Reese Witherspoon Honors Her English Teacher With 100th Reese's Book Club Pick: 'You Saw Something in Me' (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Taylor Hill/Getty; Spiegel & Grau

Reese Witherspoonis honoring an important person in her life forReese’s Book Club’s milestone 100th pick — her high school English teacher.

Witherspoon founded the book club in 2017 under her media company Hello Sunshine. TheMorning Showstar visited Renkl, 63, at her old Tennessee high school in a sweet video to let the author know that her latest book would be the 100th pick in Reese’s Book Club.

As the pair sat in a library, Witherspoon told Renkl that the idea to choose her latest novel “hit me like a lightning bolt.” Before discussing the book, the duo reflected on the teenager Witherspoon was in high school.

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Reese Witherspoon announces 100th book club pick

“This is gonna make me cry,” a teary Witherspoon admitted. “You taught me so much. You saw something in me and encouraged me.”

She confessed that as a teenager, she would read “secretly” because she saw books as “a private place to go” to escape her life when she was having a hard time in high school.

Reese Witherspoon attends the 49th AFI Lifetime Achievement Award Gala Tribute.Monica Schipper/WireImage

Monica Schipper/WireImage

Renkl validated Witherspoon’s feelings, saying it must have been difficult to start an acting career as a young teenager.

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“You were working in an adult world but you were still a kid,” she said. “And you were still navigating … the cliques and the casual cruelty of high school.”

She joked that Witherspoon would ask her for extra homework because she was “hungry” for more books.

“You already knew that language, that stories were the way to make something make sense that is hard to make sense of,” Renkl told Witherspoon.

Spiegel & Grau

“Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more,” reads the book’s synopsis.

“It’s a beautiful love letter to nature and the world around us,” Witherspoon says in the video, adding that it’s a “timely” pick as well, as people continue paying more and more attention to the environment around them.

source: people.com