Reese Witherspoon’s 100th book club selection is a tribute to one of her earliest literary inspirations.
The actor named Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year as the milestone pick for her popular club. Renkl was Witherspoon’s high school English teacher.
Renkl’s book, published last year by Spiegel & Grau, is a series of reflections on the wildlife she observes in her backyard over the course of a year. A critic for Kirkus praised the book as “a welcome escape from the hectic world.”
Witherspoon announced her selection in a YouTube video, which shows her visiting Harpeth Hall, the Nashville high school she attended, to speak with her former teacher.
“This is going to make me cry,” an emotional Witherspoon tells Renkl. “You taught me so much. You saw something in me, encouraged me. And I was reading by myself sort of secretly, because it was my private place to go … high school can be really hard.”
“You were in an unusual place as a teenager,” Renkl said. “You were working in an adult world, but you were still a kid, and you were still navigating all of these—oh, you know, the cliques and casual cruelty of high school, and you had already found…that books were a refuge for you.”
At the end of the video, Witherspoon says, “I’m so glad that now we get to be friends, and I get to call you Margaret, and I get to call you [a] Reese’s Book Club author.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
