Reese Witherspoon Hopes Her New Book Is as Inspiring to Young Women as Legally Blonde: ‘My Metric for Success’

Reese Witherspoon hopes Maggie McCabe is the next Elle Woods.

Witherspoon’s first novel — the thriller Gone Before Goodbye, cowritten with bestselling author Harlan Coben — is set to be published Oct. 14. Speaking about the book during a recent panel discussion, she talked extensively about her newest protagonist: Maggie McCabe, an Army combat surgeon who becomes entangled in a dark conspiracy.

The star, 49, and Coben, 63, joined “Inside the Writers’ Room: Mastering Fearless Storytelling” panel on Oct. 11 in L.A. as part of Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine experiential event, Shine Away. Witherspoon said she aims to inspire young women in the same way her iconic Legally Blonde film franchise has done since the first movie’s 2001 release.

“Your whole life, what is your metric for happiness, or what is the result you’re looking for?” Witherspoon asked the audience during the panel discussion. “In everything I’ve ever done, I want to touch people. So I’m less worried about critics. I really don’t care about their thoughts, feelings or opinions, because half of the stuff I’ve done is not well reviewed. But it means something, and it landed for some reason. It was important to me. For some reason, it’s in my life.”

“My biggest goal for this book is to make as many little girls as possible want to be surgeons as Elle Woods did for lawyers,” she continued. “That would be cool. So yeah, that’s probably the metric for my success. Med school rates went way up. Something very noble.”

During the discussion, Witherspoon — who sold her media company, Hello Sunshine, for a value of nearly $1 billion in 2021 but continues to run the company, including its influential book picks — spoke about the challenges of cowriting her first novel.

“I had this idea for a long time,” she says of the Gone Before Goodbye premise. “I had it for probably two-and-a-half years during the pandemic. I was kind of cooking on it. I kept reading stories. It was all leading me towards this character that I wanted to create. And then meanwhile I was like, ‘Well, but I don’t know how to write a novel. I don’t know how to structure it. I know how to make a movie and I know how to create a character.'”

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“I had ideas, but I was like, ‘I [need] a partner, somebody who is great at what they do. That’s always been a winning formula for me.”

For his part, says Coben, “One day Reese Witherspoon called me, and there’s no way to say that without sounding braggy. There’s just no [other] way to say that! I love collaborating on TV, and I told Reese that right away: ‘I’m not that guy. I’m not the collaborate-on-novels guy.’ But Reese, we had a meeting and she started telling me the idea and I’m like, ‘Oh damn, that’s good.’ ”

The book followed, and Witherspoon shared that she will be playing the role of Maggie McCabe in the audiobook, with actor Chris Pine also performing a role.

The character of McCabe, Witherspoon explained on the panel, was inspired by both of her parents: her dad John, a surgeon who served in the U.S. Army, and mom Betty, a lifelong nurse.

“The first five years of my life, I lived on a military base in Germany, and everybody who filtered in and out of our house was another doctor,” Witherspoon said. “And all they would talk about was medical jargon. So I was really, really little sitting at the dinner table listening to my dad and his friends and my mom and her friends talk about really gnarly surgeries.” 

Gone Before Goodbye comes out on Oct. 14 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.