Get up close and personal with exclusive, inspiring interviews and taste profiles delivered with a cheeky twist to your inbox daily.

Success! You’re all signed up. 🎉
Please enter a valid email address.

By subscribing to our email newsletter, you agree to and acknowledge that you have read our Privacy Policy and Terms.

Taylor Jenkins Reid Wants You to Consider the Price of Ambition

The bestselling author’s latest novel, ‘Carrie Soto Is Back,’ explores the pitfalls and payoffs of an unchecked desire for success.

Culture
Taylor Jenkins Reid Wants You to Consider the Price of Ambition
Photo (R): Courtesy of Taylor Jenkins Reid

Taylor Jenkins Reid knows how to tell a story. For her audience of millions, the bestselling author creates narratives covering the likes of love, loss, and (perhaps most notably) women with an uncanny amount of fame and social capital. With three New York Times bestselling novels—Malibu Rising, Daisy Jones & the Six, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo—as well as both television and film adaptations, respectively, for Daisy Jones and Seven Husbands in the works, Jenkins Reid has the kind of success many creatives only dream of experiencing. Both commercial and complex, Jenkins Reid’s work is, essentially, a walking jackpot for the publishing world and an adaptation-hungry Hollywood.

In her latest novel Carrie Soto Is Back (out August 30), the final installment in what she calls her “quartet” of books about famous women, Jenkins Reid explores what it means to strive for such accomplishments and accolades—especially in a capitalistic, fame-obsessed world that’s fraught with unchecked wealth and willful ignorance of wrongdoing. Jenkins Reid dissects these themes through the journey of her novel’s lead character, Carrie Soto—a (pompous, at times) tennis superstar and record-breaking champion who returns to the game after retirement in hopes of defending her title as greatest of all time.

The daughter of a former tennis standout and immigrant from Buenos Aires, Carrie is coached by her father throughout her reentry into pro tennis. Amid losing loved ones and a limited social circle, she reckons with the aspects of her life that have fallen by the wayside in her pursuit of greatness, as well as the pitfalls and victories partnered with returning to the sport. The novel is a page-turning read with a quick, cheeky plotline designed to be easily consumed. And while many readers may finish the book in one sitting, the questions regarding ambition, sexism, and success—a combination that’s sure to make this release another bestseller—that Reid asks of her audience will sit with you for days following.

Ahead of the book’s release, Coveteur sat down with Jenkins Reid to discuss the politics of creating an unlikeable female lead, her research process, and what’s next for her after Carrie Soto.

In the past, your books have been inspired by the trajectories of famous, noteworthy, or groundbreaking women—and the same could certainly be said for Carrie Soto. The text echoed the treatment famous female tennis players have experienced over the years. How much of this was intentional for you?

“The book doesn’t exist without Serena Williams. Serena Williams has changed tennis and made it a sport that I'm interested in. But Carrie is not Serena very purposefully. I don’t take someone else's narrative and I don't tell someone else's story. I don’t want to tell Serena Williams’s story, especially when she is so good at telling it herself. Carrie is a lot of people, and she’s not just tennis players. She’s inspired by the Williams sisters, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Chris Everett, Steffi Graf. Incredible women who dedicated themselves to being very good at something. But also, she’s inspired by the rules that we hold for famous women. I was interested in finding out what it would be like to break those rules.”

It was refreshing to read a sports-centered piece of fiction for women, especially when many books that are written about sports are for men. So much of the content we get around female athletes is biographical or autobiographical.

“One particular aspect of writing about a female athlete that was very intoxicating to me was getting to live in the space of a woman whose body is not immediately interpreted as meant for consumption by other people. Carrie’s body is one of power. Carrie’s interest in her body is of strength and excellence and accomplishment. She says at one point that she never felt pretty, but she also knew that's not what her body was meant for. Her brain is saying, ‘This is my tool. I use it to accomplish what I want to accomplish.’ She wants to be strong far more than she’s interested in being beautiful.”

Carrie has an anti-hero, antagonistic competitiveness about her. How were you hoping the audience would receive these moments in the story?

“It was very important to me to write a story about someone who is genuinely mean sometimes. Women can't do anything remotely competitive or self-interested without being called a bitch. Why does it make the audience so uncomfortable? What if she were a man and she was mean? Would it make you as uncomfortable? As a writer, I find whether someone is likable is just completely irrelevant to the story. To me, it’s like, do you believe her? Do you believe there’s a woman like this? Does she make sense to you? Even when she drives you crazy? Do you want to know what’s going to happen next to her? I think we’ve been giving male characters that credit for a really long time, but we’re just now starting to do it with female characters. What’s interesting about Carrie is that she’s not nice at all. She says things she doesn't need to say. It's entirely wrapped up in her identity of needing to be the best, and if she’s not the best, she’s not okay. Every word that comes out of her mouth is in the interest of upholding that sentiment.”

This book was also about the tie between ambition and failure. Can you speak more on this theme and why you’re writing about this now? Do you feel connected to these existential questions in your own career?

“Female ambition is a really interesting thing because for a very long time, we have punished women for their ambition. We have made the world hostile to women admitting their ambitions. Personally, I've never needed to grow into my ambition. I have always needed to grow into admitting my ambition. I have always known what I wanted, and have been prepared to work for it and get it. But I've also always been embarrassed to admit just how much I want for myself.

Ambition is not an inherently good thing. In this country, especially when it's a white man, ambition is seen as a moral good. But it's not. It's value neutral. We have to encourage people to feel good about talking about their ambitions. But at the same time, I think it's important to say, ‘How much do you really want? What are you willing to lose in order to get it? Is it really serving you in the best way?’ Sometimes I don't think my ambition serves me—sometimes I think I'm serving my ambition. And this book is very much about that feeling.”

You’ve written about tennis matches and the intensity of physically being in the flow of playing. How did you prepare to write those scenes? What was your research process like?

“There was a lot of research that I had to do because I have played tennis before, but I'm not a tennis player. I don't know what I'm doing. I had to throw myself into it and learn it along the way. In the book, the tennis matches needed to function on two levels. One, they needed to be interesting to someone who is not interested in tennis because most people are not going to know tennis on an intimate level. Two, it had to be able to hold up against the scrutiny of someone who has known tennis since childhood. I worked very hard to learn as much as I could about the way people talk about tennis, and use what was relevant in that exact moment and not get lost in the details. The tennis match is there to serve Carrie’s larger journey. It is not the reason people are picking up the book.

I watched Friday Night Lights. How was I on the edge of my seat during those football games? I wanted to watch them play ball. I wanted to find out if they could do it. I basically just tried to impersonate [Friday Night Lights creator] Jason Katims, putting Carrie in this match and making it fun for you. One of the hardest parts about writing the book was getting that right. I worked very, very hard on that.”

Throughout this book, you weave both Spanish and English into the dialogue. You’ve addressed what it means to write characters of color as a white woman before, but how did you go about preparing yourself to do so for Carrie Soto? When did you decide it was appropriate to use Spanish or English in the text?

“[Carrie’s father] Javier’s first language is Spanish, Carrie’s is not. I felt like the honest thing would be for Javier to not always be speaking English for the convenience of the English-speaking reader. If I’m going to write about someone that’s from another country that speaks another language, I wanted to render them in full. I worked with my Spanish language editor a great deal and there were a lot of things that I needed to be taught. I don’t speak Spanish fluently. I was fortunate that I have an editor who took a lot of time to help me through that. It was important to me to write about Javier and Carrie as people who, for a lot of reasons, are going to have to work harder for tennis in the United States to embrace them. Tennis is an inherently white sport, and for much of its history, a gate-kept sport. I didn't want to write about a woman who was on the inside of that already. That was not interesting to me.”

This book is also about a person processing grief and loss. What drew you to these themes?

“When you have someone who is working so hard to prove something, I’m always questioning, where’s the hole? I see it in myself. I see it in my most high-achieving friends. You can’t write about the height of human excellence without writing about some level of loss and grief. Because what’s propelling you that high up? I have a hard time seeing incredibly high-functioning, very intense people as not working through something. For me, it has always been that I’m working through something.”

What’s next for you?

“I’ve done what I set out to do. I’ve written about these four famous women. I’ve said what I have to say. I feel like that scene in Forrest Gump where he's been running, and all these people are following him, and then one day he goes, ‘Okay, that's it.’ And he turns back. With Carrie Soto, that’s it. It’s time to do something else.”

More From the series Culture
You May Also Like