Reese Witherspoon Debuts Novel Set in the Medical World, Reveals For Years “I Wanted to Be a Surgeon”

Reese Witherspoon has officially entered her author era, kicking off the book tour for her first novel, Gone Before Goodbye, in Los Angeles on Saturday alongside her co-writer Harlan Coben.

The pair brought their thriller — which follows Maggie McCabe, an Army combat surgeon who finds herself thrown into the world of Russian billionaires and private medicine — to Shine Away, the two-day summit put on by Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine media company. The star told the crowd that she had been cooking up the story idea for two and a half years but didn’t know how to go about writing a book, and reached out to Coben after meeting him years earlier.

“My entire career, my creative career, I kind of just stepped into other people’s visions — there was already a vision, there was already a book, there was already a movie, there was already a director and I’d come in and play a part, and that’s what I thought I was going to do with this idea,” Witherspoon explained, “but I thought, why don’t I be part of making the whole world? I know what I’m doing. I know how to structure things. I know how to get from the beginning to the middle to the end. And so it was a big leap for me to jump in and go, OK, I can’t just bow out and my part’s done.”

Coban, a bestselling author who has dozens of books to his name, admitted that although “we both have had a fair amount of success, we were both terrified” of teaming up for the project. “We were entering a new realm. And I warned Reese, I’m like, ‘You’re writing a novel. We can’t make it gimmicky. We are the only two people ever in the room, we’re not having a third person come in the room, no one else is writing this but the two of us,’ and we then became completely obsessed with this story.”

The pair teased that that story deals with A.I. along with the medical focus, as Witherspoon explained that when approaching the international thriller genre, “I always think about Jason Bourne or James Bond, and the girls in those books or those movies are always using their sexuality to get ahead. And I thought, what if we could do a book in a thriller world where this woman, it’s not about her sexuality or being hot, it’s literally about this very unique skill she has? She’s a reconstructive surgeon, she’s been in the military for a long time. She’s worked with Doctors Without Borders and she falls into kind of a crazy world of private wealth and private surgery.”

The actress revealed that much of the Maggie character was inspired by her own family, as her father was a doctor and her mother was a nurse, and they were both in the military when she was growing up. “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, 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,” Witherspoon recalled. “For years and years, I wanted to be a surgeon.”

She continued to sing her mother’s praises, noting that after watching her mother work as a nurse for 40 years, “I thought, why am I the famous one? This woman literally saved people’s lives. So I hope, if you guys have people in the medical profession in your life, it’ll give you a little moment to just honor them,” adding, “This is really a love letter to my mom and dad.”

Witherspoon declared she isn’t seeking critical acclaim for the book either, telling the audience, “I’m less worried about critics — I really don’t care about their thoughts, feelings or opinions, because half the stuff I’ve done is not well reviewed.” Instead, she has a loftier goal: “To make as many little girls as possible want to be surgeons, as Elle Woods [of Legally Blonde] did for lawyers. That would be cool. So that’s probably the measure for my success: med school rates going way up.”

The third annual Shine Away event, this year taking over the Universal Studios lot, also featured conversations with Mariska Hargitay, Chrissy Teigen, Malin Åkerman, Lilly Singh, Karen Pittman, Monica Lewinsky and Brittany Snow, along with an opening comedy set from Yvonne Orji.