“You make it a movie star, rock star, supermodel, tennis player, it’s all the same stuff we’re facing: How much of myself do I want to give, and what do I hide?” she tells TIME. To Reid, there’s something universal in that. But each of the books centers a vibrant protagonist managing the tensions between her glamorous life in the public eye and the pressures she feels in private. The books in Reid’s famous-women quartet stand alone, save for a few easter eggs here and there, like the mention of a Daisy Jones biography in Carrie Soto and the appearance of singer Mick Riva across all four novels. The two novels Reid has published in the interim-2019’s Daisy Jones & The Six, about a ’70s rock band and their magnetic frontwoman, and 2021’s Malibu Rising, about a supermodel surfer and her siblings in the ’80s-have also made the best-seller list and celebrity book-club rounds Reese Witherspoon picked the former, Jenna Bush Hager the latter. The book, which has been both lauded and criticized for its representation of a queer woman of color, became a sensation on TikTok four years after it was published, shooting it to the New York Times best-seller list in January 2021 and reappearing there for 75 weeks and counting. Carrie Soto is the final installment in the bundle, which started with Reid’s 2017 novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, about a 1960s Hollywood icon who falls in love with her female co-star.

She’s been working for a decade straight, churning out book after book, the last three of which, part of a quartet about famous women, have finally made the author herself a household name.

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