Taylor Jenkins Reid's novels feel like they could be true, and that's not an accident. Before she invents a single scene, she wants to know exactly who really existed in that world, so her fictional stars have real ground to stand on.
Know Who Was Really There First
Reid has said in interviews that before she creates a fictional figure, she wants a clear picture of who actually occupied that world, whether that's a studio-era Hollywood actress, a 1970s rock band, or a professional tennis player. The research comes first, and the invented character gets built to fit inside a world that already checks out.
That approach shows up book by book. For The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, she leaned heavily on You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth's podcast about the scandals and hidden histories of Golden Age Hollywood, using it to ground Evelyn's rise inside a studio system that genuinely operated the way the novel describes. For Carrie Soto Is Back, she has pointed to Andre Agassi's memoir Open and Billie Jean King's All In as material that shaped how she wrote the grind of a professional athlete's career and comeback.
Building a World That Didn't Exist, Out of Facts That Did
The research gets even more technical when the subject demands it. For Atmosphere, her novel set around the shuttle-era space program, Reid has described reading around Andy Weir's work, studying the Apollo 13 mission, and working through NASA documentation. She also brought in Paul Dye, a retired NASA flight director, to help her get the technical details of spaceflight right rather than guessing at how mission control actually operates.
She's also talked about keeping research notebooks for each book, pages of notes she builds up while reporting out a world before she starts writing scenes in it. She's said those notebooks end up doing double duty, since long after a book is finished, they're often the only record of why she made the choices she made, which is useful when she's back in front of readers or journalists asking about a novel she finished years earlier.
Why Daisy Jones and Evelyn Hugo Read Like Transcripts
Two of Reid's best-known novels don't read like conventional narration at all. Daisy Jones & The Six is written as an oral history, structured like a transcribed set of interviews with band members, producers, and people around them, the kind of format documentary music histories actually use when they reconstruct a band's rise and breakup from competing memories. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo uses a related device: the whole novel is framed as a series of interviews between an aging film star and a journalist, with Evelyn narrating her own life directly to the person sitting across from her.
Both structures let the same event get filtered through more than one voice, which matters a lot in Reid's books, since her stories tend to hinge on the gap between what actually happened and what the public version says happened. An interview format makes that gap visible on the page instead of just implied. You can see how the finished shape of a book grows out of the research behind it in the full Taylor Jenkins Reid writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Research the real world before you invent your character. Know who actually existed in that space, then decide what your fictional person adds to it.
- Let form follow the story's central tension. If your plot is about the gap between the public story and the real one, consider a structure, like interviews or multiple narrators, that makes that gap visible.
- Keep a research notebook per project. You will not remember your reasoning years later, and readers will ask.
- Bring in an actual expert for technical ground. A novelist's research goes further with one qualified reader checking the details than with any amount of solo Googling.