human being – that is how the world propagates itself. All of humanity dies without some sense of desire and romance. hy is that not important ”

She is impatient, too, with the label “women’s fiction”. “I write books for people who want to read books about women. That’s how I think of it. If you want to show up for the story about women, please come in. I don’t care who you are. But at the end of the day, if you have to make a distinction that this is about a woman, it’s because men will not read about someone different than themselves. That is their problem.”

Her next book, Carrie Soto Is Back, about a champion tennis player’s post-retirement comeback, is out in August and then “that’s it for me and the famous women”, she says.

It’s time for another reinvention and she’s not sure yet where that will take her. But for now, Taylor Jenkins Reid is rising. And TikTok’s only half the story.

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2022-05-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

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