From The Cut:
On Tuesday, in a characteristically delightful interview with Bustle, Dakota Johnson launched her “TeaTime” book club, announcing that her first pick was Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino. It’s a quiet, lyrical book published in January by FSG, about a working-class girl named Adina who is born in 1977 and soon starts being visited each night by aliens from another galaxy who use her to glean information about life on Earth. It’s exactly the kind of slightly off-kilter thing you’d expect Dakota Johnson to be drawn to if, like me, you are a semi-scholar of the queen nepo baby who made a fool of Ellen DeGeneres and has claimed both to love and to be allergic to limes and simply will not promote her wannabe-blockbuster movie, Madame Web, which is what she’s really supposed to be doing interviews about right now. Instead, here she was talking about her book club. “Our book club is literary fiction. It’s not beach reads. It’s not silly,” Johnson told Bustle. “It’s not all female authors, but it is female-forward, and it’s a lot of first-time novelists.” She wants to use the club to bring a bit of gravitas to Instagram: “People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things rather than talking about what f***** face serum they’re using and thinking that that’s the most important thing in the world.” She then went on to say that she loves face serum.
Every single thing about this announcement piqued my interest. It also got me wondering about why it is, exactly, that so many actresses want to become bookfluencers. For Johnson, it’s not solely about material gain: She hasn’t optioned Beautyland yet, merely thought about how she’d go about adapting it while acknowledging that adaptation is hard. (“I know Margot Robbie’s company is making My Year of Rest and Relaxation. But how the f***? I don’t know how you do that.” Me neither, Dakota!) For others, of course, it’s all about the cash. Reese Witherspoon has been canniest about monetizing her taste in books, creating a business where her monthly picks are sent out in a newsletter and proclaimed on a website, as well as optioned by her production company, Hello Sunshine, which she recently sold to Blackstone Group for $900 million. Making her book-club picks into movies and TV shows is clearly the driving force behind Witherspoon’s club. But she’s also used the idea of being bookish to burnish her image. Being a guru with industry clout on the production side gives Witherspoon a plausible next chapter at 47, an age when acting roles begin to become scarcer for women.
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Beyond the realm of clubs, there are also celebrities who simply want to be seen reading books, ideally good ones. In this category we find the professionally gorgeous people Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner. Gerber technically has a “book club,” which consists of her hosting chats with authors like Emily Ratajkowski on Instagram Live, and she’s also often photographed with books, including titles by Dolly Alderton and Annie Ernaux. But the queen of being photographed with books that both are good and also coordinate with her swimwear is Jenner, and the books she’s seen with are notably obscure, often published by small presses with limited print runs.
In 2019, the author of one of these books, Darcie Wilder, decided to investigate how a Kardashian family member ended up being photographed reading her memoir, Literally Show Me a Healthy Person. After Jenner was shot reading the book, it sold out on Amazon. Wilder got to the bottom of how the book ended up in Jenner’s hands relatively easily by finding Ashleah Gonzales tagged in Jenner’s IG post. Gonzales, who is also a published poet, is now widely acknowledged to be Jenner’s book concierge, tasked with supplying the model and reality star with ’grammable literature, often annotated throughout with turquoise Post-it notes.
Link to the rest at The Cut