Marella Gayla Marella Gayla is a contributing editor at The Drift and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.

Strong Female Leads | The Reese Witherspoon Literary Canon

Marella Gayla

In 2012, Reese Witherspoon was thirty-six years old and sick of Hollywood. Her acting career had slowed since her Oscar win in 2005; she had filed for divorce in 2006 and appeared in a few box office duds, and she wasn’t encouraged by the sexist, stultifying scripts she was receiving. Witherspoon requested meetings with studio bigwigs, and was disappointed to find that they didn’t care about developing stories with female...