The Best Nonfiction Picks From Reese's Book Club

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Since its inception in 2017, Reese Witherspoon's Book Club has made a name for itself with its page-turning fiction. Every month, followers of the "Legally Blonde" actress expect novels that pair perfectly with her Drop of Sunshine wine and a group discussion. Her selections often lean into lofty and layered literary fiction, twisting thrillers and mysteries, transportive historical fiction, and romantic reads — always with a strong female voice at the core. Many have gone on to become cultural juggernauts, adapted for screen with Witherspoon herself behind the scenes. Just look at "Little Fires Everywhere," "Where the Crawdads Sing," "Daisy Jones & The Six," and "Big Little Lies."

But occasionally, Witherspoon throws a curveball for her avid community of bookworms — trading plot twists for personal truths, and selecting nonfiction that resonates just as effectively. In this genre, the stakes aren't imagined, and the questions don't always resolve as neatly as a clear-cut beginning, middle, and end. Instead, you get reflections that pry open the undercurrents of lived experience. These Reese-approved titles certainly made an impression on the readers who loved them, and they're well worth the reflective pause they ask of us.

Being Black in America, Austin Channing Brown writes, is like walking with ankle weights. In "I'm Still Here," she exposes the exhausting emotional labor required to move through institutions designed to center whiteness. These spaces exist in every corner of society: schools, universities, workplaces, churches, even prisons. As a Black woman, she is constantly expected to translate, adapt, soften, or stay silent — whatever makes the white majority most comfortable.

Over the course of a slim 175 pages, Brown distils a remarkable breadth of insight. The memoir moves through 14 chapters and three interludes, interlacing the intimate with the institutional. Personal narrative is married with cultural critique. She writes with precision about the contradictions of a country that claims to celebrate diversity, yet so often demands it be performed on its terms. Her scope is wide: from the failures of American history education to the complicity of white, middle-class Evangelicalism in enabling racial hostility.

What's more, Brown is especially astute in examining the emotional economy of whiteness — how guilt, when centered, becomes another means of deflection. This work pushes readers to confront their ego and apathy, examine their societal structures, and commit to anti-racism in practice, not just on paper. The writing in "I'm Still Here" is impressively clear-eyed and urgent, but remains full of care. Reese Witherspoon said this book opened her eyes — and Brown proves with this bestseller that she's a voice we'll be hearing from for a long time.

There's a reason "Untamed" has sold millions of copies and spawned its own companion journal. Reese Witherspoon herself couldn't stop highlighting chapters — and if you, as a woman, have ever felt hemmed in by the tyranny of being "good," you probably won't be able to either. 

Doyle opens her memoir with the image of a cheetah raised in captivity, trained to chase a stuffed toy in exchange for a reward. The metaphor is deliberate: a powerful creature, meant to run wild and free, made small in order to perform. From there, Doyle traces a life lived in service of other people's expectations — to be a good wife, a good mother, a good woman — even when it means silencing your own instincts entirely.

Her book is divided into three sections: "Caged," "Keys," and "Free." Their titles should give you an idea of the shape of Doyle's story, and the book's emotional trajectory from containment to release. Though she writes about specific instances of addiction, faith, family, and falling in love, the work's deeper concern is liberation, of returning to the self. Her writing is unsparing, sometimes disarmingly so, and in its honesty, it asks its reader to question the rules we've been living by. Even Adele called the book life-changing, sharing on Instagram, "It's as if I just flew into my body for the very first time." If you're ready to stop performing and start becoming, "Untamed" might just wake something up in you.

Take love, loss, and a drizzle of olive oil, and you've got Tembi Locke's sumptuous memoir, "From Scratch." It starts in Florence, where Tembi — an American student with no plans to fall in love — meets Saro, a Sicilian chef who's already sure of her. Their long-distance romance simmered into marriage, a life built in Los Angeles around food and art, and eventually a daughter. But behind the beauty, there are tensions, namely in the shape of a family back in Sicily who never fully accepted her, and a diagnosis for Saro that changes everything.

The book is not structured around Saro's cancer, but it seeps into the narrative like grief often does. Locke's prose is warm and lyrical, a voice well-suited to the sweeping emotional terrain she covers. After Saro's death, Locke travels with their daughter to his home village, carrying her husband's ashes. During those Sicilian summers, she tells a stirring story of how love can survive in its original form — through cooking, planting, and making peace.

Locke lost her husband, but not the love he gave her. "From Scratch" is the story of how she carried it, cooked with it, and returned to Sicily to keep it alive. This is the perfect read for summertime, and made its way onto our list of best beach reads from Reese's Book Club. You'll want to keep the tissues nearby for this one, and maybe a snack. Luckily, Locke includes a handful of delicious family recipes alongside her prose, too.

For a certain demographic of women, the magazine advice column was a sacred space. People who wrote to these confessional lifelines were bruised, but searching for a way through. Strayed is something of a high priestess of the form, having written the anonymous "Dear Sugar" column for online literary magazine The Rumpus from 2010 to 2012. When the column came to a close, "Tiny Beautiful Things" followed — a curated gathering of its most unforgettable letters and replies, alongside a handful of never-before-published pieces. With this book, Strayed restores the intimacy of the original dispatches, and it makes for a luminous read.

Followers of Strayed came from every corner of life, bringing with them problems just as varied. The questions they asked came from the hard, complicated middle of life: a grieving mother learning to exist after her baby's death, an older woman unsettled by her aging body, a student drowning in debt and doubt. But "Sugar" rarely answered the messy parts of people without first returning to her own life. With witty wisdom, she would refer back to moments of her own befuddlement, heartbreak, or hard-won perspective to build a bond between herself and readers in need.

Those who haven't read the book might recognize the name from its Hulu adaptation. That it made the leap from anonymous digital column, to book, to a televised series only confirms what the converted already knew: "Tiny Beautiful Things" is one of the digital age's most tender and beloved artefacts.

Ann Patchett is best known for her novels — after all, her "Tom Lake" is one of the best books to capture the fresh feeling of spring. But it's in this collection of essays that you get a fuller sense of the accomplished writer herself: wry, observant, grounded, and sneakily funny.

"This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage" collects decades of offbeat writing: pieces commissioned for magazines, personal reflections on writing and faith, memories of dogs, nuns, and the long, circuitous road to love. There is a kind of professional pragmatism running through it. Patchett has always been discerning about the work of writing, about what it means to make art and also a living — but there is also a softness, an ease, that feels earned.

There are essays here about Catholicism, creative discipline, the indignities of early career freelancing. But more than anything, we see how a life is assembled in fragments, by habit, with love. If the title sounds neat, the contents are anything but, and that's what makes it sing.

All five of these books come from Reese's Book Club, which since 2017 has carved out a space for stories that are written by, about, and most deeply felt through women. But within that list, we sought out the literary corner less travelled: nonfiction, which spans memoirs, essays, and self-help and epistolary books. 

These are the well-written titles that have been critically praised and commercially revered, and are well-reviewed across print and in online circles like StoryGraph and GoodReads. We also picked books that we hope will land with our audience, with themes of love, identity, ambition, grief, reinvention, and recognition.