With New Novel On The Horizon, ‘Seven Husbands’ Author Taylor Jenkins Reid Comes Out Publicly

Taylor Jenkins Reid, the bestselling author behind The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six, has publicly come out as bisexual in a new interview with TIME magazine. The announcement arrives just weeks before the release of her next novel, Atmosphere, and marks a personal turning point for the author—one she says has been a long time coming.

“I am very private,” Reid said in the interview. “So at first, I just sort of let people assume what they were going to assume.”

Reid’s new openness is meaningful for fans of Seven Husbands, a novel that traces the life of a reclusive Hollywood actress and her hidden love for another woman. Since its 2017 publication, the book has become a hit with lesbian, bisexual, and queer readers. And while we should all know by now that assuming someone’s sexuality is never a good idea, some questioned why Reid, a supposedly straight writer, would so intimately center queer love in her work.

Related: A Conversation With ‘Making Room’ Author Carl Siciliano

“It has been hard at times to see people dismiss me as a straight woman,” Reid said. “But I also didn’t tell them the whole story.”

As a teenager, Reid remembers being questioned for not conforming to feminine norms. “Why can’t you dress more like a girl? Why don’t you do your nails? Why do you talk that way?” she recalled. “I started to get people who would say, ‘Oh, I get why you dress like a boy—you’re gay.’” That label didn’t feel right either. Her first love was a boy. But when she later fell for a woman in her early twenties, her friends doubted her again. “The messages about bisexuality were you just want attention or it was a stop on the way to gayville,” she said. “I found that very painful, because I was being told that I didn’t know myself, but I did.”

Reid is married to screenwriter Alex Jenkins Reid, and she acknowledges that being in a relationship with a man has afforded her what she calls “straight-passing” privilege. But that didn’t mean that the part of her that feels attracted toward women ever went away.

Related: Queer Books By BIPOC Authors You Need To Read

“My attraction to women is a room in the house that is my identity,” she explained. “Alex understood this book was about me spending time in that room. He was so excited for me, like, ‘What a great way for you to express this side of you.’”

Reid said writing Atmosphere, which follows a NASA scientist in the ’80s as she falls in love with another woman, provided the nudge to open up publicly. She asked herself, “How do I talk about who I really am with full deference to the life experiences of other people?”

And found her answer: “Basically where I came down is I can talk about who I am, and then people can think about that whatever they want.”

Atmosphere releases June 3, and film adaptations of it and Seven Husbands are in the pipeline.