Taylor Jenkins Reid has sold over 21 million copies of her books worldwide, soaring to success after The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, a novel with a bisexual protagonist, took off on social media. It landed on the New York Times bestseller list in 2021, four years after its initial release. 

The novel follows the life of a fictional Hollywood star, Evelyn Hugo, and at the centre of the story is a queer romance. Despite its widespread popularity, Reid faced some backlash at the time for writing queer characters as a presumed straight woman. 

Young Adult author Becky Albertalli faced similar criticism before coming out, and described the intense pressure faced by herself and others in the industry: “if you think I’m the only closeted or semi-closeted queer author feeling this pressure, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Before releasing her latest book Atmosphere on June 3, 2025, Taylor Jenkins Reid spoke about her bisexual identity in an interview with Time Magazine. While she has never explicitly stated her sexuality, her marriage to Alex Jenkins Reid led fans to the unfair assumption that she was heterosexual. 

“It has been hard at times to see people dismiss me as a straight woman, but I also didn’t tell them the whole story,” she said in her Time interview. She opened up about her experiences growing up as a bi woman in the 90s: “nobody was talking about bisexuality. And if they were, it was to make fun of people […] I found that very painful, because I was being told that I didn’t know myself, but I did.”

Her ninth book, Atmosphere, subtitled ‘a love story’, centres around a romance between two women at NASA in the 1980s. The complexities of astronomy are well-researched for the novel, particularly for the thriller aspects of the plot, but the more urgent story is that of Joan Goodwin and Vanessa Ford, astronauts in love. 

By August 2025, Atmosphere had spent 10 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The author spoke about the novel’s personal importance to her, saying, “my attraction to women is a room in the house that is my identity […] this book was about me spending time in that room”. 

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Reid commented that “it felt like time for me to write a very high-stakes, dramatic love story.” There is currently a film adaptation of the novel already in the works.

This won’t be Reid’s first time entering the world of film and TV. She began her career as a casting assistant, and her novel Daisy Jones and the Six was also adapted for the screen. The Emmy-winning series features Sam Claflin and Suki Waterhouse. 

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