IT’S THE CLIMB
WHEN YOU’VE REACHED THE TOP OF your game, where can you go next? It’s a question that plagues the protagonist of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s latest novel, the ’90s-set tennis drama Carrie Soto Is Back, coming Aug. 30. Carrie, now 37 years old, steps out of retirement to reclaim the record that made her a legend, just tied by a young hotshot. With 20 Grand Slams to her name, she’s desperate to live up to the reputation for dominance she once believed was unimpeachable but now feels slipping away, forcing her to reckon with how much of her identity is wrapped up in her record—and to wonder if she’s expecting too much of herself in an attempt to prove her worth to the world.
Reid, 38, knows these feelings well. She’s been working for a decade straight, churning out book after book, the last three of which, part of a quartet about famous women, is the final installment in the bundle, which started with Reid’s 2017 novel about a 1960s Hollywood icon who falls in love with her female co-star. The book, which has been both lauded and criticized for its representation of a queer woman of color, became a sensation on TikTok four years after it was published, shooting it to the New York best-seller list in January 2021 and reappearing there for 75 weeks and counting. The two novels Reid has published in the interim—2019’s about a ’70s rock band and their magnetic frontwoman, and 2021’s about a supermodel surfer and her siblings in the ’80s—have also made the best-seller list and celebrity book-club rounds; Reese Witherspoon picked the former, Jenna Bush Hager the latter. All three have adaptations in the works.
